I sat next to a minor celebrity on my flight out to Long Beach, California this afternoon. He was a 50s-ish fellow with a moustache who looked like what a younger brother of Robert DeNiro would look like, only skinnier and taller.
He started with the usual seatmate small talk, the Q&A that can worry me when I wonder whether it will carry on throughout the flight. Yes, I live in New York. Yes, I’m going to Long Beach on business. My business? Real estate.
I learned he’s a lawyer and splits his time between homes in Los Angeles and Cranford, New Jersey, which he described as being famous for the fact that the Ashton Kutcher/Bernie Mac movie Guess Who was filmed there. I found out that he too has a Sony Ericsson T610 and that he too thinks the reception is appalling (inability to get signals inside buildings, etc.) and that he too wonders why he hasn’t yet bought a new phone.
But his minor claim to fame was, as he confided to me, that he’s the guy with the ad on the back cover of the Long Beach yellow pages.
So the first thing I did after arriving at my hotel was to slide open the nightstand drawer and flip over the phone book. Sure enough, there was Mr. Moustache in the requisite Lawyer Standing In Front Of A Wall Of Important-Looking Books photo. Judging by the tie width, shininess and design, and a lack of gray in the hair and moustache, I estimated it was taken in the mid ’80s. But I definitely still recognized him there, cellphone troubles years away, under the headline PROVEN RESULTS!, with notes that he has 32 years trial experience and accepts major credit cards.