Writer's Block: Brush with stardom

[theoldwolf]

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As a child I met Walt Disney and Harry Belafonte - both before I was really old enough to understand how awesome it was. I'm pretty sure I met Mason Adams as a child - he was a friend and colleague of my mother - but I was too young to remember.

I recall meeting Whit Bissell (Time Tunnel) when I was about 8 or so - my mom was briefly married to his brother.

In 1965 or thereabouts, I was with my father when he was filming "Blue". I had the opportunity of spending a day with Ricardo Montalban and Jimmy Westerfield out in the Utah deserts hunting for arrowheads and potshards. My memory of Mr. Montalban was that he was warm, friendly, gracious and supremely human. We visited with some friends of his in the Monticello area... I wish only that I had a clearer memory of the encounter.

In 1974 I met William Shatner at a PPB (Pacific Pioneer Broadcasters) dinner I had gone to with my father. I was an avid Star Trek fan, so nothing else need be said about how cool I thought that was.

Other than that, I can't recall bumping into any official "celebrities" by happenstance.

Comments

[deckardcanine.livejournal.com]

Wow, two actors from Birdman of Alcatraz in unrelated situations.

I have trouble answering the question, because not everyone regards comic strip artists like Bill Holbrook and Patrick McDonnell as celebrities. (Meeting them wasn't exactly an accident, either.) The best I can say is that I met Mary Chapin Carpenter while she was walking her dog in my neighborhood. I didn't know it until Dad told me right after the encounter. Not very exciting, since I hardly knew her music.

[torakiyoshi.livejournal.com]

I spent a couple hours chatting with Uncle Kage at RF. Does that count?

-=TK

[coyoty.livejournal.com]

When I was a staff member of the Science Fiction RoundTable on GEnie, I regularly talked with well-known writers, artists, and actors, and had face time with them at conventions. I spent one New Year's Eve at Peter David's home. Bruce Coville kept encouraging me to enter Punday competitions at Boskone. At the Babylon 5 Wrap Party in London, I made sure a tipsy James White got to bed safely, and Harlan Ellison served me black pudding in his pajamas.

Not so directly, I've worked with one girl who was dating The Master (Anthony Ainley), and another who was dating Eriq La Salle from E.R.

At the bookstore where I was working with the latter, Michael York came in regularly, and I talked comic books with his son.

[carlfoxmarten]

Closest I got to a celebrity was being on the same street as they were shooting part of Viper...
(man, that was a cool car. Though probably beat by Knight Industries Three Thousand...)