At 07:42 PM 8/11/2014, you wrote:
Between this and the Tony Stewart situation, my capacity for
wierdness is maxed out.
Re: Robin Williams [with stories all over the place...]
The people I've talked to are all depressed about his death. It
really wasn't anything any of us who know him from his public persona
might have expected.
I shook his hand once, I looked it up in old email cause I didn't
remember when it was exactly, and found a reference to it being in
2005 (June 2005). I'd gone to the Haight Streeet Fair, after too much
sensory input [mostly noise] decided to come back home, which means
going east (I live on Haight and though not far from the hoopala,
about 8 to 10 blocks, I am not in the Haight-Ashbury but the Lower Haight).
Haight Street was hot and crowded, and I guess because I was tired of
humanity I walked over a block north to Page Street to come back
home. I wasn't paying a lot of attention, thinking about the fair,
probably, then looked up after a bit, and about 10 steps in front of
me were Robin Williams, his wife (then), and two kids. I'm not one to
be immensely impressed simply by celebrity but it was damned
startling to have someone whom you've seen in image form so
frequently right in front of you. I guess they were going to stroll
to the fair, but I can't imagine that he would have done that with
the thousands in the streets, it just couldn't have been very safe.
My first thought on seeing him was, "He is really short."
Evidently I looked pretty startled, so he smiled and said something.
I said something back, no doubt sounding stupid, and asked if I could
take his picture. He said sure I could as long as I didn't take it of
his wife and kids.
About then I realized I wasn't acting in a way I felt was
commendable, so I retired from being paparazzi. He said, "That's
cool, man," and shook my hand. They wandered on.
It was pretty surreal
I've met several others who've had the mixed blessing of fame, but
the only other time I remember being similarly startled to the point
of not really knowing what to say was once at a job in the 1980s when
Paul Petersen (from the Donna Reed show of my youth) called my boss
and I answered the phone. That's not even close to being a meeting.
One other local story I know about Robin Williams I heard about a
year ago. I was getting off my butt and roaming around town taking
pictures of the locations in SF that were in the movie "Vertigo,"
ostensibly to compare the 1958 city to the 2013 one. [If you can't
guess, it's changed.]
In "Vertigo" there was a scene in a bookstore (the Argossy) that
Barbara Bel Geddes & Jimmy Stewart visited to get information on the
historical Carlotta character [Kim Novak], whose tombstone was in the
Mission cemetery.
The bookstore they went to was based on an actual one in town (the
Argonaut) that Hitchcock frequented when he was in Northern
California (high end, first-editions, etc.). The bookstore never was
at the location where it appeared in the film (on Powell Street where
the cable cars travel by in front), though it was downtown. It's
moved since the 1950s, too, and is run by the original owner's son.
I went in the store last year and when Bob (the owner, don't know his
last name) came over and asked "May I help you?" I quoted Jimmy
Stewart, not even attempting to imitate his voice, "What can you tell
me about Carlotta Valdes?" A big smile came over his face and we
talked about a half an hour. Hitchcock used to come to dinner at his
parents' home, as he'd befriended Bob's father. Bob said Robin
Williams and his wife also had been in recently; she got a first
edition of Moby Dick, I forget what he got, but they left after
paying a fairly tidy tab.
Some humanity in the face of the sensational...
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