I think it is a safe and accurate assertion when I write that no one in my family is a cosmopolitan individual. Minx, judge not...and I know, but I also make such claims while sitting in my quadplex in the absolutely armpit of the Midwest between my neighbor the juvenile justice officer who seems to collect delinquents and apparently recently met her 20 year-old rapper boyfriend (his Dodge Neon has spinners!) through her fostered teenage boys and the ladies who evicted the assisted living residents on the other side of me and are now living in their apartment for the same subsidized rent their clients were paying. Way to put your GEDs to good use, gals.
So basically, we done up and caught the redneck, ya'll.
I didn't get to accompany my brother and the parents to Connecticut to drop him off for his freshman year of Yale, but thanks to my generous text messaging and daytime minute plan I got a play-by-play of every single minute. I was in teacher meetings at the time, and I could hear my phone buzzing like a Mexican jumping bean in my purse, so I snuck it out and checked my messages during a particulary scintillating lecture on prose/poetry workshops in the high school classroom (made EVEN BETTER by the fact that most of us were elementary teachers). My family was at a meet and greet for my brother's dorm and they had stood in line for the cocktails next to the Denzel Washingtons, my brother had best befriended the son of the man who wrote "Man of La Mancha" and who subsequently retired in his 5th Avenue apartment to count his millions, and the next day at freshman convocation my mother saw Steven Spielberg take a picture with his son on the quad and washed her hands in the restroom next to Kate Capshaw.
Thrilling events, indeed, and they certainly replaced me and my 1995 backstage encounter with three members of the Monkees (I handed Peter Tork a water bottle...swoon!) in the H. Family Hall of Fame for "Best Celebrity Sighting". Denzel was declared to be even more handsome in person, and Mr. Spielberg had "a great deal of hair." I saved those text messages in my phone, if only to hold on to the feeling of crushing, unadulterated bitterness I felt for my family as I sat with my colleagues and our two inch thick pile of medical forms during our "MetLife and Philly Cheese Steak Luncheon".
Since September, my brother has become fairly blase about celebrity sightings, because apparently Yale just gets 'em by the dozen each week. So this evening, when he spent three hours watching the Cards beat the Mets in NLCS game 7 with his suitemate Tsega and their freshman mentor and his girlfriend Sarah...when my brother told Sarah that there had been a package for Sarah Pettigrew in the mailroom for three weeks and she needed to pick it up...when Sarah told him her name wasn't Sarah Pettigrew, but Sarah Hughes...
...when my brother's brain worked like this over the course of fifteen minutes:
Sarah Hughes.
Sarah Hughes.
Sarah Hughes?
Sarah Hughes.
SARAH HUGHES!
He was just the tiniest bit embarrassed. She was really gracious about it and said that most people were weird to her because of her Olympic fame and he apologized for being awkward in a completely opposite way. Then he called me and I Wikipedia'd her and found out she was a Mets fan, so that was too bad for her and then we cackled a bit about how he had laid on a bed watching TV with an Olympic gold medalist for three hours and didn't know. And then we realized we were both kind of ridiculous.
I'm still proud of touching Peter Tork's water bottle, though.
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