List Of Celebrities I Have Seen

One of the things that people tend to ask me about now that I live in LA is what celebrities have I seen? I suppose this is a valid question if the sighting of celebrities is something that interests you. Personally, I prefer hearing/talking about people of interest who are not celebrities (e.g. the homeless guy near the 3rd St. Promenade who had the sign that read, “Family Killed By Ninjas, Need Money For Karate Lessons,” or the obviously somewhat well-off guy in his 40s-50s who stole a book of post it notes from the customer service desk at the Verizon store and stashed them in his man purse while (he thought) no one was looking). Nevertheless, I admit I do enjoy a good celebrity spotting from time to time. So, I have decided to keep track here on my blog and start a…

List Of Celebrities I Have Seen.

In order to do this, we must first establish or rather clarify two things. They are what or perhaps how exactly do we define celebrity, and what counts as “being seen.” The first of these two issues is probably the more difficult and arbitrary. My good friend Wikipedia states:

A celebrity is a person who is widely recognized in a society. The word stems from the Latin celebritas, itself from the adjective celeber meaning ‘famous, celebrated’. Fame is the major prerequisite for celebrity status, but not always sufficient. Indeed, as “infamy” (an equally well-known profile, but as a bad example; the antonym of fame) seems passing out of common English usage, even high-profile criminals may be considered to be famous, but they are not always celebrities, as this rather requires an active presence, at least in the media, while crime usually shuns publicity. Sometimes a game is played of pretending to loathe press attention, in itself only attracting even more, or keep them guessing so the press reports are repeated, according to the show business PR rule ‘the only bad publicity is no publicity’. Traditionally, even high-profile politicians are rarely described as celebrities, but in the era of television, some have had to become de facto celebrities. Today’s celebrities are largely media figures, especially from television and movies.

This all seems very comprehensive, if not entirely clear. So I suppose I must develop a litmus test of sorts, in order to determine who is worthy of inclusion on my list. I suppose the first thing that I will do is to eliminate criminals from consideration on my list (unless said criminals are/were famous for something other than the crime itself. Robert Blake, OJ, Michael Jackson, Phil Spector would therefore all be list eligible, while say Scott Peterson would not. And please let’s not get into a semantic discussion of the word criminal, because then we’ll be here for a while).

Next, as a rule I will state that politicians or news reporters cannot be included on this list, no matter if they would prefer to be celebrities instead of public servants (however, I will make exceptions for someone like Fred Thompson or Arnold or anyone else I might think of who could be just as (if not more) easily recognized for film/television work as he could be for being a former or current politician).
As a rule, I also will not include people whose sole claim to fame is the appearance on a reality-television program. Again, this protects people like the cast of The Surreal Life, while eliminating lots and lots of people who have done absolutely nothing of note other than appear on a reality-television program. This includes but is not limited to anyone from Survivor, Laguna Beach, Real World, Amazing Race, Fear Factor (but not Celebrity Fear Factor), The Bachelor, Meet Your New Mommy, etc. (on a side note let me say that just because any/all of these people will not be included on my celebrity list will not prevent them from receiving mention in other areas of my blog if a sighting of said individuals should occur).

Okay, next people from the sports world…this one’s kind of tricky. I think a legitimate argument could perhaps be made for and against including people from sports in this list, but in the end I’m going to side against. Seeing professional athletes (outside of paying a ticket to attend a ballgame) is definitely something noteworthy, but then we have to start another set of criteria in case I run into someone who may not be as well known say Brad Penny, P LA Dodgers, so there won’t be any debate as to whether or not he deserves inclusion, as opposed to say Kobe Bryant who there would probably be less debate over (although I suppose one might make an argument that given recent events Kobe might require an entirely different set of criteria all together). Either way, no athletes, so now it’s not a problem.

Then we have people in the music world, which is also somewhat of a grey area. Again, given my musical tastes as compared to someone else’s makes determining who is of note and who falls under the category of celebrity difficult to decide. So, I will say this, I will include people from the music world if they meet both of the following criteria 1) I think the majority of people would know/have listened to their music/and or could identify (but not necessarily name) them if they saw them (People like Bono, Eminem, Mick Jagger, and any member of Franz Ferdinand would all qualify) and 2) Were not on American Idol. This second one is again more about my dislike of reality television then it is a slight against any of the past winners from that show who are still selling records (albeit an ever-dwindling number). If say 10 years from now I spot Kelly Clarkson and she’s still successful then we’ll talk about amending the latter part of my music criteria. Generally speaking, I will apply the same criteria for people in films and television as I do for people in music, however I will probably be slightly more lenient for people who work in film and television, as again generally speaking, seeing as how this is LA, these will probably be the people I see the most of. And finally, there are those fringe people, the people who are famous for being famous and nothing else (like Paris Hilton for a while, she would not have gotten on for Simple Life, but her sex tape, House Of Wax, an appearance on the O.C., and upcoming film/TV work does qualify her as (shudder) an actress. Although presumably I would have put her on the list regardless of these other things just because everyone knows who she is, and with the exception of her sex tape aside, hardly anyone has seen her work). So, again fringe people will be dealt with on the same sort of case-by-case basis.

Good, now that we’ve got that settled (anyone in need of clarification feel free to ask, also feel free to submit names for litmus tests), I shall now define what it means to “be seen.” I guess really the simple way to decide what constitutes a celebrity sighting is to say they have to be in the same location as I am and visible with the naked eye. However, I am further limiting the concept of same location to mean within the range of physical contact. So, if I went to a Lakers game and saw Jack on the Jumbotron or even could see his seat from where I was sitting, neither of these would count. But if I went to the concession stand and he was in line getting a few beers and a hot dog, this would. Okay, everyone got it?

Then, without further ado, let me now present to you the (as of today) current

List Of Celebrities I Have Seen (and where I saw them):

1. Richard Kind (at the Italian festival in the Grove, eating a slice of pizza and talking on his cell phone)
2. Paul McCrane (in the lobby at the Arclight Theater, however, I can’t recall what I was there to see)
3. James Van Der Beek (two rows in front of me on my Jetblue flight from Burbank to JFK before Thanksgiving. He spent most of the flight flipping between ESPN classic and VH1)
4. Wayne Knight (in the lobby while I was at the Arclight Theater waiting to see King Kong)
5. Robert Forster (also at the Arclight lobby, after I saw Brokeback Mountain)
6. Adam Brody (about 10 rows behind me at the Arclight seeing Munich)
7. Rachel Bilson (ibid.)
8. Josh Schwartz (ibid.)

There you have it…stay tuned for more updates in the future.