After brunch, I came out of the Flying Biscuit, this is maybe 2008, the waiting line was milling along the sidewalk. Among them, who I passed right in front of, was Salman Rushdie.
Now, I’ve not read any of his books, though I’m told I should.
What freaked me out was coming within handshake distance of a guy with a million-dollar bounty on his head.
Waiting in line on the sidewalk of Clifton Rd for a table at the freaking Flying Biscuit.
Later, I read in the paper that he had a visiting professorship at Emory and that he had stopped being worried about the fatwa for many years by then.
But it was still weird
I have met Henry Louis Gates in Harvard Square. I had seen so much of him from his TV show and from the Beer Summit that I had assumed he was someone I knew. I waved to him. He waved back.
I was walking in Manhattan in the early 80s, near Gramercy Park when I looked up into the eyes of BJ Hunnicutt (Mike Farrell). He got this pained look on his face, like “oh no. not another one,” so I just smiled and said hello as I passed. I bet he would have gotten more acting gigs if he’d had a better manner with the public.
I had that happen at LAX: saw someone I recognized so I smiled and waved, and he waved back. Only after I’d taken a couple of steps and started down the escalator did I realize that I didn’t KNOW him know him, it’s just that I ‘saw’ him weekly on a TV show I was watching because I knew one of the behind-the-scenes people involved. So that was my brush with William Sadler. Not an A-list celebrity, but a decent guy to some strange pregnant woman in an airport.
i have a huuuuge crush on him during his MASH period. in retrospect, i have come to realize that he was an early part of my young sexual awakening. when other boys my age were finding themselves being turned on by Linda Carter’s Wonder Woman, i was super happy to watch MASH with my family because of how much i loved him and his character on that show. i can’t imagine what i would’ve been like running into him in real life, lol
I used to love Alice as a kid. When I lived in Wilmington, NC Linda Lavin also lived there. She took yoga classes from a fellow teacher in the town. One day I attended the other teachers class and Linda was there, too. I really wanted to tell her how much I loved that show but didn’t want to be that annoying fan girl when she was getting her yoga on.