Star struck blues

In my imaginary life when I encounter Jon Hamm in a crowd outside say, the Ahmanson Theatre in LA, I just smile and give him a coy little wave.  You know, the kind where you duck your head and waggle your fingers.

               
He waves back.  Smiling of course.  Glad that at least some of the public are composed and know how to act around celebrities.

When I’m flying First Class, which is never - except in my fantasy life, I wind up seated next to Oprah, the powerhouse, enormously influential mogul of an all-around high profile person.  But I’m cool.

When I’m seated next to her?  I do not ask for her autograph.  No.  Instead, I ask just the right question in precisely the right way.  Something like, “No really, how ARE you?” 

See?  See how that works?

She is drawn in, is Oprah.  She cannot resist my direct yet unassuming eye contact.  She’s relieved, actually, to not have to be ‘on.’  Here is someone, at last, she must be saying to herself, who is not so dumb struck as to be groveling. 

In our cross-country flight, somewhere over Oklahoma (poetic isn’t it?) she leans toward me and begins a sentence with, “I’ve never told anyone this, but…”

Oh yes.

I hold my own with the celebs.  A day’s work.  No.  Big.  Deal.

I saw Elvis once. 

I was nineteen, hanging around the gate to his mansion in Beverly Hills with a rumpled and torn “Map to the Stars’ Homes” in my hand.  (When I balked at the map’s $5.00 price tag, the sketchy character who sold it to me said he had a torn one he would let me have for $2.50.  Then he turned his back and ripped the corner.  It was a good deal.)

We did not have curvy roads like that in Tulsa, so it took my girlfriend and me a lot longer than we thought it would to weave our way up the hillside, gawking at Lucille Ball’s house and George Burns’ house – and the houses of other big name stars our parents knew and we cared about on their behalf.

We barely arrived when the gate began to swing open.  A black Cadillac El Dorado rushed forward and paused until the opening was just wide enough; then it swooshed in. 

We saw him behind the wheel.  He looked good.  Like Elvis.

I’m not sure how poised I would have been if he’d looked my way.  I hadn’t worked out a cool fantasy conversation in advance so on that inevitable occasion Elvis would see I was different from all the others.  Poor planning.

Not like with Jon Hamm or Oprah in my dreams.  Now I’m ready.


Ted Turner shook my hand once.  I was in a reception line at the Grand Ole Opry hotel in Nashville.  He was the keynote speaker at an event I attended with students I coached in debate.  It was a national tournament and they qualified, so we got to meet TT.

I was tired and hungry and my shiny new ‘attend-a-keynote-dinner-with-Ted Turner’ shoes had rubbed a flaming blister.  So, bedraggled and limping, I offered my hand with an apologetic smile, my moment less than I had hoped. 

I think I said, “I admire your work.”

Oh brother.
                                                              
He gave me a quizzical look and said thanks.  Doubtful he’s retelling the story. 

 I didn’t practice for Robin Williams either; even though it seemed possible I might run into him sometime.  After all, he lived close by.  Once, he even shopped for a vacation home up on the remote north coast right where my family hangs out.  So we had some anticipation.

From what I hear he was pretty easy to talk to.  No pretenses.  Gentle.  Normal-seeming in the moment.  

But not normal.

He was not a regular guy on this planet.  Maybe it was lonely for him in the face of all this ordinary life.

I wonder if he rehearsed his conversations, hoping to seem natural with his paper boy or the guy at the bicycle shop…the retired high school principal.

Too late now, of course, but I wish I could tell him he didn’t have to try so hard.  We really did love him anyway.

Peter Pan lied!

Let me just say what a swift kick in the britches it is be as old as I am and still such a complete and utter work in progress.  

I may even be getting worse.   

What are the hallmarks of maturity, anyway?  How can you tell you’re grown up? 

That’s right.  I have to ask.  I don’t just know, like, automatically.  (Maybe I’ve spent too much time with teenagers.) 

So, in my saga of self-improvement I’m developing a checklist.  Here we go: 

Age.  Sure, if you’re the literal type.  And I can be.  So of course, age is one facet of maturity.  The concept applies to cheese and to people.  So, check!  Like a succulent Gouda, I have aged. 

My mom used to say that a grownup can carry money without spending it.  Oh hooray.  I’m a big girl now. 

Ripeness.  OK…this could be delicate.  Ripeness implies reaching the fullness of one’s potential.   

Part of me wants to believe I’m still rising in this regard.  Still on the upswing.  In this roller coaster ride of life, I’m still grinning in wild anticipation of what’s to come.  Gravity pulls me back in my seat as I look at the sky and the car ticks its way up the steep, steep grade toward the peak of ripeness - that moment of weightless glee at the top. 

But another part, or perhaps I should say parts, of me must acknowledge that I may have crested the summit a while back when I wasn’t paying attention.  Maybe I missed my peak experience.  Or, maybe, in the continuum of peaks, mine was a middling one, unremarkable in contrast with the surrounding Himalayas.   

Ripeness for me could very well be in the rearview mirror.  Come to think of it, 35 was a excellent year.   

Yep, I may be overripe.  In the vernacular of food preservatives, I could be going bad.   

Uh oh.  That actually explains some things. 

For example:  Some evidence indicates that I’m edging my way down the slope of wisdom, having spent too little time at the pinnacle soaking things in, as it were.  I’m less wise, which is as we know, a gentle way of saying I’m dumber than I used to be.   

This may be an unintended consequence of holding a know-it-all job for so many years.  Whether I ever actually knew anything is subject to debate, but in the role of principal, pretty much everyone treated me as if I possessed oracle-like abilities, especially when they wanted to pass off their freshly created debacle.  Or, folks shuddered in disbelief when I didn’t know the particular thing they thought I should know; the classic case of a lose-loser situation.  

As you can no doubt see, holding such a job for any length of time has the effect of creating a crackpot.  The only difference is now that I’m retired, no one listens to me!  Back in the day when I spouted off, it meant something.  Today, pfffft! 

Yet I’m still cracking wise…Is that maturity, or immaturity?  I prefer to think of it as freedom, but again, no one cares what I think.  It’s an extremely frustrating conundrum.  

I’m less adept on so many levels these days.  Once noted for my poise and serenity in dicey situations (run with me on this), I’ve become fretful and inept.  If I could just stop blurting.  It’s not cute anymore.  Apparently.   

Even as a child I somehow knew the right thing to say and when to say it.  My elders nicknamed me the “Diplomat.”  But those days of respect and elevated status are long gone.  Now at reunions, when my cousins see me coming, they sort of squint and turn their faces to the side, like you do when you hear a first grader playing the violin.   

Remember Mork from Ork?  He arrived on earth as an adult.  And as time passed, he got younger and younger.  The subtext of the script was that children are smarter than adults are.  We should all strive to be more childlike.  Robin Williams has made a good living doing just that. 

But outside of Hollywood, maturity is a high price to pay for growing up.