To be absolutely honest, none. None, but the fleeting if dubious thrill of vicarious voyeurism, that odd but distinct sensation of somehow being enlarged by your proximity to someone famous – and never mind if he or she is across the room or on a stage a hundred yards away; the important thing is, you’re breathing the same air, sharing the same roof, and for that one moment subject to the same cosmic forces. (That could mean, in the worst case, that you could die in the best of company, a prospect that struck me once when I boarded a tiny plane in Marinduque only to find the illustrious writer James Hamilton-Paterson in one of the seats. "Durnit," I thought, "if this plane crashes I won’t even get top billing!")
Last week, I mentioned watching a Bulls-Bucks game circa 1990, skipping my graduate class in Shakespeare to witness Michael Jordan gut the Bucks with a last-second three-pointer. It reminded me that one of the most popular threads in a techie forum I inhabit is devoted to "Famous people I’ve met (or kinda met"); it’s an off-topic thread, of course, a diversion from the usual rants and raves over core-duo processors and backlit keyboards. One particularly well-positioned member could list, among others, Colin Powell, Margaret Thatcher, Pope John Paul II, Kalapana, Claire Marlowe, Jim Chapell, Kenny G., Janet Jackson, Frank Sinatra, Phil Collins, Jose Carreras, Yanni, Barry Manilow, Gloria Estefan & the Miami Sound Machine, Ricky Martin, 98 Degrees, The Corrs, Gene Hackman, Natalie Portman, and Jon Bon Jovi. Another member ran into Mike Tyson in the elevator; more pleasantly, yet another encountered Viva Hot Babe Jen Rosendahl in Boracay. And so on. You get the idea.
In this celebrity-infested world where nearly everything’s just a plane ticket away (of course, you may have to sell the family farm for that ticket), it’s become almost impossible not to bump into some superstar or other. You could even be avoiding or ignoring them, and then they bump into you. My favorite story of a celebrity encounter – which I’ve told so often in this corner that there ought to be a plaque for it somewhere – has to do with my poet-friend Fidel Rillo who was collecting kanin-baboy as a nine-year-old at the Rizal Coliseum in 1964 when he strayed into a room and met one-fourth of a visiting foursome: John Lennon. ("The room stank," Fidel remembers; I believe him; kanin-baboy guys should know.)
Having survived for more than half a century now, methinks I’ve earned the right to rattle off some names of people who, if they’d only looked in the right direction and were blessed with divinatory powers, could have told their grandchildren that they’d met the future Pinoy Penman, self-described in his blog as "a Filipino collector of old fountain pens, disused PowerBooks, ’50s Bulovas, and desktop lint."
For example, if Nat King Cole, Harry Belafonte, and Herman’s Hermits had looked up to the bleachers of the Araneta Coliseum in the mid-1960s, they might’ve seen me; I certainly saw them – tiny moving dots on a distant stage, perhaps, given that general admission was all my folks could afford, but hey, I saw them.
"Seeing" famous people, especially for the richer and older among us, could just be another way of boasting about where we’ve been; in a sense, to see is to be, to matter in the great scheme of things. Celebrities matter, but only (we think) because we patronize them, and as patrons can feel entitled to meet the patronized. We hope to achieve some osmotic effect, a sudden sense of community or even oneness with the brilliant and the beautiful.
The easiest way of doing this is to buy a ticket to the show – and maybe, with enough clout, to go backstage. But it’s not as much fun as just stepping into Starbucks for a quick café mocha and falling in line behind Julia Roberts (as if she would).
My most memorable encounter of this casual sort happened not where the coffee’s made but, uhm, where it goes – in the men’s restroom of UP’s Faculty Center, arguably the last place on earth to meet the man who played the darkly dashing Mordred in Camelot and the hero or anti-hero of the ‘60s cult films Blow-Up and Barbarella. The daytime scene goes: I’m in my cubicle doing my thing, and in comes this big, fat, blond guy looking like he hasn’t slept for three days; he takes the other cubicle and does his thing. We don’t look (a big no-no). But when I step out after him, there’s a friend waiting outside, a theater director who whispers to me, "That’s David Hemmings!" Oh, I say, remembering the name instantly, but unable to match the tired and pudgy face with the screen idol (who, sadly, died three years ago at 62, on the set of a movie).
I work in media, politics, and entertainment, so I keep meeting famous people, feeling like Forrest Gump, trying to look composed and focused but actually a dizzy fan-boy half the time and a snickering cynic the other. Guess which one I was in this next episode? How many men can say they spent two uninterrupted hours with Ara Mina? Well, I did. Unfortunately, it was all talk and no action; I was interviewing her across a table for her life story, doing my professional best to keep my eyes at, well, eye-level. It was a great interview; I took notes; but I hardly remember anything.
I’ve met boatloads of politicians (and sometimes you just wish the boat would sink), but some encounters stick in my mind more than others: Ferdinand Marcos as our graduation guest in grade school; Imelda Marcos in front of a mountain of "nutribuns" in 1972, when I interviewed her as a rookie reporter for the Herald.
One of the best interviews I ever had was with "Globe Trekker" Ian Wright, not only because The STAR sent me to Singapore to get it, but because he proved as much a performer in private as he is in public. On another assignment, to Macworld in San Francisco, I got within 10 feet of Steve Jobs – who walks around with a 10-foot cordon sanitaire, so that was that.
As a creative writer and teacher, I’ve had more than my fair share of meetings with the literate and famous. My fiction teacher in Michigan, Nick Delbanco, was the literary executor of John Gardner, and even better, the ex-boyfriend of Carly Simon; my other fiction teacher, Charles Baxter, went on to gain more fame than all of us put together. Thanks to the resources and the good sense of American universities – who invite writers and artists instead of politicians to speak to their students – I had a chance to meet and even talk to, among others, Raymond Carver (big guy with a Marine crewcut, but gentle and soft-spoken); Joyce Carol Oates (sharp and skinny like Olive Oyl); Joseph Heller (now where’s that copy of Catch-22 I had him sign?); Marge Piercy; Margaret Drabble; and Wallace Stegner (old, very old).
Because I was either too cheap or too broke to pay the price of admission, I missed out on listening to Kurt Vonnegut in Ann Arbor, and Yevgeny Yevtushenko in Milwaukee. I did meet one Nobel Prize winner in literature: the poet Derek Walcott, who seemed interested only in what goes with wine and song.
In England, I met Frank McCourt (funny and polite, making of Beng an instant fan), Kazuo Ishiguro ("It was a good year," he said when I told him we were both born in 1954), Malcolm Bradbury, Alan Ayckbourn, and Hanif Kureishi (also born 1954, so maybe it truly was a good year), among others.
If we count what we’ll call the wave-by’s, then I’ll count Pope Paul VI (in a papal limousine around the Elliptical Road) and Bill Clinton (in shades, at the American Cemetery) among two of my most famous sightings. They were eclipsed, however, by Nelson Mandela, who spoke to a crowd I joined at the 2002 World Summit in Johannesburg, requesting only that no flash bulbs be used, to protect his eyes (and guess what: some flashbulbs popped above the audience, anyway).
The late NVM Gonzalez had a picture taken of him as a small young man with Ernest Hemingway. Greg Brillantes had a picture taken of him as a lanky young man with John Updike. I’ve had pictures taken of me as an oafish fan with Mr. Gonzalez and Mr. Brillantes. If osmosis works, then I’m headed for the big time.