Years ago in L.A., in a cheesy comedy club in the San Fernando Valley, I approached the emcee who would be introducing me when it was time for me to do my act. He was an overly muscular guy with wide-set eyes, short, spiky blond hair loaded with hair gel, and an artificial-sounding, show-bizzy name. I forgot it soon after, but it was one of those names that sounds absolutely invented, like “Neil Diamond” or “Dirk Diggler”. Nice guy, though.
I thought it was weird that I’d never seen this guy before in any of the comedy clubs or open mics. He probably just works in the gay clubs, I thought. It was obvious from his meticulous, macho-man appearance that he was gay.
Yet when he got onstage to do his act, he totally confused me. He did not talk about being gay. He talked about his girlfriend. Not only that, but the more I watched and listened to him, the more apparent it became from his attitude, his mannerisms, his way of expressing himself, that this man was most decidedly Not Gay. Then why does he dress so gay? I thought. Strange.
Another weird thing was that the audience laughed uproariously at any little thing he said or did. This was not your typical jaded comedy club audience. They simply ate this guy up. Their worshipful attitude was disproportional to his talent and material, which were merely average. But the audience reacted as if they were watching Steve Martin or Richard Pryor. Weird. Maybe it’s just a really hot crowd, I hoped.
Nope. I had a mediocre set, and the crowd gave me a mediocre response. The emcee came on again and the crowd went wild. What a ghetto, I thought. A guy gets up in front of 50 of his friends and suddenly he's the King of Comedy. Crappy Valley clubs…
A few months later at my transcription job, I was transcribing a raw interview for one of those VH1 “Behind the Music”-type shows. The name on the tape sounded familiar. I popped the video in the machine. The interviewee was the comedian who had introduced me that night in the valley.
It was Bret Michaels, the frontman of Poison.
What can I say? I was never into hair bands. At the time of Poison’s success, I was on a 5-year break from all TeeVee and was studying 15th century Flemish composers. Fuck Jon Bon Jovi. I was into Johannes Ockeghem.
My first introduction to the magic of celebrities – and, most importantly, getting near enough to annoy them – was a snapshot my father took of Robin Williams in Las Vegas at the pool of the MGM Grand Hotel. It was 1978, and Robin Williams had just become a superstar with his hit sitcom Mork and Mindy. It was an idiotic, irritating show, very much in keeping with Robin Williams’s idiotic, irritating comedy, and I absolutely loved it. I was a complete Mork and Mindy fanatic.
My father made a trip to Las Vegas every year. He always stayed at the MGM Grand Hotel, and always returned blackened from the sun -- except for his face, which was always bright red with second-degree sunburn and peeling -- and with a hundred complementary ball-point pens bearing the MGM lion logo spilling out of his suitcase.
My father loved freebies. But even more than freebies, he loved getting the hotel to give him more. It was the least they could do, he reasoned, since he was giving them so much of his hard-earned money at their blackjack tables.
One year, besides the treasure trove of MGM pens, my dad came back from Vegas with a very special treat: an actual picture of Robin Williams that he’d taken himself! He explained what happened:
“So I’m at the hotel pool and I see Robin Williams sitting in one of the lounge chairs. You know, just relaxing, ‘cause he’d played there the night before. And I know how much you like Robin Williams and how exciting it would be to get a picture of him. So I go over and ask him, ‘Hey Robin, do you mind if I take a picture of you for my kids? They’re real big fans of yours.’ And the guy says no. Just like that: ‘NO.’ So I figure, what a jerk. What difference does it make to him? So I say, ‘Okay, fine,’ and I take the picture anyway.”
I still have the picture. It’s a beautiful shot of a young, bronzed Robin Williams in a Speedo swimsuit…
…lunging forward, one hand reaching towards the camera, his lips drawn back in a furious snarl.
I had my first up-close and personal celebrity experience while working as a breakfast waitress at the Driskill Hotel in Austin, Texas,
It was a depressing job. I got up every morning at 6 and rode my bike through the Chicano ghetto of East Austin in complete darkness to the hotel. I had to wear a terribly unflattering uniform and deal with cranky customers when I felt just as cranky as them. I was 20 pounds overweight and had a jet-black crew cut. How did that happen? Well, first I had long blond hair, which I dyed black. Then I looked in the miror and saw that black hair made me look like a fat Dracula, so I shaved most of it off.
Unfortunately, with my shaved black head, I looked like a fat lesbian Dracula. On good days, I simply resembled Eddie Munster. What I'm trying to explain is that my goth-San Francisco-lesbo look created interpersonal problems for me and the moneyed redneck customers. I also fought with the other morning waitress, a tall, honey-blond tart named Carlene who called all her male customers “Baby” in a seductive Texas drawl and always earned way more money than me.
But one morning I got a table of two attractive young men and a woman. The woman was very businesslike, but the guys acted and dressed very relaxed and casual. One of them in particular looked familiar. He had an incredibly beautiful face... framed by stringy shoulder-length orange hair. His freakishly carrot-colored hair clashed with his skin tone. It was disconcerting. He dyed his hair that color, I realized. But why? Does he really hate himself that much? Followed by the thought: Could this be the boy for me?
My heart went pit-a-pat.
“Excuse me,” he said in an extremely polite voice. “Do you know of a place to buy (some article I’ve forgotten) near here?” I answered his question and studied his face as I spoke. He listened intently and calmly. He had a serenity that was absolutely hypnotic. It could make up for that awful orange hair, that’s for sure. If it ever became a problem, I could just poke my eyes out and stretch out my hands and feel every part of his body for the rest of my life. Suddenly I realized I was talking too much and staring too hard. Embarrassed, I left the table. What a retard, getting crushes on customers! I was worse than Carlene, who only put on an act to get more money out of them.
Why did I feel like I knew this guy? He definitely wasn’t from around here. So where could I have met him?
Oh my God.
It’s Johnny Depp.
I turned slowly at looked at him from far across the room. Yep. It definitely was Johnny Depp. With awful red hair, probably dyed for some role. (What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, as it turned out.)
I had to confirm it. I had to talk to him. I knew it was uncool to do such things, but I had to.
I grabbed a pitcher of ice water, headed back to their table, and proceeded to refill their water glasses to the brim. I dawdled with the sugar holder and rearranged the salt and pepper shakers. Then I took a deep breath.
“Excuse me. Are you Johnny Depp?”
He looked up gravely. Slowly and extremely seriously, he said, “Yes. I am.”
“I thought so.” It came out like an accusation.
“I’m sorry.”
“That’s all right.” He smiled. I smiled. Then I left them alone.
I thought about telling Carlene just to make her jealous, but there was a good chance she’d run over to the table and immediately get a date with him.
No fucking way. He was mine.
I’ll always have a soft place in my heart for the elegant and unpretentious Johnny Depp. Good tipper, by the way.
A few years later, I moved to New York, and the celebrity sightings became far less romantic.
Once I was lost in La Guardia airport, about to miss my flight. Panicked, I ran up the escalators with my carry-on bag, sweating, panting, pushing people out of the way and cursing until I reached the top. Whipping my head around, trying in vain to find the departure/arrival monitors, I screamed in utter frustration, “FUCK!”
I screamed this into the startled, wide-eyed face of Jon Voight, an Academy-Award-winning actor who I’d just shoved from behind on the escalator.
Another time, while working as a waitress in one of Manhattan’s “classier” strip clubs, a D-list daytime talk show host -- I'll call him "Myron McAllen" -- motioned me over to his table. I leaned over to take his order. “Hi, I’m Myron McAllen. How would you like to come home with me when you get off work and buy me breakfast?”
I stared at him like you’d stare at a two-headed fetus in a pickle jar at a sideshow, then moved on to my tables. I could hear the strippers and waitresses talking at the bar:
“Did that loser Myron McAllen stop you too?”
“Yeah, what an idiot! ‘Hi. I’m Myron McAllen. How would you like to come home with me and buy me breakfast?’ Get the fuck outta my face. You’re here to spend money on me, muthafucka!”
In the same strip club, on a dead night with no customers and the strippers and waitresses wandering around uselessly, I noticed a tall, gangly figure dressed in fine black clothes and wearing a big black Stetson cowboy hat. He was nursing a scotch and listening with authentic interest to the skinny stripper sitting next to him. He leaned forward, completely absorbed in her monologue, as she whined in a unbearable Jersey accent about her car, her bills, her boyfriend...
I took a closer look. The man was Sir John Gielgud, the greatest Shakepearean actor of the 20th century.
This was too much to accept. It was absurd. What the hell would Sir John Gielgud be doing in a strip club, socializing with the most ordinary of strippers? I approached one of the goomba security guys for verification. "Hey Vincie. That man at the bar looks like Sir John Gielgud."
"Yeeah, that's him all right. Sometimes he comes here just to have a drink and relax. He likes it here 'cause no one bothers him."
There was a “massage girl” at this club. Her job was to go from table to table dressed in an unflattering leotard and low pumps, carrying a bulky wicker basket filled with oils, lotions and towels, and offering hand, arm and neck massages to the patrons. It seemed to me the most degrading job in the whole place, much worse than the strippers’ jobs, which paid about ten times more and required no contact with the customers.
But the massage girl never complained. She told us she was an actress, confident that this job was just a short phase on her way to making a living as an actress. Once she even gave me a flyer for an off-off Broadway play she was starring in. I wished her luck, but at the same time I thought, “Yeah, good luck, honey. You and a million other girls who want to quit their day jobs and never will.” A year later, The Sopranos debuted, and I saw her on the show. She was fantastic, and I continued to see her in TV and movies.
That same year, everyone got hooked on The Sorpranos. When I first arrived in New York, I’d found an amazingly cheap apartment on President Street, in the heart of the old Mafia-town, where I lived for a year. My elderly Italian landlady, Mrs. Russo, had known Joey Gallo, the famous mobster that Dylan sang about on his Desire album. Everyone on President Street knew him, of course. That was his street.
One day I entered a Laundromat that had a cash machine, and waited for the young, dark-haired guy at the machine to finish. When he did, he turned to leave and I was face to face with Michael Imperioli, the actor who plays Christopher Soprano.
Okay, I admit: it’s probably not the smartest thing in the world to detain any celebrity in a confined space with a wad of cash in his hand.
Especially when that person happens to play an amoral murderer on TeeVee. But I had to tell him: “Hey, you’re great in The Sopranos. I love the show. Just, um... congratulations!”
He pushed the money into his pocket and took one step toward me, staring directly into my eyes in a very Raging Bull kind of way. I could hear him breathing; in, out, in out.
I, for my part, had stopped breathing.
I watched as his arms reached out towards my head. He grabbed my face in both his hands, his fingers clutching the back of my skull.
That was really dumb, I thought. Now I am going to die. Or at least be horribly maimed.
A huge smile spread across his face. He pulled my head towards him, and gave me a big, sloppy, loud kiss on the cheek. Smack!Then he released my head and flew out the door, grinning and whistling.
What can I say? I was never into hair bands. At the time of Poison’s success, I was on a 5-year break from all TeeVee and was studying 15th century Flemish composers. Fuck Jon Bon Jovi. I was into Johannes Ockeghem.
One year, besides the treasure trove of MGM pens, my dad came back from Vegas with a very special treat: an actual picture of Robin Williams that he’d taken himself! He explained what happened:
It was a depressing job. I got up every morning at 6 and rode my bike through the Chicano ghetto of East Austin in complete darkness to the hotel. I had to wear a terribly unflattering uniform and deal with cranky customers when I felt just as cranky as them. I was 20 pounds overweight and had a jet-black crew cut. How did that happen? Well, first I had long blond hair, which I dyed black. Then I looked in the miror and saw that black hair made me look like a fat Dracula, so I shaved most of it off.
It’s Johnny Depp.
This was too much to accept. It was absurd. What the hell would Sir John Gielgud be doing in a strip club, socializing with the most ordinary of strippers? I approached one of the goomba security guys for verification. "Hey Vincie. That man at the bar looks like Sir John Gielgud." 
Okay, I admit: it’s probably not the smartest thing in the world to detain any celebrity in a confined space with a wad of cash in his hand.