One man’s continuing effort to catalogue every famous person he’s ever encountered.
CE1K: So, this past weekend, I was down in Nuevo York for my brother-in-law’s birthday (and to check out the most excellent Broadway revival of West Side Story) when at one point (during a Speed Levitchy open-air bus tour of lower Manhattan), I spy a ripped, bare-chested black guy chatting up a voluptuous soul sister from the cockpit of a vaguely familiar bright yellow Lamborghini convertible. “Hey! That’s Tracy Morgan!” one of the tourists behind me exclaims. (Or, as my brother-in-law wanted to know, was it really Tracy Jordan?)
CE3K: Meanwhile, a decade or so back and three time zones away, I took an improv class with then-brunette proto-celebrity Lisa Kudrow and firepatch quasi-celebrity Patrick Bristow (of Showgirls and Curb Your Enthusiasm quasi-fame) at the Groundlings Theater in L.A. At the time, Kudrow was a member of the troupe’s main company (though only an assistant teacher in the class), and she and I and the rest of the students would occasionally end the night at Barney’s Beanery and other local haunts, playing darts and shooting pool in a friendly acquaintancey way. Not too long after that, Kudrow appeared in a play called The Ladies Room, directed by my friend, mentor (and early employer) Kim Friedman (quasi-famous in her own right as part of the Square Pegs creative team, as well as being, if I recall correctly, the first woman to direct an episode in the Star Trek TV franchise). Anyway, so one night during the run of the show at the Tiffany Theater on Sunset Boulevard, I see Kudrow and say hi, unaware her career is heating up thanks to a recurring role on Mad About You that would lead more or less directly to her eventual superstardom on Friends…meaning that, given the immutable laws of Hollywood physics, I had already become completely invisible (as well as inaudible) to my former acquaintance given the thermal imbalance in our career heat, thus causing her to react to my cheery hello with a blank-eyed stare as she quickly walked past (or maybe even through) me back to her more fabulous, fully visible friends.
CE1K: And finally, a year or three before my first encounter with Kudrow, I was working as a dishwasher in Chicago at that other famous improv theater, The Second City, when I stuck around for a late-night set featuring members of the mainstage company (which at the time included Tim Meadows and Bill Murray’s brother Joel) along with the Sunday show cast. Towards the end of the show, the actors began playing that old drama club game where two people start a scene, then another actor replaces one of them and takes the scene in a new direction. At one point, mainstage regular Chris Farley and a heavyset guy from the Sunday show wound up facing off like a pair of sumo wrestlers, laughing as they screamed the same phrase back and forth at each other several times in a row: “I’M the next John Belushi!” “No, I’M the next John Belush!” “No, I’M the next John Belushi…”
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