Anecdotes

The kid was a perpetual liar. Everything he said was unbelievable. But he just would not confess that none of it was true -- perhaps because he actually did believe the stories. He was from LA and talked about wrestling alligators. When boasting of his awesome Mexican cooking skills, I asked him if he could make Swedish meatballs. "Of course," he said and I wondered if he had heard me say "Swedish." He told us about how he got ran over by a car -- sometime in between the story about working construction and being manager at a hotel -- and I just couldn't take it any more. "I got ran over too... by a jumbo jet... it was the Concord at LaGuardia airport! After which I jumped on a train trestle and was subsequently run over." "But you're not dead," another kid --who just didn't get it -- piped up. "I know," I said with false sincerity, "That's the miracle of it." The kids just laughed as if I had made a joke we all understood. No, I was mocking the liar.

I hadn't read As You Like It but I was very excited to be seeing it at our local theatre. A little nervous too. It is Shakespeare after all, and I tend to understand it not based on the dialogue but rather on the action, as if watching a cartoon in Urdu. We stood in line to get our will-call tickets and there he was. He wore khaki pants, a blue sweater, and a baseball cap. Not as tall as I had imagined. Holy Hannah Montana, it was Edward Herrmann, aka Richard Gilmore. I had to move so I could respectfully "freak out" away from his celebrity glare. I watched him throughout the evening and contemplated and chickened out several times about approaching him. He was there alone but must have known someone in the cast because he was pulled into the action with Audrey (a character) doing a very silly dance that he seemed to already know. Frankly I was surprised his body was so agile -- he isn't a young buck, you know. The baseball cap was an odd accessory to the outfit so I can only guess he did not really want attention. The man must be recognized everywhere -- if not by Gilmore fans then by fans of something he's done in his nearly 40 years of acting. I did not approach. But I do have a good story.