"Ah, excuse me, this is the body of Hugh Grant?" © 1999 Universal All Rights Reserved

"Ah, excuse me, this is store of Hugh Grant?" the woman says in heavily-accented English to some poor bloke who happens to be walking by. In his saggy, bright blue jogging pants and white T-shirt, the Sunday edition of "The Observer" clamped tightly under one arm, he obviously qualifies as a resident of London's posh Notting Hill section, and naturally, as an expert on local celebrity history.

He uncomfortably mumbles something incoherent in response and hurriedly flees the scene, while the woman excitedly keeps pointing her index finger across the street and her husband snaps countless pictures with his very expensive looking camera.

I, too, coolly walk further down the street before I finally turn around for a look at the object in question. You've probably guessed it by now (and you might be right to point out that, for someone who's into movies enough to write about them all the time, I am a bit slow to pick up on these things, but I really hadn't noticed). I had indeed just walked past the building that housed the bookstore owned by Hugh Grant's character in "Notting Hill." And it really does look just as it does in the movie.

Things—and people—that we have seen in the movies. Somehow they continuously prove to be alluring objects of interest for the public at large. Most people fall into one of two categories. There are those who openly, and sometimes fanatically, admire celebrities, going to great lengths to have that one famous encounter that will last them a lifetime. And then there are people who like to appear completely unfazed by fame. They would recoil at the thought of camping out for a week to get the best seats along the red carpet at the Oscar's, only to get all giddy the moment they think no one's watching because they just saw Bea Arthur in line at the check-out of their local Stop 'n' Shop.

Oddly enough, whenever one happens to have that unexpected brush with fame it more often than not turns out to be amazingly unspectacular.

Ok, so I'm not counting that one occasion when I was 14 and Norwegian pop trio a-ha, the biggest thing to hit Europe since, well, the Beatles, were playing near my hometown. My mom (who really is beyond cool, though I didn't know it back then) took us to the hotel where they were staying. When the tour bus arrived they got out and stopped to talk and sign autographs, and I, somewhat weak in the knees, heard my younger sister saying quite loudly, "Mom look, I think she's not feeling so well." Mortifying, isn't it? In case you were wondering, I still have the album they autographed, somewhere.

My point is, once you get beyond that kid stuff, these encounters of the celebrity kind should make you realize that, really, they are just people too, and they are on that pedestal, seemingly larger than life, because we put them there. Why? Maybe so we can live vicariously through them, without ourselves having to take the risk of exposure to public scrutiny. I don't know. You tell me.

But just last year I walked past Natalie Portman on the campus of Harvard University. She is shorter than I'd thought, and in jeans, sweatshirt and without make-up she blends in so completely with the student crowd that I would never have noticed her if there hadn't been some star-struck classmate desperately trying to be seen talking with her.

And there is the sister of a friend of a person I recently met. She happens to work for a catering company that specializes in A-list affairs at impossibly posh hotels. At one of these high profile events, the sister, en route to the ladies room, passed by the men's facilities and, owing to a left-open door, had the questionable pleasure of watching Brad Pitt perform at the urinal. The life-lasting impression she took home with her? "He didn't wash his hands afterwards." How utterly, disappointingly human.