Wait, isn't that...? Holy cow, it is.

If you live in Southern California, you know it's littered with famous people, their hangers-on, and Hollywood has-beens and wannabes. You can't go anywhere without tripping over one of them.

Okay, that's not exactly true, and you get less of the fame junkies the farther from LA you wander.

But you still bump into someone famous every now and then. For my SIL, who is a children's photographer, this happens a lot because she has celebrity clients. One of them had her photograph their children on a beach in Malibu yesterday, which lead to a funny encounter with Martin Sheen (who I will forever love as Jed Bartlett, long may he reign). My SIL always finds this stuff entertaining, probably because it happens a lot and she's too down to earth to get caught up in any of it, but as her audience, I'm always sort of fascinated. You know, like it's that page of that one magazine where it's all, "Stars: They're just like us" and then you see a celebrity shoving a burger in their face.

Anyway, I thought I'd share my brushes with fame this week. If you live in California, you have two or three or ten of these stories, same as you do earthquake stories. You just keep them in your back pocket and pull them out when a party gets dull.

But I'll start with my credentials first, by laying out my six degrees to Kevin Bacon (remember that game?)*. Anyway, my friend Colleen is best friends with this guy Kyle whose girlfriend was the photographer's assistant at Jennifer Aniston/Brad Pitt's wedding, and Jennifer Aniston was in a movie with Kevin Bacon. So I think that gives me maybe five degrees.

I think this week I'll tell about hanging out in a club with Shaquille O'Neal, waiting in line with David Spade, almost riding in a limo with Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, and my most favorite celebrity encounter of all which I'll reveal when I tell the story (and yes, it's a cool one, not lame like the other ones, which I never said would be cool so just relax because I am the last person in the room to pretend coolness because I'm so totally opposite of cool that you should be embarrassed to even be reading my blog because probably I'll drip nerd juice on you and you'll get infected).

Anyway, you might have seen through this as a thinly veiled attempt to think of something to blog about, and you'd be right, because I have to divert my extra brain power to an editing project for my brother (grr) and so I'm pulling my celebrity stories out of my back pocket to keep this blog party from getting too boring.

And I warn you in advance that my comments on your blogs might lack a little....um...what's that word for when things make sense?

Oh, yeah. Coherence. So you might just want to skip my comment if you see it pop up. (Guaranteed, my brain probably did. Skip my comment, that is.)

*Thanks for the link, Shellie!