Fortunately, on that warm fall evening in 1992, Dustin Hoffman did indeed smile, and with great sincerity and warmth, as he walked into the site of that year’s MTV Music Awards. What Mrs. Robinson’s boy toy was doing at the MTV Music Awards I have no idea, as I don’t think he has shown any musical inclination since playing that rock star in “Who is Harry Kellerman, and Why is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me?” The one thing I do know is that Joe Buck’s boy toy is not only the highest caliber celebrity I have ever been in thecompany of, but one of the very few I’ve seen in the flesh in my forty-plus years on this planet.

Yup. Despite having traveled the world since I, Film Fanatic At Large John Ervin, was four years of age, and spending the last twenty years pursuing a career as an actor, writer, director or some other species of performance artist, my sightings of greatness - outside of prearranged concerts and public appearances, of course - have been few and far between. Aside from the fact that I’ve never gotten around to attending the Sundance Film Festival, I have no idea why these encounters have been so rare. After all, nearly everyone else I’ve known, inside and outside the arts world, has had the good fortune to meet, work with and, on occasion, copulate with a member of the Show Biz Elite.

This goes back to the days when I attended grade and high school at Saint Paul Academy. Being one of Minnesota ’s most elite preppie factories, many of the more well connected brats could boast not only handshakes with the greats, but even blood relatives from the big, and especially the little, screen. And the range of reactions these privileged little shits exhibited varied from the disinterest expressed by the stoner whose aunt happened to be TV movie goddess Jane Seymour, to the lack of enthusiasm one penny-loafer wearing snot had toward his uncle being none other than “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.” At least, my former neighbor Chris Solberg appeared to enjoy his one line in that ABC Movie of the Week, "Intertect", starring his father, David Soul (formerly David Solberg), soon to be known to the world as Hutch.

Or is that Starsky?

Anyhow, as for myself, it wasn’t until my cousin, Kirk Adams, married the daughter of former Governor of Texas Ann Richards that I could boast a more impressive family connection. This is despite the fact that I’ve never met Ann Richards and I haven’t seen my cousin since The Johnson Administration (though this family connection does give me one more reason to hate George W. Bush, who, of course, became Governor of the Lone Star State thanks to his architecht, Karl Rove's, characteristically unregenerate smear campaign against my ... Aunt-in-Law?).

It was some consolation when my sixth grade teacher let her Hollywood screenwriter son, Mark Frost - who would later go on to produce and write for “Hill Street Blues” and “Twin Peaks” (and whose sister, Lindsay, would one day be a TV movie goddess, herself) - treat my home room class to stories about Tinsel Town. At that time, in 1977, Frost’s only

Now, I have to admit, even by that point in my life, I already had two brushes with celebrity skin, and they were worth well more than four bits. The first was in the men’s room of the Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport, where I had the honor of urinating alongside Senator George McGovern. Though at the age of nine I was still a political ignoramus, I very much recognized this man from TV coverage of his unsuccessful run for the Presidency against Lyndon Johnson’s brooding successor two years before. It would, of course, have been an honor to shake this great man’s hand, but not only was McGovern busy talking to an aide at another urinal, his hands were occupied with his own “Johnson.”

“Pissing” would factor into my encounter with my next legend, though it was not of the kind George and I partook in. In the summer of 1976, my parents, my brother, Alec, and I were walking along the banks of the Seine River in Paris (yeah, I was another privileged little brat). Suddenly, out of the shadows emerged a tall, scrawny, sixty-something man, wearing a wrinkled, stained, button-down shirt and pants, and sporting a Captain-Ahab length beard. As we looked at him in mild surprise, he bellowed in a booming, rapid fire voice, “Hi! I’m Sterling!”

Considering that this bedraggled geezer was clearly, as the Brits say, “pissed” on more than a few jugs of rum, I wouldn’t have blamed my folks for shooing him away. But seeing as this guy was only interested in relating his adventures on the boat that was moored several yards hence, they indulged him in a chat. The exact details of their conversation I don’t recall, as I was in a heated discussion with my brother about which of us was the rightful owner of that “Jigsaw” 45 back home. This argument was moving on to both “Disco Tex and the Sex-o-Lets” discs when my parents told the stranger that we were running late for a restaurant reservation. Gesturing at his craft, Sterling bellowed, “Well, when you’re done, come back to my boat and we’ll have a drink!”

The old man then staggered off in search of more belly warmers, while we moved on to the restaurant. As we did, my mother said to my father, “You know who that was, don’t you?”

“No. Who?”

“Sterling Hayden!”

resume for many years. As for that after-dinner drink on the boat, my parents decided against it, as they didn’t want to risk treating their sons to the sight of a drunken old screen legend brooding about how Hollywood screwed him over.

Damn, I wished my folks had taken him up on that drink!

In any case, following this most distinctive encounter with film history in the flesh, I had to content myself with listening to others’ shoulder rubbings with gods both small and large. Frankly, the most memorable of these star-gazing incidents had nothing to do with fleshy, overpaid ones but with those that twinkle in the dead of night.

Achmed Kaseem, a deadly serious Pakistani man I met in my freshman year at Ripon College in Ripon, Wisconsin, had a peculiar but harmless past time of gazing at stars from various parts of the campus. Being a science major, he was as fond of this practice as he was of watching pornographic movies at the dwindling number of X-rated palaces in his home town of Kalamazoo, Michigan. A particular favorite among the latter constellation - and a title which he would utter with all the seriousness of a prophet - was a sixty-minute opus titled “Bubblegum.”

As for Achmed’s more innocent pursuit, he always did this on his own, never inviting me, his roommate, Hal, or any of his science-nerd friends to come along. One night, Hal came to my dorm room to report that his astrologist had gone out for a star trek several hours earlier, and never returned. Since Achmed did not drink, or pursue women made of flesh and bone, we figured he had either gotten into a deep conversation with one or more scientists, or he actually managed to find a red light district tucked away somewhere in Ripon.

It turns out the latter option came closer to what happened. Evidently, Dr. Kaseem had been watching stars in the courtyard of an apartment building, when a flashlight shined on his face and a voice shot out, “Put your hands on top of your head!” The next thing Achmed knew, he was spending the night at the Ripon jail, all thanks to a woman in the apartment complex who called the police about a Peeping Tom in the courtyard. Fortunately, Achmed only had to spend one night in the slammer - and alone - before being released to the warmth and security of his dorm room, which, from that point on, he stayed put in after dark.

However, Achmed’s troubles weren’t over, as he still had to appear before a judge. Despite the defendant’s pleas of innocence - including his testimony that what he held

in his hand when he was arrested was a rolled up astrological map, and not something else - the judge sentenced him to a year’s worth of therapy by a psychiatrist in the nearby town of Appleton. As the months went by and Kaseem continued to express obsessions with porn and all things “Bubblegum”, Hal and I realized that the good women of Ripon probably were the unwitting specimens of this determined young scientist. And, as Hal once said to me, “You know, in all the times he went out to look at stars, I don’t think I ever saw him leave the room with a map.”

As for stars of a more earthly variety it would not be until the year that Sterling Hayden boarded that sailboat in the sky before I would get another whiff of the soon-to-be rich and famous. In this case, it was the members of Soul Asylum, a band that briefly hit the international scene in 1992 with the hits “Runaway Train” and “Somebody to Shove”, a piece of good fortune which resulted not only in their playing at Bill Clinton’s inauguration, but also in lead singer Dave Pirner‘s shacking up with Oscar-nominated shoplifter, Winona Ryder.

At the time that I met them, in the summer of 1986, Soul Asylum was beginning to make waves in the lower echelons of rock stardom, in their home town of Minneapolis as well as in New York, LA and San Francisco. I had also become connected to them tenuously through two people near and dear to them. A peaches-and-creamed complexioned cup cake whom I pursued romantically earlier that year had made my pursuit a vain one thanks to her shacking up with guitarist Dan Murphy. I had also come to know one band member’s younger - and heftier - brother. The Brother, whom I met thanks to his shacking up with two friends of mine, was an occasionally funny, but generally obnoxious, jerk who thought the only bands that “fuckin’ mattered” were The Cure and his sibling’s outfit.

Thanks to The Brother’s musical snobbery, and my loss of a cup cake to the band’s guitarist, I have to admit I did not approach the one and only Asylum concert I ever attended - at a tiny, suffocating firetrap called Seventh Street Entry - with an open mind. Nor did I possess a sunnier attitude when I visited a party the band hosted a couple of months later at the home of one of its members. When The Brother, who was our “liaison” to this VIP event, introduced his roommates, my roommate and myself to Dave, Dan, drummer Grant Young and bassist Karl Mueller, we were greeted with identical smirks and chuckles by each luminary, before they shuffled on to more appealing groups of attendees.

The reason we were branded with second class citizenship was due entirely to the fluffy hair-do’s, twee pants and quasi-“alligator” shirts we wore, which contrasted sharply with the scraggly hair, faded plaid, ragged Tee and unwashed jean of everyone else - a look that would one day be known to Mr. Blackwell and the rest of the world as “grunge.” Consequently, I have maintained a loathing of Soul Asylum, and their more celebrated counterparts in Seattle and the rest of the “alt-rock” world, that goes well beyond their lack of musicality.

More agreeable were my next two swims in the pool of greatness, and, as it happens, would be the last ones I would have before being warmed by Dustin Hoffman’s big grin. In early 1990, the teacher of a screenwriting class I took at San Francisco State University treated us to several appearances by her good friend, movie director Fielder Cook.

Faster than you can say “Who in blue fuck is Fielder Cook?” I will have you know that this man directed not only Robin Williams in “Seize the Day” - admittedly, his least known film, unless you get it confused with “Dead Poets Society” - but also David Niven and Deborah Kerr in “Prudence and the Pill” - admittedly, one of the biggest bombs of 1967 - and Blythe Danner and Michael Moriarty in “No Turning Back” - admittedly, broadcast on PBS. In any case, Cook would listen to excerpts from scripts I and my classmates were writing for the class, and then provide vague, generally dismissive appraisals in his soft, South’un, “lemonade ‘n sassafras” voice. At least this high-handed piece of Key Lime pie did show some charm and self-effacement when somebody asked him what films he directed, and he replied, “Honnuh, you don’ wanna know.”

That same year, I attended what I can safely say was one of the strangest conferences ever held in this brain wave. Entitled “Psychedelics in the 1990’s”, and given at the ballroom of a hotel near the Berkeley College campus, the forum featured a panel of mind-alteration gurus discussing the ways in which acid, magic mushrooms and other psychedelic drugs could affect and shape events in the coming decade. I was standing in the lobby just outside of the ballroom, chatting with a couple of other “heads”, when a trim, well-dressed, twinkly-eyed man of seventy sauntered up to us. With a gesture of his thumb behind him, this sprightly old fellow said, “Boys, if ever you should be in the mood to visit a hotel bar, don’t try the one here!”

Though this sudden appearance by Timothy Leary might not count as an “accidental” star encounter, since he was one of the speakers on the panel, I certainly did not

Twenty minutes later, Dr. Tim was only slightly more coherent as he told the thousand-strong crowd assembled his estimation of the fall of Communism, the rise of computers and, of course, humankind’s eternal need for chemicals. The only downside to the evening was the gas problem exhibited by the fifty-ish professor seated next to me. As Leary, Ram Dass, Andrew Weil and Aldous Huxley’s widow took turns pontificating, a loud blast of gaseous horns would be sounded every so often by my poor neighbor. Politeness, and the fact that every seat in the room was filled, kept me from getting up and finding another chair. Besides, it would have been hypocritical for me to move, as I, myself, have been afflicted with “The Flatulence Follies” on more than one public occasion. Still, it’s too bad that the one chance I had to see the heavyweight champions of consciousness expansion was so thoroughly distracted by a series of common, every day farts.

Hm, come to think of it, now I know why Dustin was smiling.