The Sunday Musician

Through the Big Church job, I met some really great people, like my friend Cort, who wrote music like some people write grocery lists. One year he wrote a one-act piece, a musical drama, which we performed at a thousand-dollars-a-plate fundraiser. A lot of local celebrities were there, and I got to meet one of them.

I needed to say Something Important. That’s what I was thinking as I stood face to face and shook the hand of Suzy Anchorperson, the local newscaster. For 20 years she’d been bringing the news into my life – important stuff, the news. And now I was looking her in the eye, and trying to say Something Important. And I was not up to the task.

Some people seem completely at ease meeting celebrities, and I hate those people. I stumble exquisitely through every near-encounter with anyone bigger than, say, the shoe department manager at Meijer. I saw a picture of myself in the paper once, and couldn’t look in the mirror for a week without blushing.

I have to qualify here – it’s only famous people in the arts and entertainment arena that undo me. Big business people, sports people, I can take ‘em or leave ‘em. I could pick up Mark McGwire or Bill Gates hitch-hiking, and say nothing more than, “I think there’s a phone at the Mobil Station.” Paul McCartney, however, would be different:

Paul: Thanks for the lift.

Me: Ooh-I’ve-been-a-fan-since-I-was-little-I-saw-you-on-Ed-Sullivan-when-I-was-seven-what-was-John-Lennon-really-like-can-you-show-me-how-to-play-Blackbird?-oh-I-forgot-you’re-left-handed…..

Paul: Why don’t you just drop me off at the Mobil station.

This side of me was marching in full parade dress the night I met Suzy Anchorperson, and, I think, for good reason. When someone comes into your home night after night for all of your adult life and tells you Important News Stuff and stares you (and 750,000 other people) in the eye and smiles at you while you lay in bed eating Totino’s pizza and waiting for M*A*S*H to come on after the news– well, you develop a bond with that person. Admittedly it’s a one-way bond, but who else other than your spouse comes as close to tucking you in every night?

This time, however, there were no cameramen in between, and she wasn’t a cloud of electrons being scanned onto a screen. I couldn’t switch to a rerun of Starsky and Hutch while I changed into my bedclothes. She wouldn’t be momentarily cutting to a commercial, or saying, “Back to you, Biff”. It was me and her, her and me, eyeball to eyeball.

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