Like most people, I’ve got stories about meeting famous individuals, and it’ll surprise approximately none of the regulars here that most of those meetings came at music events. (At some point I’ll have to write about the experience of talking to a Canadian astronaut who was a guest performer at a gig.) Equally interesting, to me at least, are the near misses
: they’re slightly higher on the scale than sightings, as there was potential for actual conversation.
The first I can remember is walking into Althouse College for a Holly Cole concert—the first I’d ever gone to by myself—and recognizing Steven Page and Tyler Stewart (from Barenaked Ladies) ahead of me in line. This was around the time of the Yellow Tape, and must have been before they’d gained notoriety for being barred from playing in Toronto due to their name, because as far as I could tell no one else there recognized them. Holly’s opening act did, though: they were Moxy Früvous, who were also starting out at the time, and in improvised lyrics for Blow Wind Blow they riffed on the idea that they were often confused for BNL because they both did “funny” songs, and pointed out Ty and Steve in the crowd as they sang the verse.
I had another near-miss with Steve Page just recently. My friend Bob invited me to see “Weird Al” Yankovic at Massey Hall, and as we were walking in one set of the front doors I realized that Steve was just entering through the next ones over. He was with his family, though, and I didn’t want to intrude on their night out, so I didn’t say hello.
The strangest venue for an almost-meeting has to be the Ontario Science Centre. I had taken a couple of days to go to Toronto to see Lenni (natch) and wound up with a free afternoon, so I decided to go to Body Worlds 2, which had recently opened. (If the name sounds familiar but you don’t remember why, let me refresh your memory: it’s a controversial travelling exhibit of actual human bodies that have been preserved using a process called plastination and then posed in configurations that highlight certain parts, such as muscle groups in various states of flex, internal organs, and so on.) I’d gotten about halfway around the main hall when I noticed a slim, dark-haired woman on the other side of the central display. She looked familiar, but I couldn’t quite place her. As I continued around the exhibits I caught sight of her a few more times, but it wasn’t until we got near the exit that I realized she was Sarah Harmer. Given the… unique… environment, it certainly didn’t seem like the right place to go up and be Joe Fanboy, so I refrained.
It was on the same trip that I managed to not invite Rachel McAdams to Lenni’s show as I passed her on Queen St. West near the Drake Hotel (where Lenni was performing). As with Sarah Harmer, I wasn’t quite sure who she was until it was too late; all I’d seen her in at that point was Slings and Arrows (in which she was great, by the way).
Walking in to the Centennial Concert Hall, performance space for the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, and seeing Jeff Goldblum playing the piano in the lobby was unexpected, to say the least. We found out later that he was there visiting his fiancée’s parents, and had somehow used his connections (his fiancée, Catherine Wreford, had trained with the RWB) to score the opportunity to perform and schmooze with the crowd who were there to see The Nutcracker. He wasn’t half-bad on the keys, either.
Perhaps the funniest, unintentionally, was an occurrence with a local celebrity—although that term might be overstating the case slightly. For reasons I can’t remember, I was at Bertoldi’s Trattoria here in London with my friend Jessie and her mother, and we’d gotten to talking about high school. I’ve written before about having played on my school’s Reach for the Top team, and I was opining at some length about how Alex Trebek was good and all on Jeopardy!—and had hosted the national edition of RFTT for several years—but the best quiz-show host I’d come across was Mark Lade, who’d been the quizmaster for the CFPL-TV version of Reach. (Yeah, I know how to impress the ladies; watch out George Clooney.) As we got up to leave the restaurant, out of the corner of my eye I saw something… no, someone… no… it couldn’t be…. Um, Jess… remember what we were talking about earlier? Look over in the corner… the tall guy in the sport jacket? That’s Mark Lade!
To this day I don’t know how long he’d been there, or if he heard me or not. I hope he did. 🙂
