according to a certain celebrity

I'm not going to mention the name of the guest of honor at a party I worked recently; I don't want to get busted. Not that I have anything unkind or scandalous to say. Quite the opposite. I'm just concerned about holding onto my catering gig for a while longer.

But I have to tell you, this guy was just as nice as you might wish. It's rare that a guest notices us, let alone tries to help us out in any way; at one point this fella saw that I was struggling to move a big propane heater closer to his table and he got up and helped me move another table out of the way. Just got up and did it, no big deal. The younger brother of a more-famous comic talent who did himself in with speedballs, back in the day; Our Guest of Honor has lived in a long shadow. He's not funny in the same way. His brother was funny because he always seemed on the verge of combustion. OGOH is funny in that Midwestern shlub-next-door way. Which is appropriate, really; we share a good solid Chicago provenance, and you know only Midwesterners are allowed to make fun of the Midwest.

The rest of you, don't even think about it.

Now, there was another guest with an equally recognizable name. When he was younger and quite a bit skinnier, he was in a movie with OGOH's brother about a couple of white blues musicians. Are you following this? Here's another clue: Feeling slimey? Who you gonna call? Our Guest's Friend was shaped more in the Hollywood mold; he brought along two bodyguards and a dog, all of whom we were expected to feed. Later there was talk about his smoking silly weed and verbally abusing other guests, but I didn't see that for myself, more's the pity.

The cool thing--and there were a few cool things, even if the party went three hours over and I ended up doing an eleven-hour shift--was that these two guys really seem to like each other. Sometimes there are performers who have great chemistry together on stage or screen, and then you find out that they absolutely despise each other, and it's kind of disappointing. Not OGOH and OGF, who got up after dinner to sing with the band and had a jolly old time. I was glad to see it. Too often, when you get close to someone who you know solely through their work, they turn out to be entirely different than you expected them to be, and not necessarily in a positive way.

I was just glad to see that being a Beeg Star hadn't made this guy a Beeg Asshole.