You look familiar, do I know you?

Various

Keeping in line with my running hypothesis that I am the one directly responsible for the randomness that is my life, I have stumbled upon my fair share of “celebrities” in odd places.  I put celebrities in quotes, because the idea for this blog got me thinking that it is a fairly personal topic when it comes to who we get excited about meeting.  A quick story as an illustration:

I was a hurdler of some minor reknown in high school, and continued on at U-M.  During that time period, Allen Johnson was the top hurdler on the planet, winning multiple gold medals at the World Championships and Olympics.  While in law school, I was an assistant track coach for the university, and would travel with the team to out-of-town meets on the weekends.  It was early Saturday morning at the hotel before one of the meets (I think it was Clemson, SC, but it might have been Chapel Hill, NC), and someone started knocking on my hotel room door.  Hauling my tired, lazy butt out of bed (because coaches get to drink on Friday nights while the athletes are sleeping), I opened the door ready to berate one of our athletes for waking me up.  Instead, standing there was Allen Johnson, my favorite athlete.  He quickly apologized for knocking on the wrong door (ends up his coach was in the next room), and I believe my exact response was: “Tee hee.  That’s ok.  Tee hee.”

The idea of celebrity simply relates to what we are individually interested in, and I rarely tell the Allen Johnson story because I understand that most people could care less.  My point is that to me, that was a big flippin’ deal, to a very small slice of the track community that would have been a big deal, a slightly larger group of people yet may have realized who he was, and to 99.9999% of the population, they would have just been annoyed that some strange dude woke them up.

Which gets to my second point about celebrity:  People always tell me they are amazed with my ability to remember useless facts and information; but personally, I believe everyone can be trained to remember the same stuff, it’s just not a priority to most people.  I do acknowledge that I am a visual learner with an above average recall for faces and voices – and I watch a lot of movies and TV.  Which is definitely a contributing factor in the “random” sightings I have had.  Another story as an illustration:

The movie 8 Mile starring Eminem came out in November, 2002, and by the next summer, I owned the DVD and had watched the movie a few times.  I was living at home during the summer of 2003 while interning at a law firm, and my Dad and I decided to go sit in the woods in Northern Michigan for a weekend.  After hiking for a few miles later at night to get to our campsite, we finally arrived to the location as it was getting dark, only to find a giant black dude and a little Asian lady sitting there.  It’s stereotyping, but I’m guessing it’s not a common occurrence to find a black man and Asian woman sitting deep in the woods in Northern Michigan.  We struck up a conversation with them and he was complaining about how hard it was hauling all of the stuff into the woods.  (Of course it was hard, you’re not supposed to carry a 2-ton cooler, king size mattress, full wardrobe and kitchen sink 5 miles deep into the woods!)  But as he’s talking, I’m thinking to myself:  “Man, this guy looks familiar.”  Finally working up the courage to just blurt out “Dude, how do I know you?”, it ends up that he was the club bouncer in 8 Mile and had a few lines in the movie arguing with Eminem.

My point is that while it’s an amusing story finding a black guy and an Asian lady deep in the woods with 18,000 times too much stuff, it adds a little kicker at the end because of my uncanny ability to remember names and voices.  Lesson For The Day:  Watch more TV and movies, because you never know who you might run into deep in the woods late at night.

Ok, one final celebrity sighting story for the road:

I mentioned in my very first post that I worked as a summer camp counselor at the University of Michigan.  Each week during the summer, the U-M coaches for different sports would hold camps for the little rug-rats.  It’s a pretty cool thing, as the younger kids get to come spend a week at world-class facilities and meet the coaches and players who are still around.  My job (along with about 30 other counselors) was to stay in a dorm room on a hall with them at night and make sure they didn’t burn the place down.  [There will definitely be a post or two in the future dedicated solely to that summer.]  It was one Sunday afternoon as the kids were checking into the dorms that I went to the lobby to get my mail out of the box.  I was looking down and flipping through the mail as I got on the elevator after a guy and his kids.  Next thing I remember, I was thinking: “Why is Harry from the movie Dumb and Dumber asking me what floor I want?”  I looked up, and staring back at me was none other than movie star Jeff Daniels, bringing his tikes to hockey camp.  Thankfully, I had enough sense to reply “7, please,”  rather than, “Kick his ass, Sea Bass!” or “You can’t triple stamp a double stamp!” or “Would you like an atomic pepper, Mr. Mentalino?”  (Obviously, I’m a fan of that particular cinematic masterpiece.)