Skinned Knees, a Nude Beach and a Serial Killer

What’s your celebrity story?

You know, the one that comes to mind when you’re chatting with acquaintances, at a meet-and-greet gathering before classes begin or to kill a few minutes waiting for a staff meeting, and someone asks, “Have you ever met anyone famous?”

I don’t have any really good ones, having mostly lived in places where the probability of seeing a celebrity on the street was somewhat lower than the probability of seeing a moose. I did have a few years in Boston, and I’ve traveled a bit, but neither raised my exposure to real-live people from, well, People. I’ve never been trapped in an ATM vestibule with Jill Goodacre, or seen Britney Spears for a mental health crisis assessment (not that I could tell you if I had).

My best story happened more than 20 years ago. I was eight years old, on a day trip to New York City with my parents. We’d gone down as part of a group, a busload of tourists dropped off at some time in the morning and picked up some time later. There wasn’t even a Broadway show involved, just several hours to wander the city. Given our financial circumstances and decidedly unworldly lifestyle, this was a Big Event all by itself.

As the afternoon wore on, we ended up on Park Avenue, outside the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. I was tripping along, several yards ahead of my parents, in that unique combination of exhaustion and spastic energy that children get on vacation. Just as I passed the hotel entrance, a long, black limousine pulled to the curb. The driver scurried around to the back, and opened the door. An elderly woman got out, straightened her fur coat, raised her chin, and walked, quickly and assuredly, toward the lobby. Our paths crossed, quite literally, and we bumped into each other hard enough for me to hit the sidewalk on my hands and knees.

She stopped, shifted her purse to her shoulder, and offered me her hand. In the way of a healthy and somewhat cranky child, I just stood up on my own. My parents stopped, still several yards back, and watched silently. The woman looked at me for a moment, and said, “Are you all right?”

I nodded.

“Well, then,” she said, “Do you want me to sign anything?”

I felt my face rearrange itself into a quizzical, skeptical pinch. “No,” I said. Not rudely or abruptly, just a simple negative response to a question that had baffled me. The woman waited another moment, tilted her head in an almost-shrug, and continued into the building.

The whole interaction took all of ten seconds, at the most. My knees were skinned, but a quick swipe with a Mom-spit-dampened tissue was sufficient first aid. My parents hadn’t said anything during the encounter, itself, but they did stop to take a picture of the limousine’s license plate afterward: it was an old, yellow-and-blue New York plate with the letters “I LUCY” and a heart sticker in between the words. I had just been knocked over by Lucille Ball, and then flatly refused her offer for an autograph.

My second- and third-best celebrity stories are both by-association sorts of things; I never actually laid eyes upon the person in question. In 1998, I was living in Salem, Massachusetts. My mother decided to come out one weekend, and we planned to take the ferry out to Martha’s Vineyard for a day on the beach. She brought a large bottle of wine, lots of sunscreen, and a cooler with snacks. Neither of us brought bathing suits, because somehow it seemed like a good idea for the beach in question to be a nude beach.

I had picked up an extra shift at work the night before, and so had reached something like 30 consecutive hours awake before we arrived at the beach. Between the haze of sleep deprivation and a healthy dose of medicinal wine, not to mention the awkwardness of trying to maintain eye contact and some semblance of poise when a naked man has just stopped me to ask what time it was, the day had a hazy, dreamlike quality to begin with.

The dream took a sharp dive into the bizarre when uniformed police officers and members of the National Guard showed up and started instructing everyone to get dressed and return to the parking area immediately. Debris was washing up onto the beach, they said, and for our safety we needed to evacuate the area promptly. We objected: we could stay away from anything that appeared ashore, and we just wanted to be left alone to enjoy our day. We were filled with righteous anger and resentment, but as has been proven in countless other instances, the right outfit can be the difference between success and failure. It’s just impossible to win an argument when the other person has all the clothes.

So we got dressed, and went back up to the road. We watched as a constant stream of rescue vehicles drove by, and listened to helicopters and Coast Guard cutters cruise along the shoreline. We had to wait for hours - much too long for one bottle of wine to serve as any effective consolation - until the shuttle bus reappeared to take us back to town.

It wasn’t until we got on the shuttle that we heard the first whispers, the early rumors: “plane crash,” “wedding,” “missing,” “Kennedy.” And it wasn’t until we found a bar and grille with a television that we understood the bigger picture: John F. Kennedy, Jr., had been expected on the island that morning with his wife, Caroline, and Caroline’s sister Lauren, but their plane never landed. By mid-afternoon, pieces of luggage and bits of airplane started floating to the beach, though it took another few days before the bulk of the plane, and the victims, were found.

The news reports didn’t mention that it was a nude beach, did they?

And my third-best story? A high school friend, Terry, was born in Chicago and lived there for several years before moving to New York. His older brother loved clowns, and so his parents, through word of mouth, found someone willing to dress in a clown suit to entertain at his birthday party. That someone was John Wayne Gacy. By all accounts, he behaved appropriately and everyone had a great time.

I have a few others, here and there: Gavin DeGraw in the lobby of the Orpheum after a concert, Randy Cross in the dining room of a hotel in Florida, hours in line for a photo op with the Barenaked Ladies. None of them have especially fun anecdotes.

How about you? What’s your celebrity story?