Brushes With Fame

I keep starting this post, but never finishing-hoping that I brush up against someone a bit more famous than the handful of people I have met. But it seems less and less likely as time goes by and I become less and less interesting. I used to go out and do things-this makes it a lot easier to met famous people than sitting around the house blogging-where the only famous person I have encounter was Perez Hilton in my blog stats one day.

No, real famous people are Out There, and I spend too much of my time In Here.

But I have a few small fame stories to share. When I was a kid there was a Tv Show called Peppermint Place-this was Dallas’s answer to Captain Kangaroo. The star was a skinny man who wore a red and white striped suit and a straw hat-seems like he had a peppermint stick cane as well. One day I met Mr Peppermint at a shopping center-I told him that I like Captain Kangaroo better.

When I was in High School a friend of mine was really into comics-so we went to a comic book signing for a fellow I’d never heard of named Frank Miller. I was not alone in having never heard of Frank Miller as the shop was empty except for maybe five people. This was when The Dark Knight Returns came out-Best Graphic Novel Ever. We bought copies and got them signed. One of the other fans had at least a hundred comics Frank Miller had worked on that he wanted signed. I looked at the stack and told Frank Miller-Wow, you really crank this stuff out don’t you? He looked at me with blank disdain and said-I don’t like to think of it as cranking it out. But it was hard for him put on his Big Star act at an empty signing.

The Wife won a costume contest and one of the prizes was having dinner with William Shatner. Captain Janeway, Captain Sisko, and Commander Riker were there as well-Patrick Stewart was already too big a star to be bothered with Star Trek events. We had heard all kinds of bad things about Bill Shatner, but he was really nice-for the fifteen minutes he sat at the table with us. We even got an autograph-we were supposed to get all of their autographs as part of the prize but the only we got was Shatner’s. I didn’t have anything mean to say to William Shatner.

I met Tom Cruise during the filming of Born on The 4th of July and at about the same time I met Valerie Bertinelli and Eddie Van Halen. I was working security at a film production company at the time and I was greatly impressed by these movie stars. I even got to be one of the faceless minions in the crowd scene in Born On The 4th of July. My only regret about leaving the life of a Rent-a-Cop behind is that I might have met other cool people and found some other way to make money in the movies. It was fun seeing real movies being made and reading the scripts so that I knew how the story would end before it hit the theaters.

And that is about that. I have met a few local radio personalities and authors, but none of them are exactly in the same league with Tom Cruise and Mr Peppermint. I also met H.R.PuffnStuff when I was a kid and was greatly disappointed that it wasn’t the real PuffnStuff, but just a guy in a costume. Childhood is filled with so many disappointments.

---