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2002-03-30 | 12:47 a.m.

Okay, so the whole idea was to finish it on Friday, but I didn't make it. (Had to do some surreptitious shopping while thinking like a bunny.) Maybe next week. Props to Maddy for the inspiration. (Sheesh, can you believe I just said "props"? Don't you hate it when old people try to use slang and they're, like, five years out of date?)

1. If you could eat dinner with and "get to know" one famous person (living or dead), who would you choose? This is hard. How much time do I have to make my decision? Either Shakespeare or Joyce, I think. If I could talk to Shakespeare----whoever really wrote the Shakespeare plays----then I could resolve this whole authorship dispute once and for all, which would be satisfying. Then again, I wouldn't mind meeting Thomas Jefferson. There are tons of people worth meeting but I always worry that I would bore the other person to death.

2. Has the death of a famous person ever had an effect on you? Who was it and how did you feel? Yes. Unfortunately, like Bill Clinton, I feel everybody's pain. Therefore many celebrity deaths have had an effect on me. Well, to be honest, the death of Milton Berle had zero effect on me, but usually I feel sad. Bear in mind, I'm the sort of person who reads (with keen interest) the obituaries of people I don't know, and sometimes I cry over them. So, examples. The two that come to mind most readily are universal enough: Princess Diana and John F. Kennedy, Jr. Even though I had made fun of them over the years, I felt terrible when they died. Of course they were both just a bit older than me, so anytime you freak out over something like that, a lot of that is fear of your own life being cut short. There've been lots of celebrity deaths that freaked me out. Chris Farley died at 33 when I was 33, which was weird. I thought it was terribly sad when Phil Hartman was killed. And Jessica Dubroff, the little girl who was trying to fly across the country.

3. If you could BE a famous person for 24 hours, who would you choose? Probably Noam Chomsky, because I would like to be privy to the way he approaches information, how he remembers various things, collects his thoughts when writing, and so on. Of course, if being him meant merely being me in his body, it wouldn't be an interesting experiment. (I already know how I think, and trying to be me while living his life would be nerve-wracking. I would just have to tell everybody I was sick that day and spend my famous-person day as sick Noam. The only fun part would be rootling through his book collection.) So if that's how it works, it would be more fun to be someone who has interesting experiences, such as...uhhhhhh... maybe Christiane Amanpour or somebody like that. Or the president, if I thought I could make a difference in 24 hours. Where could a person make a difference in 24 hours? Maybe I want to be Bill Gates's father, because he controls the purse strings of the Gates Foundation. Not to say that I think he's doing a lousy job; I really don't know. I suppose the best answer would be to think of the person in whom I might do the most good. Today, for example, if I were feeling very brave, I would choose to be Ariel Sharon.

4. Do people ever tell you that you look like someone famous? Who? When I was very young, a lady told me I looked like Rhonda Fleming, "before the nose job." Rhonda Fleming, for the 99.5 percent of you who don't know, was a minor film star in the 1940s and '50s. And then around the same time in my life, a couple of people told me I looked like Blair from Facts of Life. But if you ask me, I don't look a thing like either one of those people.



5. Have you ever met anyone famous? I've met a few reasonably famous people, mostly writers, but the most excited I've ever been about meeting someone famous was when I met Mario Savio. You may not have heard of him but he was (and still is) a hero of mine. I also met Jessica Mitford and worked for her for a day. That's a story I'll have to tell some time.

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