| I've been flying up to Northern California for short business trips a lot recently. On Wednesday I was up there to check out the new office in Walnut Creek and pick out an apartment.
I was rushing to get back to the airport in time for my flight. I had looked at one too many apartments, I suppose. So I get in line at the gate for the Orange County flight and the crowd looked fairly typical of Orange County. Lots of arrogant business men and trashy girls. There was one girl, sitting alone, reading a book, minding her own business, who definitely stood out. She was blonde and pretty and she had a nice body, but that wasn't so strange. What made her stand out was that she was sitting in one of those terribly uncomfortable airport chairs cross-legged and with the most beautiful posture and poise.
Anyway, I wasn't staring at her or anything, but at one point I felt her look up from her book at me. So I looked over at her and saw the pale skin, the hazel eyes, the unbelievably full lips--her expression did not change during the few seconds that our eyes met--her calm but intensely present gaze practically burned a hole through me--my expression slowly changed from "Hi there" to "Holy shit, you're Scarlett Johansson!"
She calmly directed her attention back to the book she was reading as a thousand and one questions shot through my head. I'd met celebrities in airports before as they pick up their friends and relatives at the gate, a priviledge unavailable to mere mortals. But what was she doing in Oakland? It couldn't be Scarlett Johansson because she gave me a look--a fairly curious and amorous look--and what is she doing in Oakland? She's probably just someone who looks like Scarlett Johansson getting on this plane, right? Wait, but she doesn't have any luggage--just the book she's reading.
My line was starting to move and in my frenzied mental state, I still hadn't proven to myself that it was her (despite the incontrovertible evidence above). So I looked over at her and noticed that along with the black fitted sweats and a casual but fitted t-shirt that showed off her signature Scandinavian assets, she was wearing a very cute, girly watch that was literally covered in diamonds. This was the clincher for me and I started trying to get up the confidence to go say "hi", but the plane was boarding. And besides that, the celebrities I've met in the past were all male--what could I say to a female People's-50-most-beautiful-people kind of star that would even be worth responding to? But I have to feel validated considering that during the whole time I have been standing in this line, she has looked at a total of two things: her book and me.
When I tell this story, I usually preface it with, "Now you don't have to believe me if you don't want to, but..."--but then people are expecting that I got a date with her or something like that. So I took off that part and then people think that this was all a big fantasy.
The truth is that celebrities really are just like us. They're prettier and much luckier, for sure. There are some snobby ones, some dumb ones, some smart ones, some loud ones, some quiet ones, some who like people who are nothing like me and apparently some who like people like me.
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