Scratching the itch on our celebrity skin

Everything you ever wanted to know about Yale celebs and the men who love them

Last year, I was standing behind Kellie Martin in line at Ashley's," says Mike Stafford, PC '00. "I asked her how the bittersweet chocolate was, and she just gave me this look, like `how dare you ask me about ice cream?'"

"Sara Gilbert, ES '97, bumped into me once outside of Stiles," reports Rob Stilling, MC '99. "She was carrying a huge bag of laundry. And another time, she bummed a cigarette off of one of my friends."

"Josh Saviano, BR '98, served me a beer at a frat party last year," one student claims.

"The girl from Adventures in Babysitting was in one of my sections," says another.

If you ask Yalies if they have any stories about celebrity encounters, they're sure to provide you with one or two of these little gems. They probably won't remember what they had for breakfast that morning, but they will recall, in brilliant detail, what brand and flavor of potato chip Sara Gilbert was buying when she stood in front of them at Store 24 in October, 1996. It could be the shock of seeing someone from a frequently-watched TV show buying towels at the Co-op. It could be the stunning realization that the normal-looking girl who's sitting three rows in front of you in Psych 110 has french-kissed Leonardo DiCaprio. For whatever reason, we treat our run-ins with celebrities as something special, something memorable, when really, they aren't.

Of course, this isn't a phenomenon restricted to Yale; practically everybody remembers his or her brief brushes with fame. But the encounters should be expected, and shouldn't be especially memorable. No student celebrity lives more than four blocks from his or her non-TV star classmates, and the famous and non-famous alike have unbelievably similar daily routines. The celebrities don't sneak off into secret Viper Rooms to snort cocaine and hang out with rock stars; they eat at Commons and hang out with schlubby, sweatpants-wearing Yale students.

At Yale, celebrities aren't really celebrities anymore; they've put their fame aside for a while, and become, more or less, like us. They live and act like the rest of us, and they do what the rest of us do. But unless we're close friends with them, we turn our heads when they walk by and talk excitedly about the mundane things we've seen them do. It's fun; it gives us something new to talk about. But what's it like for the actors and actresses?

Remember me?

"It always surprises me when it happens," says Crystal McKellar, TC '99, when asked how she feels about being approached by people she doesn't know. To the avid couch potato, McKellar is best known as Becky Slater, Fred Savage's sometime girlfriend on the hit show The Wonder Years—but at Yale, she's an active member of the Tory Party and an editor of Portia. "It doesn't happen too frequently—probably about once a week. It happened a lot more freshman year, and there's always a spurt in September. When Nick at Nite ran a Wonder Years marathon last fall, people started coming up to me more often."

It's nice to see how well McKellar handles her status as a former prime-time celebrity. She doesn't seem annoyed that I've called her at 11:30 p.m. to talk about The Wonder Years. She says she's not bothered when people come up to her and ask about her days spent hangin' with Winnie Cooper. "It's always a good conversation starter at parties," she says, laughing. "When I don't know anyone, it gives us something to talk about."

Like McKellar, Nicole Dubuc, MC '00, doesn't care when a stranger points her out as a former star of CBS's Major Dad and ABC's Our House. "It happens about once a month, usually in weird places like Au Bon Pain," she says. "I'll notice someone staring at me from afar, and then they'll come up to me and start talking. I don't mind it, except for the fact that I get teased a lot—everyone always seems to remember the most embarrassing episodes I was in." And like McKellar, Dubuc's fame was boosted by Yale's deal with Comcast. "When we got cable, the number of times I got spotted jumped," she says.

For actors and actresses, Yale provides an opportunity to get out from under the media microscope and pursue what Dubuc calls "normal activities." In a piece for Esquire in December 1982, then-junior Jodie Foster, CC '84, commented on how Yale was a welcome escape from her life as a film star: "My personality changed. I took on a screw-the-world dress code....I had my first and last bout with tequila. I did ska dances in the street, water-ballooned singing groups, philosophized and talked dirty till five in the morning. The control I'd had all those years was self-imposed and alienating. Now I was able to make mistakes." Foster enjoyed her life as a Lit major so much that she began to question her career as an actress—to her, anonymity was far more appealing than a life spent drowning in Hollywood bullshit. "I wanted to be at Yale forever," she wrote, "The idea of returning to a dressing room in a Winnebago, being called Miss Foster, seemed foreign,
unnatural. I didn't want to return those phone calls from home, from agents, from polite employers."

Foster's fame had become hideous-ly apparent by March of her freshman year, when a madman's attempt on the President's life thrust her from the Old Campus back into national headlines. No matter where she went, her celebrity status was not something Foster could leave behind; it was a significant part of her life, and she had to deal with it.

So it seems Yale doesn't make a good hideout for the young and famous. Still, I find myself asking, if celebrities who can be seen only in late-night reruns get approached by strangers once a week, what would life be like for, say, someone who can be seen in the latest issue of Jane singing karaoke with Winona Ryder? Someone who's been on the cover of Vogue and has 9,000 web sites devoted to her? How would someone like that deal with the pressure, the constant attention?

There's only one way to find out, I tell myself, and I pick up the phone.

Brian has no so-called life

It takes me about 20 minutes to get up the nerve to call, but I finally do, and I hear a female voice at the other end. "Is Claire around?" I ask. "This is she," says the voice, and then, quickly, "Who's calling?"

I stammer for a few seconds, and then tell her my name, and that I'm working on an article about fame at Yale, and that I can't complete it without at least trying to talk to her, so would she mind if I asked her a few questions?

"Sure," she says. "But I'm on the other line, and then I'm going to go to bed. Will it take a long time?"

I stammer some more, and tell her I don't know.

"Can I call you tomorrow?" she asks. I tell her she can, and give her my number. "I'm sorry. I'm just really stressed out."

"I'm sure," I say, fumbling like a spaz. "You're probably the most stressed person in the world now."

She chuckles. "Oh no, it's not really like that."

I thank her and hang up. I know she's not going to call me back, and I don't care. She didn't hang up on me, or curse me out, or send goons over to my room to beat me up. She sounded like a normal person—a normal person who just wanted to be left alone.

Photo of Monica Lewinsky courtesy vNational Enquirer. Photo of Nathan Hale and Brian by Julia Tiernan.

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