My particular claims?
I've had letters to the editor published in Car & Driver, X-Men, and Newsweek.
When I was 12 or so a production company was filming a made-for-TV movie and recruited people from my summer television production class for kid extras at the community college. The working title of the movie was Murder On A Monorail. I was an extra on the train which suffers a terrorist attack. They made me up to play a body but the producers decided that none of we kids should be shown as a dead body so they didn't film us in the aftermath scene. This thing was so bad that it never made it out of the can. I don't know what happened to it.
When I was 17, The World According to Garp was filmed at my boarding school. I applied to be an extra but was turned down for having too many zits. That fall, however, the production crew came back to film some callback scenes and I did make it into that cut. There's a scene where a young boy runs into the infirmary building. The camera pans from the right to show the running boy and I was just half a second out of the edit of the pan. It really sucked because the opening shot of that scene would have shown me and another kid sitting on the steps of another building. A lot of my friends and some of the faculty made it into the movie though so it's cool.
I was 12 or 13 when Kenny Rogers' private jet landed at Syracuse airport the same time a commuter plane landed I was on with my father. One of his handlers asked me if I'd like an autograph. I told him no. He was like, "Really! I can get you an autograph from Kenny Rogers!" I was like, "The plane has his name on the side. I believe you. Thank you anyway." He was offended that I wouldn't want the autograph of such an illustrious persona as the great Kenny Rogers. My father was speechless and then laughed, shocked that I didn't fall all over this guy for an autograph. Later on, it turned out we were staying at the same hotel and Rogers looked over at me and said, "Are you following me kid?" He was smiling when he said it but for some reason I gave him a chilly response, "No. We just happen to be staying at the same hotel." I had no interest in this guy at all and after that he just turned around and kept talking to his handlers. I did not, however, tell the man how atrocious I found his music. That would have been rude. I think my father was disappointed because he liked Kenny Rogers very much and would have appreciated the autograph. He didn't say anything though. There's a streak of Stewie Griffin in me.
My aunt once invited me to a party in Greenwich, Connecticut. It was at a very nice club and before I went in I thought I'd grab a smoke outside. As I walked around for a bit while I was smoking and decided to peek inside the French doors to see what the party looked like. Everyone looked very nice and the room was quite crowded. I get apprehensive in situations where I have to meet a lot of people because I'm pretty bad with names. All of a sudden I heard a voice from behind a boxwood. "Have you got a light?" I turned around and there was a woman with red hair in a nice very light pink satin gown. She asked for a cigarette too as she couldn't be caught with them. I thought that was a bit odd at her age but then I don't smoke around my mother either. I gave her a cigarette and extended my hand to light it and when I did, I noticed it was the Duchess of York. I couldn't very well say, "Hi Fergie," so I was a bit formal and managed to say, "Oh! Your grace..." She immediately replied, "Oh please don't say that while I'm being naughty!," and I concluded she didn't want anyone to know she was smoking. Turns out she was staying with friends of my aunt and they brought her along to this shindig. I didn't know what to say as all I knew about her was what the tabloids said and THAT was right out so remarked that I thought her wedding dress was better than Diana's and how much I liked the bee pattern in the train. So we talked about the heraldic symbology of the bees (they're in her coat-of-arms) and how much she likes Americans and the US. I liked her. She was very nice, down to earth, and quick to laugh. She's cool in my book.
I've really known (or know) other people like Margaret Truman, Isaac Asimov, Eli Roth, and Richard Kiley.
Others I'm just barely acquainted with usually because I know somebody who knows them and met them once or twice, like Paris Hilton, a few minor Kennedys, Kitty Carlysle Hart, and some other society page sorts, but I don't count them as necessarily famous even if their names do end-up in newspapers on occasion. I'm a poor country mouse so don't think I'm glamorous at all, I just have friends or relations who know most of these and I get asked to these things on occasion.
