OK. I have some weird stories that will really tell my age!
My great uncle Joy was in the movie industry. When I say "in it," I mean that he and his son, Joy Jr owned a lot of movie theaters and made some pretty terrible movies! This was from the late 1930s till the 1980s. They lived in New Orleans but of course traveled a lot.
My parents were pretty mortified by a lot of aspects of that business (for instance, mob connections) so unfortunately for me they tried to keep us kids sort of away from our wilder and higher living cousins! But every once in awhile we'd get caught up in some movie making stuff.
In the 1970s my uncles were making one of their usual awful B grade movies, but this one happened to have two pretty good actors in it - Slim Pickens and Jaclyn Smith. This was right before Jacklyn Smith was "discovered," - in fact, she broke her contract with my uncle to pursue her career with Charlie's Angels - a move she probably never regretted! But - long story short - they were on the set up in the Ozark Mountains making a movie one summer and my dad decided to take us up there to watch the movie being made.
It was really cool. Several mornings we had breakfast with the cast and crew. Slim Pickens was very nice and seemed to genuinely like interacting with kids. Jaclyn Smith was very snobbish and standoffish. In fact, she was so cold that us kids were literally scared of her!
Here's the movie:
Bootleggers (1974) - IMDb
It's pretty bad. My uncle did make one decent movie though - Down By Law. Worth watching if you like artsy black and white stuff set in New Orleans. Ellen Barkin and Roberto Benigni (Life is Beautiful) are actually in it!
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Anyway, back to famous people. I kissed Willie Nelson once, right on the lips, at a sold out concert in Columbus, GA back in the 1980s! I snuck up onstage (from the back - it was difficult and involved schmoozing a security guard with my nubile young flirtations!) and just walked across the stage while he was singing "Will the Circle Be Unbroken," and I tapped him on the shoulder and asked him if I could kiss him. This was on a dare - my dad actually is the one who dared me to do it. Anyway, he just dropped his guitar and said, "Why SHORE, Darlin!" and laid one on me! Then the security guards tried to come at me, but he waved them away and winked at me and I just smiled and walked calmly offstage! It was a lot of fun!
The BarKays asked me to go on tour with them, literally to shake a tambourine off to the side (yeah....hmmmm...) but I, um, turned them down. I have a feeling that would have ended badly!
Louis Gohmert (state rep, Texas) gets a lot of flak these days, but I met him at a function one time, and casually mentioned that my husband and I were taking our teenage son to DC on vacation. He got my card, and gave me his, and "my people talked to his people" and he arranged a very nice private tour of several major buildings in Washington - it was a nice thing that he didn't have to do at all. It really made our trip special.
It seems like I've met more famous people than this, but my brain is blank. Honestly, I don't get overly excited about meeting famous people - as my mother always says, "They put their pants on every morning just like the rest of us."
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