How My Grandmother Conned Ron Howard

I come from a long line of imaginative groupies. My grandmother used to skip school to see Frank Sinatra at the Paramount Theater before he was super famous-she once even got him to share his sandwich with her, and when she gave birth to my mother on the same floor of the hospital where his first wife Nancy was giving birth, she leveraged the fact that her name was also Nancy to get all the Sinatra family's flowers delivered to her room.

My mother spent much of her teenage years stalking Anthony Perkins back and forth between his apartment and the dry cleaners she somehow found out he frequented. My aunt once told me when I was 5 that I was adopted at birth by my parents because I was really her love child with Fabian (a story that was entirely untrue but nonetheless shaped my self-image for years). And then there was the time I was on the same flight as Lou Reed and tried to steal his luggage from the baggage carousel in the hopes that a home address would be listed on the tags.

Celebrity encounters became a sport for us-each Monday we'd call each other and say, "Who'd you see this weekend?" Normally such an inquiry would mean friends or family, but our responses were, "Madonna," "Bruce Springsteen's wife-does she count?," and "Pierce Brosnan-and he's even better looking in person, believe it or not!" When my cousin Gina got to go backstage one night and met Bono, she won the contest for biggest celebrity encounter ever. Well, I once met Keith Richards, who arguably may be more famous than Bono, but since I didn't recognize him and was quite rude to him I can't claim the win (more details on this encounter can be found in my article "The Time I Gave Keith Richards The Finger").

The most entertaining celebrity encounter any of us had involved Ron Howard and my grandmother, though. It was about 15 years ago, and all of us were gathered for someone's birthday at the trendy New York restaurant "Café des Artistes."