The time has come (again). Prove to us that you inhabit the penumbra of fame. It’s Tenuous Connections 2009.
Here are the rules of the game: You have to come up with a tenuous connection to a celebrity. The cheesier or weirder the celebrity the more points you get. The more tenuous (or weirder) the connection the better too (although there is a cut-off point – seeing them on television does not count, nor does merely living in the same country or following them on Twitter).
Last years winners were:
(1) The Prestigious UK Award:
Rivergirlie for: “I bought my house from Uncle Monty.”
(2) The Equally Prestigious International Award:
Claudia for: “I was introduced to Dax Moy the celebrity trainer who used to mock Moobs’ paunch.”
You cannot use a connection that you have entered before. For the bibulous amongst you the prize is plonk. For the others (or at your discretion) it will be something that has fallen off the back of a truck headed for Amazon.com.
Place your entries by leaving comments. The winners will be decided Zimbabewean Election stylee: there will be a vote but then I will steal the ballot boxes.
Good luck!
Damon Albarn’s dad used to teach at my sixth form college
I was at law school with a Liverpudlian girl, who knew a couple of snooker groupies, one of whom had shagged John Parrot’s dad after meeting him at a snooker tournament.
Dragging one of my charges out of the last day of school church service, I urged him to hurry as I still had several other kids to pick up. We raced past a HUGE queue of parents waiting to smooze the headmaster of his north london prep, with the boy wingeing about how I hadn’t queued myself, to which I replied “I’m your nanny, not your mother, I don’t need to toady to your headmaster!” I suddenly heard clapping and an “Oh, very well said!” It was Peter O’toole!
My former next door neighbour once went out for a pint with Timmy Mallet.
My boyfriend’s friend’s dad is Pussy Galore’s dentist
My boyfriend’s friend’s grandmother is good friends with Jon Bonham’s mum
My boyfriend’s mum once snapped at a man in a shop and told him to ‘stop dawdling and get a move on’. It was Dustin Hoffman
Tamara Eccleston once punched my boyfriends ex in the face
Cracker Bacon from Grange Hill runs our local pub.
Happy post-Birthday! Sorry I missed you yesterday! Hope you had a wonderful day! 🙂
those posts by hjonesy (a v strong contender!) have just reminded me i had lunch with rockmother in soho recently (before it burned down, of course) and apparently ricky gervais was in the restaurant and she pointed him out as we went past but i didn’t notice. tbh, once you’ve had lunch with moobs, it takes a lot to impress …
i once offered peter maxwell davies some spacedust
david tennant used to live in my chemistry teacher’s dad’s house.
it should be noted that it is a rather big house. i know because there is a picture on facey b.
These are such fun. I once swooned and teetered, clutching Bono’s shoulder whilst realizing that he, in boots, is still 3 inches shorter than I. He didn’t seem to mind that I wobbled and grabbed him, but I proceeded to act all the worse by saying in a breathy voice: You have no idea how happy you’ve made me.
oh, and he smelled like an odd combination of soap, sweat and whiskey.
My wife’s father’s friend’s son’s best friend is none other than military muso James Blunt. I make that six degrees from me. Not far enough.
A girl I worked in a pub with in Colchester in 1989, who coincidentally ended up going to the same college as me in Birmingham, just Facebooked me. When checking her pals to see if there were any college buddies lurking, I discovered that she’s friends with a guy called Jamie, who’s brother Andy made it to the semi-finals at Wimbledon this year. That’s what the internet’s *really* for, discovering stuff like that.
…should have been ‘whose brother Andy’. How embarrassing. That’s shut me up with my big gloat ‘n all…
I once bumped into a minor celeb as I was…ahem…coming out of a ‘specimen room’ at a fertility clinic as he was going in. We both gave that international male ‘raised eyebrows and chin’ look of resignation to each other. I don’t think it’s fair to say who it is. Sorry. It also wasn’t the kind of place to stop and say the traditional “love your work”…He’d have probably made a joke about the last word being alphabetically close to the truth…
Sadly, it’s not these tenuous connections that give us real perspective on our lives, it’s ones like this: the sister of a schoolfriend of mine was classmate and pal of a pretty blonde girl called Rachel Nickell, who years later at 23 was assaulted and killed on Wimbledon Common, in front of her 2 year old son. It’s these little droplets of experience which ripple through all our lives and remind us how lucky we are to be alive…
Ok, that was too sombre to finish up on. Here’s another: a few years ago, in the restaurant of the spectacularly positioned Hotel Santa Catarina in Amalfi, the selfsame dextrous waiterly fingers that returned my credit card to me had just moments earlier been deployed in handing a menu to Maura Tierney (ER’s Abby Lockhart), who was ensuring she was inconspicuous amongst us mere hoi-polloi by wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses. Indoors. At night.
I have another: a volunteer on my Samaritans shift’s hairdresser is friends with Anthony Costa from Blue, who invited him onto Celebrity Family Fortunes because he didn’t have enough relatives. *SPOILER ALERT* his team wins.
My mum once met the man who invented the Jaffa Cake.
Oh and my great aunty was a mermaid in Blackpool which didn’t make her famous but did make her half fish if that counts at all?
Tv funny lady Wendy Craig once autographed my plant pot. She opened the local fete and it was all I had with me. (NB: I’d just bought the plant – I didn’t carry it around all the time or anything).
I was wearing a massive and unfortunate purple dress that made me look like Violet Beuregarde and along with the whole plant pot thing, it quite scared Miss Craig I think.
WC and I don’t keep in touch but my friend’s sister lives next door to the woman who played Veruca Salt in the first Wonka film.
Small world isn’t it?
Ricky Wilson’s brother gave the toast at my physiotherapist’s wedding.
My wife once rented a room from a chap who was a good friend of Jeremy Guscott’s brother.
My sister-in-law went out with a chap at school called Simon Pearce, who moved to Australia and ran the Oz office for a PR company. He was headhunted by one of his clients, Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nayhan, the brother of the ruler of Abu Dhabi, the brother of the ruler of Abu Dhabi, and now owner of Manchester City Football Club. From being his Head of Communications, Simon is now his trusted personal adviser and is a board member of Manchester City. The lad’s done great.
you see I cannot remember what I have entered before so I could inadvertently cheat!
My sister’s next-door neighbour got a waiter in an Indian restaurant in Nottingham to get Judi Dench to sign a chapatti which was later pinned up in the smallest room in my sister’s house. Sadly, the proof disappeared a year or so later into a pile of purple mush when some homemade elderberry wine, that was bubbling away in that very room, exploded.
My boss’s kids go to the same school as McNulty from The Wire’s kids
My driving instructor’s husband taught Diana Dors to drive.
Another attempt: my older son inspired Thom Yorke to decorate his Christmas tree with polo mints.
My college friend Mitch Schofield inspired her friend Jamie Hewlett in his creation of Tank Girl.
Ok I know I won plunk a couple years back, but my memory is gone and I cant remember if it was for this ? I think it was a different weird contest of yours …anywayssss here it is
My mother was best friends with a lady named Betty who had a cousin also named Betty who lived next door to the woman who sewed Marilyn Monroe’s undergarments. Beat that!
Oops its Plonk isn’t it ?
Ok, we have to kick the voting off properly, otherwise all these great tales will get lost in the blogging wasteland.
Assuming that everyone gets three votes (isn’t that how it always works in Zimbabwean elections?), my votes go to (in order of merit):
1) darkdwarf for the milk round story
2) studleybigair for the attic dalek
and finally
3) anotherblogger for the Gary Wilmot mention. C’mon, Gary Wilmot?!
is it voting time? i go for kate and the physiotherapist’s wedding speech. it has everything going for it! x
Have I missed the voting? – no the ballot boxes haven’t been stolen yet. It’s a slow process and the turnout at the polls is not looking too good at the moment 🙂
I’m presuming that I can’t vote for myself, and I think that 1 vote is enough, so StudleyBigAir gets mine for the Ian McKellen refusing to stay in a villa story.