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godvlsBack in the summer of '79 I attended an orientation for prospective fall enrollees at Arizona State. My roommate in the dorm they put us up in was a kid named Mike Donahue. As we got to talking it became apparent that his family had a good deal of money. Somewhere along the way I asked Mike what his dad did for a living.....he pointed to the closet and asked me to check his luggage. I pulled out his luggage and read the bagtag which read 'Phil Donahue'. "Your dad's not THE Phil Donahue, is he???", said I. "Yes he is and he'd coming to see the campus tomorrow". Sure enough, the next morning there was a knock on the door and Phil Donahue is standing in the doorway.
Living all my life in L.A. (with the exception of three years at ASU) I have run into a few celebrities. I chased Dusty Baker around a small market when I was in high school, ran into Wilt Chamberlin at Westward Ho market in Sherman Oaks, sat next to Pamela Anderson at a sushi bar, sat next to Kim Basinger at a sushi bar (twice), stood near the guy from Dashboard Confessional at the House of Blues, ran into Gilda Radner and Lorraine Newman at a Squeeze show in '81......there were other sightings over the years, but none of them meant a whole lot to me with the exception of the night I sat right across the aisle from ELVIS COSTELLO at a Squeeze concert at the Greek Theatre. It was 1986 and he'd just grown a beard and no one seemed to recognize him. He was sitting with his (then) new girlfriend Cait O'Riordan of the Pogues and Eddie Munoz of the Plimsouls. After the show I tried to work up the nerve to talk to him as I followed him until he disappeared through a well-guarded door which I imagined led to some fabulous party.