Brushes With The Famous

So a lunchtime conversation with my friend and co-worker, wound around, as lunchtime conversations sometimes do, to our brushes with the famous.

She recalled running into Richard Harris coming down some stairs in a public building in Milwaukee. He said, "Hello, pretty lady." (This was before the time when saying this would have been terribly politically incorrect.) She still blushes when she thinks about it and wishes she would have turned around and asked him to coffee.

And I recalled power walking in Lawrence, Kansas, and early in the morning running smack into Matt Dillon, who was filming a movie there, and looking back, I'm probably lucky he didn't sue my ass.

And she remembered Jane Fonda's limp handshake in her Ted Turner days (which doesn't surprise me, because her personality seems to have gone limp fish in those days), and I recalled seeing Joe DiMaggio in the airport in San Francisco, and he most certainly didn't want to be recognized and said so.

And then I remembered seeing Chelsea Clinton with her pals and hip secret service agents on that same trip, through a shelf in a store in San Francisco's Chinatown, telling her friends how her parents used incense in their bedroom (and this is when they were at the White House, pre-Monica), and I thought how I really didn't want to know about anything they did in their bedroom. And she remembered meeting Dan Quayle, and I tease her terribly about saying he was cute. (I mean really!)

And Gloria Steinem interviewed her about a silk project she was working on in Colombia, and me, I met Bob Seeger, well, sort of, because he was drunk and on the floor at a party in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and I'm not sure how much you can really meet someone when they're so out of it.

And I stacked my four and measured them against her four, and she wins.

I know if you live in LA or NYC or even Chicago, these brushes are a little bit of nothing. But wherever you live, tell me about your brushes with the famous and the infamous.