I waited as long as I could, through lots of nonproductive conversations with looky-loos, but finally was about to bust, so adjourned to the latrine. When I emerged a scant 3 minutes later, my co-worker greeted me with, "Oh, too BAD! You just missed Dick Van Dyke and his wife."
But what she doesn't know: Mr and Mrs DVD live right down the street from where I'm staying in the pool house--just around the corner from Mel Gibson (too bad about him, huh? wish he'd just held the line at Braveheart)--so we're bound to run into one another eventually, tra-la.
OK, something I learned today: the Malibu Look
It's not about what you look like (very much); it's about how you look AT other people.
Something I heard all the time in Boston/Cambridge but never really understood: one way Yankees always can spot (and thereby reflexively despise) Californians (besides the fact that we are so well-groomed, not to mention attractive) is, everybody we pass on the street, we always look them in the eye. (We also have that annoying "Have a nice day!" habit that drives stony Bostonians apeshit.) This made no sense to me until tonight, in the supermarket.
I realized was checking everybody out--everybody I saw in the aisles, everybody in line ahead of me--to see whether they Were Somebody. Most celebrities can fly under even the best radar (mine, for instance; I've had it since I was nine and spotted Clark Gable--also in a grocery store!), simply by not putting on their Public Personalities; they have to be Acting in order to project that identity vibe (sorry). I've seen, for instance, Bob Newhart not being Bob Newhart, so nobody knew he was even there--and then suddenly BEING Bob Newhart, so EVERYBODY knew he was there (in a hotel lobby in Palm Springs, 1974). Bill Cosby, too: on an elevator one 3AM in 1969, in an apartment complex in West Hollywood where nobody respectable had any business being at that hour; I got on, wanting only to get home ASAP (the bullet I had just fired into a corner of Hari Rhodes' apartment is another story)--saw this man leaning up against the back corner of the elevator looking completely done in, did a double take, and opened my mouth to say, "Hey, aren't you--?" But as the elevator doors closed, he waved me off without even really looking at me, saying, "Yeah, yeah, yeah. Never mind, OK?"
The funny part about the scenario in Ralph's tonight: I realized everybody else was doing exactly the same thing to ME! "Who is she? IS she Somebody?"--I could almost hear them thinking as they stared into my eyes, hard. This never happens in the store, of course, because nobody who was anybody would be working in a bookstore! But the minute I step outside, I'm fair game.
(But yesterday there was this one guy who paused at the front door of the store with a group of his pals, gestured to the counter where Andrea and I were standing [trying to figure out a special order], and said, "Hey, look, you guys--Gloria Steinem and Jayne Mansfield!" "Wow, yeah, no shit!" the boys from Peoria or McKeesport or Ottawa all marveled.)
Do you actually get any work done while tending the store? Gloria Steinem I betcha. However with a better attitude!
Posted by: Catch-22 | July 20, 2004 at 10:49 AM