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Celebrities instinctively don’t like me yet love my wife. Talking to y’all

Ving Rhames and Hugh Laurie 😡

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A friend of mine has a story about John and Yoko. He was collecting signatures to petition for refusniks to leave the Soviet Union, at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal. John & Yoko were having their bed-in to protest the war, and receiving visitors, of course. My friend got their signatures, duly turned in his packet, and later thought, "I could have kept those autographs!"

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Never underestimate synchronicity

That said … In NYC the magic is everywhere. Working in the “theatre”, I rubbed elbows with everyone from Harry Belefonte to Orson Welles. I built sets for John Houseman and Martha Graham. I stage managed for Mike Nichols.

BUT the chance encounters

Doing laundry with Guilda Radner

Getting a haircut with Grace Slick

Once I found myself face to face with the Man From Uncle in his own apt ( long story)

These were by far the most memorable

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This is fantastic. I’m sure I can think of more if I give it a try. Here’s a story I will put in an essay sometime. I once played in an orchestra performing “Peter and the Wolf.” The narrator was a sweet, adorable woman who was a “Sesame Street” performer. After many, many run-throughs, she gets to the part where the duck could be heard quacking inside the wolf’s stomach. In this run-through, everyone was getting punch-drunk, and she said, “But in this version of the story, there’s no quacking heard from inside the wolf, because the duck had died a horrible, awful, painful death, completely dissolved by the wolf’s stomach juices.” Everyone sat utterly stunned and then collapsed in laughter. Anytime I saw her on Sesame Street after that, I could think of nothing else.

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