Chekhov's Mistress

Chekhov’s Mistress Renamed to “People Magazine”

by Bud Parr

Last week I mentioned seeing Eric McCormick of Will and Grace fame on the day I saw the dead or dying man, but I didn’t mention that I also lunched across from Steve Wasserman, who you might recall recently left his post as the books editor of the L.A. Times – in flight, the rumors go, from Mark Sarvas – for the less sunnier climes of New York City. Now maybe it’s my age that I appreciate better the small graces of living in a big city, but I do enjoy the celebrity sightings more than I used to.

Sure it was exciting to see Fyvush Finckle from time to time, or living down the street from the likes of Dustin Hoffman, Steve Martin, the Baldwin brothers (Alec naturally with Kim Basinger), Jerry Seinfeld, Harrison Ford, and Liam Neesan all of whom I saw on several occasions. Once in a while we’d see Frank McCourt toodling around the Upper West Side, or Kevin Bacon and his lovely wife or any number of cast members from Sex and the City. More recently we’ve been running into Dan Zanes, our favorite kids music guy bouncing around our Brooklyn neighborhood with his standing-up-straight shock of hair. Before we moved this year, we lived three doors down from Spike Lee’s parents in the brownstone Spike grew up in and the hood he immortalized. Both his dad and his step-mom are fascinating people in their own right, I might add, and although I coincidentally met Spike earlier that year, it was at a book signing, which doesn’t really count as a sighting.


Most of the time you don’t actually meet these people out of respect for their privacy. When I met Paul Simon it was nothing more than a brief handshake. I pretended to know Sonny Turner (of “You’ve Got That Magic Touch” fame) and he pretended to know me back. But meeting or sighting, the fun is to catch people outside of their famous environment where you would expect to see them, like when I saw Tom Brokaw at a jazz club, rode in an elevator with Peter Jennings, or stood next to Oliver Stone in the bathrooms at a movie theater (it was all I could do not to say something to Stone). That reminds me of the time I went to see “Traffic” and sat right next to a not-necessarily-famous but very good looking girl who was unmistakably in the very film we were watching – so she was watching me watching her watching herself.


There’s a beauty in the randomness of living in this city, the quiet anonymity that famous people enjoy here makes them, I imagine, comfortable enough that they can enjoy some normalcy without drawing attention to themselves. John Bon Jovi was pretty subtle when I saw him in a local favorite hangout, but Howard Stern was not, with his ego-stroking entourage following close behind. You would have thought that Kofi Annan with his wife and a phalanx of men with curly wires sticking out of their ears was running away from something. Maybe he was. John “Artie Bucco” Ventimiglia from the Sopranos had his guard up when I nearly had an incident with him in the very same bar where I saw another Soprano’s character, Tony’s Russian hotty girlfriend (not the one with the fake leg).


My favorite celeb sighting has always been Frances McDormand and not so much because she’s a celebrity (or the fact that I’m a huge Coen bros. fan), but because I think she’s genuinely talented. That my friend – coming across someone I truly admire – is very exciting. I used to feel that way about Steve Martin until he got all serious on us.


But today I’ve had what is perhaps my favorite sighting outside of my famous encounter with Lou Rawls (I also met Wynton Marsalis’s father once, but that’s another story and don’t even get me started talking about Kirstie Alley from Cheers whom I once tried to buy dinner for under the influence of some very old Scotch). This afternoon, sitting in one of my favorite West Village cafés was Sam Shepard. I believe that Mr. Shepard is one of the most talented writers living today and as you know, his talents don’t stop there.


I was sitting down to do some writing before a meeting; my back to him – I pulled out some books that I’m either writing about or reading and stacked them, as it happens, with the spines facing our hero. I was very self-conscious about this as though he might care or make some judgement about me, or note that because I have Frank O’Connor’s The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story, that I’m a writer too, just like him, brothers that we are. Of course, I say that in the spirit of the washed-up-writer-dad in The Squid and the Whale describing Kafka to his son as “one of my predecessors.”


I know that while I’m writing and he’s reading the “Daily Racing Form” and the “Times,” sipping on his coffee, that I’m churning out some vaporous anonymous crap (which as you now know I promptly dropped to write about celebrity sightings). It’s humbling in a way because this man is the genuine article, an institution and I imagine that when he saunters, and saunter he does, out of the café he’s going to go call Jessica Lange and I’m not.

posted June 14, 2006

comments

Surely, you mean Wasserman, Bud.  Unless of course you’re playing up the satirical rube angle.  smile

    – ed (06/14  at  07:11 PM)


whatchutalkinboutwillis?

    – Bud Parr (06/14  at  10:25 PM)


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