Day Three: Celebrity Rehab

So, I'm at the gym today, on the elliptical, watching The View as is my wont, and they have this guy Drew Pinsky as guest. He's the host of Celebrity Rehab, and they showed pictures of D-list celebs shaking and sweating and vomiting. Lovely. Pinsky himself seems like a pretty bright guy. He said that you have to be in the public eye already to consider having your detox filmed, because you know what it means to show that much. And I nodded, because I totally get that. After all, I've had a few brushes with celebrity myself. Or, should I say, pokes and tickles.

MY LIFE ON THE Z-LIST:

1. Hilary Swank thanked my cousin on TV at both the Golden Globes and the Oscars. (He's a famous agent. And yeah, I know that's not actually me, but I'm related to him, right?)

2. I danced Nia on the NBC morning news. (You can see me doing some fabulous-looking kicks. Afterwards, one of the cameramen said "You looked hot. I'm free for lunch.")

3. I talked about this blog on "These Days" on NPR. (One of the other guests was Dooce, who is uber-famous, so it was like a double-brush.)

4. Lee Ann Kim from Channel 10 interviewed me for the 6:00 news when I was teaching a mini-course on Jewish Humor at a mall. (It's a bit sick, really--they were looking for some "Jewish content" because there had been an anti-Semitic shooting that day. The piece never aired.)

5. A reporter from The Yiddish Forward followed me around all afternoon when I gave a talk at the Catskills Conference. (She even took notes when I unexpectedly had a long-lost reunion with my third cousin, Renee, who lives in that area. The reporter did quote me in the resulting piece.)

6. I was approached by a darling girl after giving a poetry reading for The New Writers Series at UCSD, asking if I would autograph a copy of my book for her. (It was a bittersweet moment, since I don't have a book. She gushed that she especially related to my poem "Why I Am No Longer a Redhead." She was, in fact, a redhead herself.)

7. Once, when I asked for some tickets under my name at Will Call, the ticket gal gasped and said, "Not the Samantha G.????? The POET?" (Really, I have no idea what she was on about, but what could be more delicious?)

8. I received an e-mail from a nice woman in New York who said she had read my dissertation (okay, that in itself is mind-boggling) and wanted to interview me for a documentary she was making. After IMDB-ing her, I discovered she was the director of one of my favorite movies, Crossing Delancey, and has had a long and illustrious career. (We did have an interview, but the film is still "in concept.")

9. I got a call from the editor of the San Diego Jewish Journal, asking if I would consider writing a piece on the novel Marjorie Morningstar for its 50th anniversary. Along with the piece, I would have the opportunity to interview novelist Herman Wouk himself. (I regret that I wasn't able to meet him in person. But we did the interview over e-mail, and his publicist told me he liked my questions. Psych!)

10. When my sister was working at Warner Bros., she and her boss asked me to write a "treatment" for a television pilot. They liked the treatment, and gave me the full-court press to write the script. I will never forget her boss shaking my hand and saying "You're about to make us all a lot of money." Whee! The show was called Temporary Insanity, and followed the wacky adventures of four full-time "temps" in the corporate jungle of Boston. (That pilot is "in turnaround," which is a catchy way of saying someone pitched it in a drawer several years ago, where it will be found someday frozen in amber with a buttercup in its mouth.)