Brush with Beauty…Letterman Style

Never in human history has someone more furiously resisted the urge to fart.

 

She was great in “6.”

 

My wife and I were in Cleveland during the Eastern Conference Finals during the LeBron era, walking to dinner. We went past the building where all the athletes live. There is a pack of incredibly attractive women in dresses standing in front of the building. I have no idea what the strategy was, but they had one. Women who just don’t show up on street corners in Ohio. From a distance, I’m wearing some loud douchey shirt that a 28-year old douchey Hermes would wear and my wife was wearing roughly what a personal assistant would be wearing. So from a city block away…maybe Johnny Manziel is walking this way. As we near the building, women start “posing.” As we get closer and it’s clear I am a regular five-digit earning loser, one of them starts to turn away and says “I thought he was somebody.”
Right in front of me.

It’s the single loudest laugh I’ve ever heard my wife produce.

It’s all been downhill from there, ego-wise.

 

When I was a first year law student, I did work for my brother’s boss, who was a quasi celebrity divorce lawyer who worked from/owned a townhouse in Manhattan. Elle Macpherson was going through a breakup/divorce and was staying with him for a couple of months. So when I would come to the office, she would sometimes just be hanging around. Super nice and effortlessly gorgeous.

 

Went to HS with Sports Illustrated swimsuit model Angie Everhart and TV/Movie star Melina Kanakaredes (Stela Bonasera on CSI NY). Both have aged very well. Melina is incredibly talented. Angie, who did not look like a future supermodel during high school, continues to get roles in minor productions despite underwhelming talent.

 

I was struck by the thunderbolt four times in my life. Two were celebrities.

Late 1980s at the Capital Centre. Went up the portal toward my seat at a Georgetown game, and came face-to-face with Lesley Visser. She left me speechless. (This was before her unfortunate fall.)

The second was at Penn State's Bryce Jordan Center before a women's game as I watched Carolyn Peck climb up the row adjacent to me. "Statuesque" did not do her justice.

A third was high school classmate Jill Horneys, who would go on to become Mrs. Kentucky and then married Kentucky governor John Y. Brown for a while. That settled into a nice friendship, though.

 

If neither of them was homecoming queen, you had one heck of a high school.

 

I went to college with a woman who I thought was drop-dead beautiful, and (unbeknownst to her) I would pretend to pass out when I saw her. We even had a syndrome named in her honor. Later in life, I discover she's now married to a former head of the CIA. Needless to say, when I've seen her at subsequent alumni functions no such nonsense happens anymore.

 

Spring of '82 or '83, Lesley knew somebody in the Dodgers media corps and came to spend a few days in Vero Beach. She played in our afternoon basketball games. It was easy to be distracted when you're guarding her (your frontside on her backside). She played in college and might have been the best player in our games. She took a lot of guff from the print guys for moving from newspapers to TV sideline reporter. She was embarrassed but said she had to do it to further her career. Most of us were stunned when she married ugly old boring Dick Stockton.

 

Pretty sure neither was. Melina was a year behind me and Angie Everhart was a couple behind her and may or may not have graduated. She was partying with Van Halen by 11th grade.