…Barbra Streisand asked me to tell her husband she was ready to go.
…I noticed Danny De Vito in my living room, and when I greeted him he said he was looking for the bedroom.
…I spent a night on a bench outside a Canadian bus station.
…I answered my cellphone while shopping at Home Depot and it was Barack Obama calling.
…I parked outside Julia Child’s house in Cambridge and sat for a while. (She was out.)
…I entered the White House, unescorted, through the doors of the north portico, in search of a bathroom. (I found one.)
…I bumped into President George W. Bush. Literally.
…I bumped into Sean Connery. Literally.
…I removed a chunk of the Parthenon and smuggled it out of Greece.
…Bill Clinton had his arms wrapped around my waist while I was standing on a chair, which put his face less than a foot from my private parts, and said, “Well THIS is somethin’ nobody ever accused me of!”
…I fell off a horse. (It was standing still at the time, so maybe points off for that.)
…George Plimpton asked me if I knew where a book store was, and I took him to one.
…I dropped my cellphone out of a helicopter, and somebody found it a week later and sent it to me.
…I went to Merv Griffin’s funeral.
…I ran out of gas on the Sunset Strip, walked to the gas station at the corner of Sunset and Crescent, bought a gas can and some gas, walked back to the car and got going, and an hour later ran out of gas again.
…I flew from Tel Aviv to Amman on King Abdullah’s private Blackhawk helicopter to have lunch at the king’s palace.
…In 1979 I offered a waiter at Caesar’s Palace eighty dollars for a better seat at a Sinatra show, and he said, “That’s not enough.” (The show itself was $35, at midnight* with no food, at the time the most expensive show in Las Vegas. Jerry Lewis, WITH DINNER earlier that evening at the Sahara, was $28.50.)
*The show began** at 12:15am but was referred to as the “midnight show.”
**There was the girl singer Marlene Ricci, then the comic Pat Henry.
…I attended the first-ever Houston Astros game.
…I slept through a play featuring David Suchet. Two, actually.
…I ate a dozen raspberry Zingers, 10 Nestle Crunch bars, a pound of beef and a baked potato in the space of an hour. It was in Wyoming.
…Joe Piscopo disagreed with me when I said Fred Travalena did a good Sinatra impersonation.
…David Beckham gave me a “Sup?” nod.