Who's the most famous person you've met?

As mentioned previously on this forum, I went to high school with Anthony Ramos from Hamilton and A Star is Born and those omnipresent beer ads where his mom makes him platanos. Neil deGrasse Tyson said "hi" to me once. Based on my observations he's an extremely nice man who tragically doesn't know when to shut up.

But other than that, bupkis, really. Uh, the theater critic Ben Bradley sat next to me at an off-Broadway show. I've met a bunch of NYC pols for my day job, but none of them are national figures (with the possible exception of Bill de Blasio's son, back when he had the clownishly large fro, who was kind of a douche, or more generously didn't love often-racialized media attention).

I haven't really "met" anyone. I exchanged a few sentences with Patrick Stickles of the not-very-popular rock band Titus Andronicus on a couple occasions.

I did a brief "I love you/your work" thing with the author David Mitchell when he signed my book.

And I've high-fived Regine Chassagne and Richard Reed Parry from Arcade Fire.

I stood outside of a Barnes and Noble in Manhattan where Kurt Vonnegut was doing a reading of his newest book at the time "Timequake" (I think). Went there to get in and listen, but my small town upbringing led me to believe I could show up five minutes before it started and get anywhere near the front door.

I was randomly pulled out of class one day in high school to go over to the Princeton University campus to have a meet-and-greet (along with a few classmates) with former NBA player, then NJ senator, and future failed presidential hopeful Bill Bradley.  He was very tall.  I still don't know why that happened.  My other celebrity encounter was having Geoffrey Holder (the 7Up "uncola" guy, among other things) go past me while I was standing in line outside a NYC theater; he was walking along the sidewalk and chose where I was standing as the break in the line to go through.  So he said "Excuse me," in that uncola voice.  I only recognized him because he'd been on Entertainment Tonight for some reason literally the day before.

Boomer is pathologically shy, but has somehow managed more interesting celebrity meetings.  She once worked the phones for a local Channel 13 fund drive and took a call from Keith Moon.  And because of my dad's connections on Wall Street in the '80s (he did corporate PR), she got to go on the set of Working Girl and meet Harrison Ford.  And at some point during the Obama presidency she participated in a project for the American Needlepoint Guild, re-stitching a needlepoint chair for one of the government residences in DC, and got to meet Michelle Obama.  Apparently Michelle is so charismatic that even someone as reserved and monumentally star-struck as my mother felt compelled to push to the front of the crowd and take a moment to talk gardening with her.

Mine are probably all either musicians/composers or sports stars. Have met the composer Stephen Schwartz (Godspell, Pippin, Wicked). Probably the highest ranking sports person for me would be football player Larry Fitzgerald, but that was nothing more than a brief "hi" at a charity function.

Wifemate and I know the illustrator at the CDC who made the rendering of the coronavirus you see everywhere. They were one year apart in the same undergraduate program at UGA.

Wow, you're a lot older than I thought you were.

My Dad worked as a courier for NBC, back when half the police department was laid off in the '70s, and I met a most of the early cast of SNL and a bunch NBC news people, but didn't really talk with them, or recognize them.

Almost every NYC person went to HS with a famous person, just by virtue of having 4-12,000 students per school.  I met Lucy Liu, although she was a senior when I was a Freshman, and she wasn't famous at the time.  Lucy Deakins was a teen actor in broadway stuff, The Boy Who Could Fly and some John Candy camping movie - she sat next to me in math and we interacted a lot. She also was working on something with John Lithgow and he showed up to our class one day and did a Q&A, but she hasn't done anything since high school.  I think she is some environmental lawyer or something now?  Frank McCourt was one of my English teachers, and people would hang out at his class during free periods, but he wasn't published at the time and we mostly just thought of him as a super entertaining speaker.

I hung out with Isaac Asimov when we were both stuck in a stairwell during a fire alarm at a con where he was the guest of honor.  He was pretty genial, considering it was 2am and we were surrounded by (and may have actually both been) drunken geeks.

I've also met a bunch of musicians of varying levels of fame, and news people, and politicians and Pentagon level military officials by virtue of my job. We hung out in the back stage area and handled media stuff for George Strait, Lt. Dan, ugh... the guy who did Drunk on a Plane (I feel so stupid not remembering his name since this was just last October, so I refuse to google it). I'll probably meet the president during the West Point graduation, but I'd prefer not to.