Celebrities I have seen in person

At Book Signings or Staged events:
Sean Astin (see below)
Brett Butler
Patricia Cornwell
Malcolm Gladwell
Danny Glover
Kevin Smith - St Cloud State, February 17th, 2006, the man talked for nearly 5 hours with no break!
Margaret Thatcher

On the Street:
Kevin MacDonald
John Kerry
Numerous Minnesotan politics, sports and news people at the Fair

In Concert:
Liz Phair
Sheryl Crow
Dido
Prince
Chumbawumba
Everclear
Smashing Pumpkins
New Kids on The Block

Sean Astin Book Signing November 23, 2004 Mall of America

My niece and I stood there, dumbfounded, elbowing each other and squealing a little bit. Were our eyes deceiving us? Could it possibly be true that, in a few weeks, Sean Astin, Samwise Gamgee himself, was going to be signing his book mere feet from where we were standing? I checked my mental calendar and found that I already had that whole week off of work, since it was Thanksgiving, and I figured I could miss the first part of my evening class.

I picked her up early from school, since the signing started at 5:00 pm, but we knew the line would be huge. We got there about 2:15 and went to eat, finally getting to the rotunda at about 3pm. There were about 45 people in front of us, but we sat down, paged through the book and drooled over the pictures of him and the other cast members. People in front of us in line had laptops and were watching various parts of the Lord of the Rings movies. Some of them also had on t-shirts from the Minnesota Tolkien Society that announced a screening of all 3 extended edition DVDs at a church in Maple Grove on New Year's Eve. We agreed to go and invited others, but nobody else was up to it.

Back in line, as the time neared my niece gasps and says she saw him behind the curtain. She straining to get a look at where he went when the emcee woman comes up on stage and announces him. He comes out and pumps up the crowd a bit by naming a few of his movies and asking those who liked them to clap. Then he takes questions from the audience and shows off the t-shirt from the Tolkien Society that he was wearing.

Then it was time for the line to run through. There were people there who would take your picture so I handed him my digital camera and asked him to try to get my niece, and he actually got a nice shot of both her and I smiling like goons at him. I overheard him say. "Oh, you're sweet," to my niece and I didn't have much to say aside from thanking him. I was one of those moments that is over before you know it, and that you have to keep replaying in your head so that you know it was real. We went up to some of the higher floors to watch the line for a while and get some aerial photos of the whole thing.