This blog is about all of my celebrity sightings. Not that I see celebrities very often, but I guess there are enough famous people out there that odds are one will spot one from time to time, and over the years it just kind of adds up. Plus I enjoy readings and film festivals and sporting events, and famous people are bound to be at those kinds of things because, well, it’s their job.
I’ve tried to figure out why sighting a celebrity is an event for me; I’m a sensible, intelligent woman who understands, intellectually, that they are just people. And yet my heart still races and my knees still quake when it happens. Perhaps it is something written in our genes, a reaction akin to our prehistoric ancestors encountering a mammoth on their hunt—an awareness at the cellular level that this is something outside our quotidian experience, that this is something somehow important. Our autonomic nervous system can’t help that it evolved in a world without celebrities and thus can’t tell the difference between genuinely significant stimuli (mammoths) and not (celebrities).
Really, though, this blog isn’t about celebrity sightings but about what comes after: the narrative. I wonder if, for our ancestors, the highlight of the hunt was not the moment of slaying the mammoth but rather that night, sitting around the fire, sharing the tale of the adventure. For me that is the best part: not the seeing, but the story.
I really have sighted all the celebrities included here, and the encounters are recounted just as I remember them. But we all know how memory works, with its eraser in one hand and embellishing paintbrush in the other.
