Disastrous brush with a celebrity?

Not a particularly bad eperience, actually a good one: I was a freshman is high school and had just started taking running seriously, so I knew very little about the history of the sport, let alone any famous runners. My brother was a senior in high school and he was looking at colleges in Boston with my dad during our spring break, so I thought I would tag along because we live literally on the other side of the country, and I had never been to the city before. We are walking around the city at night, and we end up in a running store. I am sure you guys know what store I am talking about. I am looking at the selection of shoes, although nothing in particular. The guy running the store starts asking me about my running,whether or not I would like to run in college, and if I would like to run Boston one day, and he tells me to keep running and training hard. He was a really nice guy, but I literally had no idea who he was. I end up buying a Boston Marathon backpack because it was priced really low because it was commemorating the Boston marathon that had just passed. We leave and my dad, who is a lifelong runner tells me that the guy who helped me out was Bill Rodgers, which meant nothing to me at the time because I had never heard that name in my entire life.

I was in a club recently and I saw Arsenio Hall dancing. He had a silk shirt that was waving around, it was much too large for his frame (he is skinny now). He was very excited, he was jumping on the trampoline or at least I thought it was a trampoline, he was really just jumping on the floor. Jumping very high up and down, I guess he's been doing a lot of that kind of practicing, Ray's dance moves. Arsenio, he was the man that night.

I was a 5th grader when I met Obama when he was campaigning for the Senate. I didn't think I'd get to shake his hand and say a few words to him so I fumbled my words and I asked him if he was going to run for president (I meant in 2008). He must have thought I was stupid and told me he's not running for president but the senate.

Sp!kes wrote:

Reminder: the OP asked for "disastrous" encounters with celebs. We don't care to read the pompous posts that some idiot writes because he wants to show off a great encounter with a famous person.

You seem to be the only one complaining about this, not even the OP has complained about people talking about positive expriences with celebrities. And do you know the deinition of pompous? Some of these accounts are somewhat self-absorbed, nostalgic, pointless, irrelevant, etc., but more often than not, they demonstrate humility, which is almost the complete opposite of pomposity. In summation, you are an idiot.

I had an encounter with a local celeb here in Thailand that went quite well at first. She was a famous singer in Thailand, (I am NOT telling you her name) and we had a GREAT time together. The disastrous part was when her husband found out!

666EnergyDrink wrote:

I had an encounter with a local celeb here in Thailand that went quite well at first. She was a famous singer in Thailand, (I am NOT telling you her name) and we had a GREAT time together. The disastrous part was when her husband found out!

Wow, you're the best, man. Can you give the rest of us some pointers?

Oyame wrote:

You seem to be the only one complaining about this, not even the OP has complained about people talking about positive expriences with celebrities. And do you know the deinition of pompous? Some of these accounts are somewhat self-absorbed, nostalgic, pointless, irrelevant, etc., but more often than not, they demonstrate humility, which is almost the complete opposite of pomposity. In summation, you are an idiot.

That's pretty nasty, even if you are speaking to a person you don't like.

Be nicer, the world needs one more decent person more than it needs one more wise guy.

Rupert from Survivor came to visit the patients where I worked at Christmas one year and even though I don't really care about the show I froze up and couldn't speak.

My older brother (a white guy) had a disastrous brush with Spike Lee, who was speaking at an event hosted by the black caucus at Penn State University in ~1993. The topic of the evening was something related to African American issues and my brother was covering it as a journalism student. At the end of Spike Lee's speech, a line formed for the question and answer. My brother was the very last one in the line permitted to ask a question.

If you knew my brother, you would understand how innocently and naively he asked this question over the microphone: "Mr. Lee, I noticed during your speech that you alternately referred to African Americans as "blacks", "African Americans", and "negroes". Which term would you prefer journalists such as myself use?"

The audience (most black caucus members) went totally silent as Spike started blankly at my brother. After what seemed like an eternity, Spike finally said "What did you just say? Say it into this microphone." And he handed my brother the microphone.

Since it was obvious that Spike (and everyone else in the crowd) had heard the question perfectly, my brother re-phrased the same question, but this time extremely nervously, and into the microphone.

Spike gave an angy, faux-horrified look to the crowd, and they went berserk. They were booing and crumpled papers started flying at my brother.

My brother sort of looked towards Spike Lee for help. Spike took the microphone away from him, and as he did so, he said "I gave you this microphone so you could hang yourself with it."

Met him before with his boyfriend. I didn't know he was gay.

Plus, he's classless bigot. What? He can't use the English language and the rest of us can't? Is he so stupid to think that your broher was some raging, redneck inbred hell-bent on causing a racial issue and woul come so outnumbered to do so? Yet, he took the opportunity to try to malign your brother as a racist?

No wonder we still have problems when pieces of shit like this are allowed to flaunt this shit in the face of (I am guessing your brother is good and decent)people, yet white (mainly liberal) Americans set back and take it. F*** that, and F*** anyone who woud try that with me.

Spike Lee is closet gay wrote:

What? He can't use the English language and the rest of us can't?

Uh........since you are the linguist, can you please translate?

sit back

would try that

I never looked at Spike Lee is a font of wisdom on this kind of stuff

1981, my best friend and I see John Walker coming into the party after an indoor meet in which he dropped out of the mile, suffering from compartment syndrome in his lower legs. As he's scanning the crowd looking for just about anyone who _isn't_ an eighteen-year-old high school runner, we block his path and start talking to him. The conversation is unbelievably tortuous and then my buddy asks him who's a better runner, Coe or Ovett. Walker says, "Coe," then raises an eyebrow as my friend points to me and says, "Well, here's a guy who would disagree with you." Walker asks me why I think Ovett's better and I mumbled something about preferring his attitude and bravado over Coe's, or something like that. Total bullshit. We were about to walk away when my friend mentioned growing up around horses, and then Walker became very friendly and much more interested. I stood there looking like a knob for a while then walked off.

I saw Kevin McHale at the McDonald's game in Boston a while back (Darius Miles' senior year). He just walked by. My friend and I ran in front of him and started babbling hysterical gibberish. We didn't ask him for anything, I just kept saying, "Mr. McHale!" over and over. He had a couple goons around him, and they sort of shuffled us to the side so he could pass.

When my mother was a little kid, she got into an elevator with Wilt Chamberlain, and her little brother screamed when he saw Wilt because he was so big. Supposedly, he thought it was funny.

Crumpled paper the weapon of choice for todays militant fringe!!!

Da Juice wrote:

The year was 1989 or 1990. I was working as a short order cook at a tennis club and Golf Course at the golf course in Monarch Beach, CA

OJ walks into the lobby and heads toward me at the snack bar. ...The second thing to go through my mind was to (sarcastically) ask him how his wife was doing. Not wanting to get the crapped beat out of me, I decided not to make any wise cracks about his wife.

That was pretty clever of you, thinking up that joke about his wife, since it was 4 years before she was murdered.

Spike Lee was at the US Open when Pete Sampras defeated Andre Agassi in Sampras' last match as a pro. Spike was in the stands, presumedly to push his latest movie. A TV journalist came up to him and said, "What do you think of this great match-up?"

Lee's reply, "Well, it's not exactly Ali-Frasier, is it?"

His movies aren't exactly Citizen Kane either.

Haven't cared for that A-hole since.

was here wrote:

Da Juice wrote:

The year was 1989 or 1990. I was working as a short order cook at a tennis club and Golf Course at the golf course in Monarch Beach, CA

OJ walks into the lobby and heads toward me at the snack bar. ...The second thing to go through my mind was to (sarcastically) ask him how his wife was doing. Not wanting to get the crapped beat out of me, I decided not to make any wise cracks about his wife.

That was pretty clever of you, thinking up that joke about his wife, since it was 4 years before she was murdered.

You overlooked (and cut out) the part where the poster mentioned that this occurred at the time OJ was first in the news for beating his wife, several years before the murder.