Man Bites Shaggy Dog

There I was, settling down in my seat at the Starbucks where all the off-duty drag queens hang out, when on the other side of the armchair opposite, I saw Patrick Stewart.

Maybe. Maybe not.

Here in the metro NYC area we ordinary people spy celebrities from time to time. My friends have had fabulous sightings. Fabulous. Laurence Fishburne. Meryl Streep. De Niro. Even out here in the not-so-far-flung suburbs we have Meryl (again) dining at the little restaurant down the avenue, or Laura Linney filming at the little civic center, or Tyler Perry eating lunch in the church. Why, Beyonce and Jay-Z recently dropped by for a quick lunch at the local Cosi. Why, I can’t imagine. I mean, Cosi has a fine Cobb salad, but if I were Beyonce the only way I’d slum it at a chain like Cosi would be if I’d wandered out for the day with less than twenty bucks slipped into my skin-tight gold spandex catsuit. Am I right?

Stellar celebrities abound here. That is, I haven’t seen any of them. But I’ve heard. For a very very long time, my only celebrity sightings have been of the minor Z-list reality TV show variety. No, I don’t mean the time last summer when we went to that taping of America’s Got Talent at Radio City Music Hall and saw Heidi Klum and Tim Gunn and a wee, Pee-Wee-Herman-doll-sized Zac Posen. That hardly counts as a celebrity sighting at all, because Heidi was paid to be there, since she was judging the domino-felling, talking-dog, juvenile-stripper contestants. Tim and Zac were just at her side to be supportive. Besides, they were so far away.

Which in the end was probably a good thing, since it prevented me from lunging like the rabid fan-boy I am at Tim Gunn to tell him I was one of the only five people who actually made it all the way through his book Gunn’s Golden Rules and that if I were ever invited to his apartment for an overnighter (hint, hint) (and not that way, you pervs. Just to sleep on his futon after a long night of gossip and rumination about Art and Fashion!) I learned from Chapter 10 (“Be A Good Guest Or STAY HOME!”) not to mess with the remote controls on his coffee table like his niece did when she was trying to watch cable, because the cable service is on component rather than Aux 2, since Aux 2 is connected to his DVD player and besides, why would anyone, related or not, be so presumptuous as to mess with Tim Gunn’s remotes? All that might have been a little bit too much to yell at him from the warm embrace of the arms of the NYPD officers restraining me, after all.

No, the celebrities I saw . . . well, let’s just say the word sad is particularly apropos. There was the time we were walking through Hell’s Kitchen and I had a good chinwag with Chris March. Chinwag might be overstating it a tad. We were walking past Starbucks—not the drag queen Starbucks where I either saw or didn’t see Patrick Stewart—one chilly early spring afternoon. Sitting by himself on a bench outdoors sipping a piping hot Chai Cookie Latte was someone I recognized. My brain registered the face and, in that instantaneous way it occasionally does, immediately came up with a match in my database. You know this person . . . ! it told me. Cheerfully ignoring the little warning from my central processor that it was still searching, I raised my hand and yelled out, “Well heeeeeey!” in the manner one does when one sees an old friend and can’t immediately remember his name. I didn’t want to be guilty of rudely snubbing someone a buddy, after all.

Mr. March looked up from his Chai Cookie Latte in surprise, and responded exactly as someone does when accosted by someone yelling out “Well heeeeey!” in a super-friendly manner. “Heeeeey!” he said, startled.

We both wore big smiles on our faces as we stared at each other in silence. Then, right on time, my brain finished its data search. You know this person . . . from TV! My smile froze into something a little more terror stricken. He started to wear the rictus of someone thinking, Holy hell, what have I gotten myself into? Then, both of us realizing we had absolutely no basis of acquaintance whatsoever, we both said “Take care!” at the same time and with a great deal of forced gaiety.

I scrambled down the street after Craig. “That was Chis March,” I growled at him.

“Who?”

“Chis March,” I repeated. “Project Runway. Chris March.”

“Who?” Craig asked, looking around.

“You know!”

“Where?” he craned his neck around, but by then all that was left of the designer were the skid marks he’d left on the pavement in his speedy attempt to get away from the crazy guy.

Note: I don’t know for certain that Chris March was drinking a Chai Cookie Latte. That was my authorial imagination filling in a few of the details to make the experience richer for my readers. But he seems the type. Am I right?

Then there was the time a few months later we were walking by a row of townhouses in the Village. “Hey,” I said, when we passed a window. I stopped us in our tracks. “That’s that guy,” I said, nodding inside, where a hairdresser was taking care of a client.

“What guy?” asked Craig.

“That guy!” I said, exasperated. “That guy on that awful show we watch.”

“Which awful show we watch?” he said. My previous reply, I had to admit, didn’t exactly narrow the field. We watch a lot of awful shows.

“You know!” I groped around for the answer. “The A List: New York.”

“Which guy?” Craig wanted to know. “The dumb pretty one?”

“Don’t talk about Rodiney that way,” I pouted.

“The one from The Amazing Race?”

“No.”

“The bitchy one?”

“The hag?”

I shook my head. “No. The one who isn’t any of those.”

We both stared at the hairdresser for a brief moment, then shrugged at each other, and went on our merry way.

My luck turned briefly on a brisk winter afternoon earlier this year when I was walking down Seventh Avenue and passed Harvey Fierstein straggling in the opposite direction. He was wrapped in some kind of bedraggled-looking wooly jacket usually seen on wrinkled Russian babushkas and was carrying an armful of folders. He looked very tired. Oh hey, said my brain, there’s Harvey Fierstein on the way to Kinky Boots rehearsals! Not wanting a repeat of Marchgate, I managed to keep my hand down as we passed. Then a huge gust of wind assaulted us at the cross-streets. Harvey staggered and yelped. When I turned around, my brain thought to itself, Oh hey, there’s Harvey Fierstein, dropping all the Kinky Boots scripts!

I thought the sighting was quite the coup for me, until my friend Eric rolled his eyes upon hearing about it and informed me that everyone saw Harvey Fierstein. He made it sound as if ol’ Harve was the celebrity panhandler of Seventh Avenue, wandering around dressed in eccentric costumes inspired by Little Edie Beale, pleading to be recognized.

I confess: the information deflated me.

But Patrick Stewart. I mean, come on. Genuine celebrity gold right there. Sure, he might’ve had a tendency to slum it with a ray gun in that Star Trek series or being wheeled around those X-Men movies, but even as he was battling the Borg he did it in an acting style intended to make sure you’d never forget he was trained in Shakespeare, damn it. That’s one hundred percent pure class, right there. And he was sitting not six feet from me.

Or was it really him?

I’d gone into that particular Starbucks after a long afternoon walking around Manhattan with my husband. We’d gone to an art house movie. We’d done some Christmas shopping up Broadway and down 23rd. We’d spent a very long time in Home Depot looking at kitchen cabinets. I had a meeting of my Men’s Knitting Group/Downton Abbey Fan Fiction Society scheduled for later in the West Village, so we parted paths with plans to meet up again after my session. Which is how I ended up in the Village ninety minutes early for the knitting group, looking for a place to sit for a while.

Now, when I lived into Detroit, I would wander into my local Starbucks and occasionally find its six four-person tables occupied by one person apiece. I would look at those six occupied chairs and the eighteen empty chairs and put my hands on my hips and stalk out, harumphing something like, “There’s no place to SIT in this joint!” In New York City, where space and privacy both are at a premium, I have downgraded my expectations so severely that I can walk into a packed coffee shop and spy an unoccupied flat space atop the overflowing trash bin on one side of the room, and on the other a retro diner stool missing its seat so that it resembles a medieval-era anal torture spike, and complacently think to myself, “Oh, there’s puh-lenty of seating!”

But for some reason, I was lucky enough to get an actual armchair at this Starbucks. An armchair by the window! And nobody had vomited in it! I made a beeline for its upholstered comfort, stepping over assorted bags and arms and legs while clutching my skinny mocha, and sat down with a contented sigh. There were five or six similar armchairs set around the coffee table where I set my beverage; they were all occupied by well-dressed African-American men. They ignored me. As I pulled out my iPad to read, I kind of gathered, by the multiple Oooo gorls and the lengthy conversation about dress construction, that they were drag queens with some down time before their show. Normally this discovery would have fascinated me, but that’s when I spotted—I believe I might’ve mentioned it before—the man who may have been Patrick Stewart.

There he was, ensconced on the window side of the large communal table crowded with about sixteen people. He was the only one who wasn’t engrossed in a laptop or iPad or smartphone or other electronic device—a bald older gentleman with a sharp nose and intelligent eyes that danced over the pages of a trade paperback copy of À la recherche du temps perdu. All right. I couldn’t see the title. It could’ve been 50 Shades of Grey, for all I know. But he seems the type. Am I right?

Anyway, the point is that he was reading it like it was À la recherche du temps perdu. He held the book aloft so that his profile was plainly visible. Like a hand mirror prop, he held it. He read the hell out of that book in a manner intended to make sure you knew he’d held a mirror like that when he played Lear, damn it! And my helpful brain thought to itself, Wow! That’s Patrick Stewart!

Why in the world would Patrick Stewart be at a Starbucks in the West Village, I asked my brain?

Um, isn’t he going to be in some play in town soon? You know. One of the ones without songs and dancing or anything interesting?

I had to concede the point. Patrick Stewart was indeed performing in town. It was certainly conceivable that he had a Monday evening off. But really? The best thing he had to do in his spare time was to read Proust at a Starbucks in the West Village?

Why not? asked my brain.

Really? Patrick Stewart? At the communal table, no less, crowded between a Jamaican nanny with two loud lily-white brats and a congested student in flaccid corduroy who looked like he smelled like skunk?

My brain faltered a little there. Well. . . .

Come on, now. If you looked at the guy’s face, it wasn’t really Stewart-like. He looked too seedy. You’d just jumped to that conclusion because of his shiny head. After all, not every bald guy is Patrick Stewart. Some of them are Bruce Willis and William Frawley.

Maybe you’re right, said my brain. Oh god, yeah. I see it now. That’s not Patrick Stewart at all. Doesn’t look like him a bit! What a big phony that freak is!

“Ex-cuse me,” said a deep but feminine voice to my left, distracting me. The guy next to me had leaned over the coffee table to touch me lightly on the knee. He was probably the most effeminate of the drag queen cadre. Even though it was a cold and blustery day, he wore Capris with no socks and a pretty pair of orange sandals and a loose T-shirt in a particularly intense teal. He nodded at the iPad on my lap. “But do you happen to have an iPhone charger with you? My battery is fixing to expire.”

Did I have a battery charger? Hah! I scoff at such questions. My man purse is a veritable Mary Poppins carpetbag from which I can pull the entire contents of Radio Shack on demand. “Why, sure,” I told him, reaching into its bottomless depths and producing a little charger and cord.

He plugged it into the outlet between us. His phone chirped happily as he connected the other end. “Why thank you, kind sir,” he murmured through lowered lashes. “Why, I bet when you walked into this Starbucks, a pretty straight boy like you never thought he’d be sharing his charger so intimately with a queen like me, now, did you?”

I cheerfully declined to deny the pretty boy part of his inquiry. But I did say, “Oh, I’m not straight.”

My new friend’s head immediately swiveled around to his comrades. “I told you,” he said, in shady tones of victory.

When I picked up my iPad again, that big bald phony who skulked around the West Village trying to make people think he was Patrick Stewart—like anyone cared what that fraud did—had risen from the communal table and was making his way to the door. The man in Capri pants immediately lunged from his armchair, though he carefully set his phone down in the seat to make poachers knew it was occupied. “Oh, Mr. Stewart!” he cried, tripping gracefully across the crowded seating area. “Mr. Stewart! I loved you in Jeffrey!” I heard him say.

Well, god damn.

I watched as Mr. Capri Pants engaged in a minute-long conversation with the actor that concluded with them actually hugging. All the while I was cursing my bloody luck. I could recognize (kind of) Chris March. I could spot that guy from that show who wasn’t the other guys on that show, you know? I could even pick Harvey Fierstein out of a crowd—even though Harvey Fierstein is apparently the roach of the celebrity world and everyone has suffered an infestation at some time or another. But sit me six feet away from Patrick Stewart? That’s when my idiot brain decides I’m just looking at some bald poseur reading some awful novel who's parking his keister and killing time until his trendy hot yoga class on 14th Street.

When it comes to the rarified realm of spotting big cheeses, apparently I need to stick to the aisle where they stock the celebrity equivalent of Velveeta.

Am I right?