Arts
October 22
When I was a kid, I was introduced to more than my share of celebrities, mostly musicians, because of my dad's job. This was around the same time I was going through puberty, and the cold-water shock of seeing famous people combined with a host of teenage insecurities taught me an important lesson: never act like a fan.
At some point, somebody told me that celebrities hear the same stuff from their fans all the time, so impassioned devotion doesn't really affect them. I never expected them to give me a second thought anyway. Besides, most of my celebrity run-ins were during backstage meet-and-greets or radio appearances. That's work for those people. I'll never forget being backstage at the China Club in New York City, watching the guitarist from Matchbox Twenty solemnly listen to his iPod, and thinking (years before Star Magazine did), "Wow, he's just like me."
So I learned quickly to play it cool, blasé, aloof. I complained to my dad about being forced to attend these events, awkwardly posing for pictures that I still cringe at today. I would never, ever beg for an autograph. For me, the souvenir — the reward — isn't some material token of proof. It's the opportunity to see famous people in their natural habitats, to observe them when they're not looking.
If that sounds creepy, that's because it probably is. But I think of it as a kind of cultural anthropology.
My internship on "How I Met Your Mother" posed an interesting problem for me. The show is probably my favorite right now. I've seen many episodes multiple times, and I infected (approximately) dozens of my friends with "HIMYM" fever. We've even stolen elements from the show for our own lives; I've served as Slap Bet Commissioner twice, and on my birthday this year, we held an "intervention" for my friend who unnecessarily combines words.
When I told Craig Thomas, one of the show's creators, that I was responsible for "half of Tufts" becoming fans of "HIMYM," he acknowledged my hyperbole but genuinely thanked me as if he didn't really believe people would watch the show on their own. But I would never tell him the stories of the intervention or the slap bets, because that "be cool" lesson is still ingrained in me so deeply. I think revealing the depth of my fandom would make me vulnerable, and in my most insecure moments, I fear that it would discredit me.
So I bit my tongue when three of the writers had a debate on set about their show's most ridiculous episode. (My vote is for the sublime "The Bracket.") I showed one of the production assistants a "Let's Go to the Mall" T-shirt available online and failed to mention that I own one. I managed to teach writer Kourtney Kang how to use Twitter without squealing that her "Slap Bet" is my all-time favorite episode.
The actors are the hardest. Admittedly, I have much less direct interaction with the cast than I do with the production staff and writers. But on my first day on set, as Jason Segel retreated to the couch in Ted's apartment to noodle around on his ukulele, I flashed back to that Matchbox Twenty concert, except this experience was exponentially more intense.
The weekend prior, I somehow thought it would be a good idea to marathon episodes of the late, lamented "Freaks & Geeks," starring an embryonic Segel as sensitive stoner Nick Andopolis. And I thought I was screwing myself over, that I would only see the real Segel as Nick or Marshall, his "HIMYM" character — but I was wrong. He wasn't either of them; he was Jason, and he was a real dude. We actually had a conversation about sandwiches.
The same goes for Neil Patrick Harris, whom I now mentally refer to as Neil, if only to differentiate him from his mythical persona, "NPH." Neil seems like a normal, if somewhat intense, guy who vaguely knows who I am and who once jumped into a conversation I was having about a plot point during a shoot. And then there's Alyson Hannigan, who I literally studied in my freshman explorations class, which was centered on "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," but here she's just Aly, and she's constantly running out to visit her baby in the makeshift nursery.
The lesson I learned as a pre-teen from the Matchbox Twenty guitarist was that celebrities are really just normal people. The lesson I'm learning now is that real people are celebrities. Maybe it's this particular cast, or maybe it's just because I'm a huge fan, but I find myself mentally separating them from their personae, if not just for my own frenzied state of mind.
I'm constantly convincing myself that the office is boring, that my tasks are mundane, that this is just my day-to-day life. Seeing the cast with their guard down helps me there; not even NPH is glamorous on set. He's actually pretty boring, since he's adopted Ted's desk as his own in order to spend his downtime answering emails on his laptop.
When they're performing, I usually watch on the monitors with the director, and it's almost like watching them on TV. When Josh Radnor (Ted) or Chuck Tatham (the writer of this week's "Duel Citizenship") greets me by name, it's almost like they're my coworkers. And as long as they don't know how I think of them — as people who give me joy in weekly doses of 22 minutes — they don't have to think of me as just another fan.
Even if they'd be right.
