Very Important People

Very Important People

December 03, 2025 at 04:25PM

I have been within potato-throwing distance of two celebrities, both of them named John. (Grisham and Turturro, if you’re wondering.) And I would’ve never. Like most folks, I respect the invisible, inviolable scrim that separates famous people from the rest of us. But boy, did I enjoy this comic essay on celebrity encounters from Mike Nagel, who turns over ideas of privilege and what we think we deserve while he playfully pokes the scrim from his side of things.

My first night in Seattle, I was eating dinner backstage with Adam when a famous rockstar sat down across from us. He’d gotten big a few years ago when one of his songs was in a Mazda commercial. I’d never been this close to a rockstar before, and I didn’t know how I was going to react. So I was surprised to see that I was reacting by fantasizing about throwing my baked potato at his head. This, I’ll admit, was not what I was expecting.

I seemed to be interested in the pure physics of it. That I ⎯ a non-famous person ⎯ could throw a baked potato at this famous person’s head. And that it ⎯ a baked potato ⎯ would hit him in the face. This was all purely theoretical of course. The type of thing that makes sense on paper but doesn’t quite translate into the real world, like quantum mechanics or string theory. I looked down at my baked potato, then back at the rockstar’s head.

Looking back, my reaction might not have been entirely off the map. Later I’d read about a growing trend among concert goers to throw unopened beer cans at lead singers’ heads. It seems we’ve reached the point in our relationship with celebrities where we just want to throw stuff at them. I don’t think we’re mad at them or anything. I think we just want to see what happens. See if, at the right angle and velocity, we can launch an object out of our world and into theirs. Like sending a satellite through a blackhole or petting a squirrel. It just seems worth a try.

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from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/12/03/celebrity-encounters-fame-potato/
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