Name Dropping
Still bored, still wasting time at the keyboard here. From the other room comes peals of children’s laughter — Zoe is having a sleepover with two kids from school. So I’ll write about the kids … sort of.
Zoe attends a private school that’s popular in the entertainment community. Lots of celeb’s kids are there, so we rub elbows with Hollywood’s movers and shakers at school functions. It’s a little weird sometimes, straddling the divide between their world and mine, between having to budget your vacation days from your job to cover the school holidays versus jetting off to Paris at a moment’s notice and letting the nanny take care of the kids while you’re gone. But they’re just normal people, people just like us … but with a fuck of a lot more money.
Without naming names for the Google spiderbots and thus violating these folks’ privacy, here’s a rundown of some of the folks we bump into from to time.
For tonight’s guests, one’s mother was the subject of a hit song by the 80’s band Toto, and the other’s father is a member of a popular vocal jazz group named for a New York City borough “X-fer.”
Last year I was looking forward to this. It didn’t happen — last year. This year? Oh yeah. I want to invite mom over for a sleepover.
Parents of former classmates who’ve moved on to other schools include two producers of an NBC sitcom featuring a gay lawyer and his female best friend, an actor famous for a role as a ticket scalper in a 1982 “fast” movie about the “times” at a California high school (he’s a really great guy, I like him a lot), and a singer whose first name is also that of a department store and whose last name is a neutral color.
In the schoolyard and at school events we frequently see:
- A prominent actor who was in two movies about talking gorillas
- An actor most famous for three recent science fiction movies about a computer generated world (his godchild is here tonight, Beth tells me)
- An actor who’s not a very “old man” who recently appeared in a “serious, black” role in two Harry Potter movies
- A “Monkish” fellow and his actress wife who once nearly had her “body snatched.”
- One of Charlie’s original angels — the smart one
- A prominent actor who played a Don in three Mafia movies and a Cuban drug lord with a scar on his face in the 80’s
- The founder of a musical duo named for “crying” for “what scares you” that just reunited and me and Beth are seeing them in concert next month
- The object of Gib’s (and my) fantasies and the namesake of one of my all-time favorite movies The Sure Thing
- A pretty lifeguard from a TV show where they “watched” the “bay,” who was also once the TV “charge” of a guy named “Charles”
- An “always-lazy” member of Monty Python’s Flying Circus (I was a major geekboy the day I met him, let me tell you)
- The T-1000 Terminator from T2.
- …and numerous other behind-the-scenes entertainment industry players whose names I recognize from the trades but I don’t know their faces.
Good lord, I’m an idiot. I’ve been trying to be all coy as I write this and not use their names or even link directly to them on IMDB because I didn’t want their names to even appear in the HTML link code … and I just realized IMDB doesn’t use names in the link; it’s an internal numerical code. I could have just linked straight to most of these people without being all disingenuous talking about “a movie with talking gorillas” and all.
Okay, fine. I’ve gone back and stuck in all the direct links I could have done in the first place. But you know what? I spent so much time and meager brainpower being all clever about dropping their names without actually dropping their names that I’m going to leave all that cleverness in there, even though it’s no longer necessary — and not all that clever. Feh.
What a tool. A name dropping tool.
