Fun Xmas Friday: Famous Encounters
Photo by Chris Murray on Unsplash
I guess everyone has a few stories about meeting famous people. Some of mine ended up in rather weird experiences, or involved a particularly odd celebrity, so I thought you might be entertained by a few of these stories.
Connie Chung. I had a crush on her, and as luck would have it during a trip in the early ‘00s where I connected in Atlanta, I ran into Connie in the airport. I saw her and as I approach her I said “Connie!” She was looking through her travel bag, she raised a hand in the classic talk-to-the-hand gesture that was yet to become a meme or whatever, and said “NO!” I just stared at her and our eyes locked, and she said “I don’t have time for you” and went back to whatever it was she was doing. I think she was looking through her bag or dealing with her travel companion or maybe both. Whatever. You missed out Connie, you’re off the list. So good news, Sandra Bullock and Michelle Pfeiffer, you now have less competition.
The Smothers Brothers. Again, while traveling in the early ‘00s. This was on a leg of a trip for them that took off for DFW, my home stop. Tommy and Dick Smothers had done some corporate gig in Boston, and they were on my flight on the way to the west coast. I had been going up to the gate attendant trying to get another seat. The Smothers’ manager was traveling with them and asked me if he could look at my boarding pass because he wanted to compare them to Tommy and Dick’s. It seems that Tommy and Dick had the infamous SSSS on their printed passes, and were wondering why. The gate agent said they couldn’t tell them, but I had managed to get the information out of a Fed during DEF CON. Of course it eventually became common knowledge but at the time this was a “thing” that no one knew what it meant. I remember Tommy asking me, as if I’d know, why they had a secondary screening thing and why they were a security risk. As I was somewhat familiar with their comedy show back in the late ‘60s and suggested it was from the controversies that started back then, Tommy responded with “Are you shitting me? Still?” and then Tommy and Dick started bickering. Eventually Dick got mad and went and sat down, and Tommy, his manager and I joked back and forth about various topics, and I suggested that they were probably going to search them again before we boarded the flight. Sure enough, they were approached and searched, even though we had all already cleared TSA earlier. The whole thing was quite odd.
Kurtwood Smith. Known mainly for his role in That Seventies Show as Red Forman, I was upgraded on a flight to First Class and found myself sitting next to Kurtwood. Several people that boarded the plane said, “Hey you’re Red Forman!” and he’d reply “oh no it’s not me, I get that all the time” to every one of them. He seemed somewhat amused when they’d believe him. We had drinks together and talked about goofy stuff, and he asked as many questions as he answered. Unbelievably nice guy.
Christian Slater. One year at Blackhat in Vegas, Cisco had hired Christian as a part of an ad campaign, and this included having him attend Blackhat and you’d wait in line and suffer through ads for a photo op and autograph. This was during the peak of Mr. Robot, so it was pseudo on topic. I avoided that area of the conference for the most part, although at one point I was heading to an elevator, got on, and Christian jumped on right before the doors closed. We both looked at each other for a second, then both of us stared straight ahead. I broke the silence and just said, "So Cisco, huh?" Christian replied "Uhm. Yeah." He did it in that deadpan sarcastic voice of his. I responded that I hoped they paid well. He slightly chuckled and sighed, and said "Well, that's why I'm here." The elevator opened. As I stepped off I said “Later…”, he nodded, and we very undramatically parted ways.
Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. I was a teen, maybe just barely a teen, and was on vacation with my family. We had been out sight-seeing and were in Berkeley, CA. My siblings were needing a bathroom break, and we stopped at a convenience store or gas station, I cannot remember exactly. There was a conversation going on in the parking lot with two hippies selling something to a third person out of the back of their car. One was barely able to stand up, but the other one was quite animated. The thing they were selling sounded cool - you could make free phone calls from a payphone with it. I had taken a bunch of money (well it seemed like a bunch of money at the time) from my piggy bank on the vacation with me. I approached the hippies - both named Steve - and said I wanted one of these blue boxes he had for sale. I had to talk to the coherent one while the other one stumbled around, sober Steve said “oh he dropped some acid, he’s fine” when he saw my concerned look. It took a while to talk him into it, but eventually he relented and sold me a blue box. A couple of years later my Dad bought an Apple II computer, and I would call up Apple to ask for help on something. Occasionally in the early days, Jobs or Wozniak would even answer the phone, or you’d get transferred to one of them. During one of those calls I told Woz the blue box story, he laughed and said he did not remember it at all, but it sounded about right, especially the part about Jobs tripping balls.
Bill Gates. Speaking of early computer days in the tech world, one of the early products I had acquired was a product called TASC which stood for The AppleSoft Compiler. It would take a program written in AppleSoft BASIC and compile it into native 6502 machine code. I had written a number of applications that were godly slow in AppleSoft, so TASC was a miracle as things ran so much faster. Pre-Internet so when you had problems, you called up the company, or at least I was doing that in the very late ‘70s and early ‘80s. Of course I had nothing except guesswork for a lot of the BASIC errors, and TASC was even more complex being that it spat out machine code. A few times I had issues or encountered errors, and I would call up the company that developed TASC, a company called Microsoft. The programmer of TASC was one Bill Gates, and one time when I asked about a particular error, I ended up on the phone with Bill. I was trying to explain what I was doing, and he yelled at me. I mean actual screaming. “Why in the hell would you do something like that?!? That’s stupid!! Good god do it this way…” and then he’d explain things way too fast and I’d have to stop him to ask him to repeat things, which seemed to piss him off even more. I remember thinking he was a complete asshole, and when I read about him later on in Byte Magazine, I was surprised he was head of the company. Later I learned he was pretty much like this with everyone so I wasn’t as bummed about it.
So that’s a few of the famous person encounters, at least the interesting ones. Hope you enjoyed them, and hopefully you have a few entertaining encounters of your own.
