ANECDOTES

For his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Jay Leno chose the location where he had been arrested 20 years earlier "for vagrancy: no visible means of support."

--------oOo--------

Entering a crowded restaurant with a companion, Gregory Peck found no table available.

“Tell them who you are,” murmured the friend.

“If you have to tell them who you are, you aren’t anybody,” said Peck.

--------oOo--------

This story was told by composer Lalo Schifrin on NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday, during an interview with Liane Hansen, September 16, 2007:

Once I had a meeting with him (Pavarotti), in New York City, in his penthouse. All of a sudden in the middle of the meeting, a young German soprano singer showed up and she was accompanied by a gentleman. Luciano said to me, “Oh, I’m sorry. I have to interrupt this meeting with you because I forgot that I promised to audition her for the Luciano Pavarotti International Competition.” So he asked her, pointing to the young man: “is he your pianist?”

“No,” she said. “He is my boyfriend.”

“Oh, okay. Do you have any music?” asked Luciano. But she didn’t have any music and she didn’t have a pianist but she wanted to sing some arias. So I said, “I will accompany her.”

She was terrible. She was very, very bad. She sang out of tune and she couldn’t maintain the voice and so after awhile Luciano said to her, “Come over to my desk.”

He had an enormous desk with a big equestrian statue on it. Pointing to the statue, he asked the young woman: “Do you see the details of the muscles of the horse? Do you see all these details?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Do you think that the one who made this statue was a good sculptor?”

“Oh, absolutely,” she said.

“Well, you know, he had something to start with. He had the marble. I’m sorry to tell you this but you don’t have the marble.”

--------oOo--------

On the set of The Hunger Games in Hawaii, a boulder came loose, rolled down a mountain, and wrecked the sound booth.

"The Hawaiians were like, 'Oh my god, it's the curse!'" recalled Jennifer Lawrence, who'd been rubbing on the rock to relieve an itchy bum. "I'm around the corner going, 'I'm your curse - I wedged it loose with my ass!'"

--------oOo--------

When O. J. "The Juice" Simpson was acquitted of murdering Nicole Brown in 1995, Starburst changed their candy's slogan to "Turn Up The Juice."

The original slogan? "The Juice Is Loose!"

--------oOo--------

In the hospital Dorothy Parker was visited by her secretary, to whom she wished to dictate some letters.

Pressing the button marked NURSE, Dorothy observed, “That should assure us of a least forty-five minutes of undisturbed privacy.”

--------oOo--------

Because the killer in Halloween wore a William Shatner mask, Shatner wore one trick-or-treating with his grandkids.

Once, when a man answered, "I leered at him with the mask, and then I yanked it off, and I stared at him. He screamed and shut the door."

--------oOo--------

President Martin Van Buren, who hailed from Kinderhook, NY, was known as Old Kinderhook. Supporters formed "OK" clubs and the term soon came to mean "alright."

--------oOo--------

The Hard Rock Cafe began collecting rock memorabilia by accident. Eric Clapton gave the owners a guitar to reserve his bar stool, Pete Townshend followed suit, and the collection grew from there.

--------oOo--------

In 1968, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents held an exhibition in the town of Harrogate. The entire display fell down.

--------oOo--------

Censuring Stalin at a public meeting, Krushchev was interrupted by a voice from the audience. “You were one of Stalin’s colleagues,” shouted the heckler. “Why didn’t you stop him?”

“Who said that?” roared Khrushchev. There was an agonizing silence in the room. Nobody dared to move a muscle. Then, in a quiet voice, Khrushchev said, “Now you know why.”