AL in more than one way

This first Thursday of March is crawling with depressing news: Patrick Swayze is battling pancreatic cancer, US mortgage foreclosures hit an all-time high, the student-body president of UNC at Chapel Hill was fatally shot, a UC Davis student had explosive materials in his dorm room, reporters and photographers are being packed like sardines in a can on the little island in Times Square that used to be the pigeons’ haven and my shortcut to work because of a pipe bomb that went off overnight … (Read amusing comments about that here.)

I’m okay with sharing my shortcut (today) with the underpaid journalists of the world, because I ran into Annie Leibovitz at lunch!!! I’m not going to lie and say that I am impenetrable to star-struckness, but I am also the girl who basically told Jesse McCartney, following an interview, that I thought he sucked in concert. So I’m walking along, in a rush to get to my lunch meeting, when I see someone facing me – looking at me. Someone who has that big poufy but long Annie Leibovitz hair. As I approach with my less-than-stellar vision, I realize it is Annie. When the girl walking just ahead of me realized it too, she turned back, which is when Annie scooted out of the way, towards the curb.

As I walked away, all these random thoughts ran through my head: wasn’t I just thinking about her this morning? (I was.) What was I thinking about? (Something creepy, you don’t want to know.) Oh, and yeah, she was on that ABC special on the British monarchy on Sunday – no, Monday night. It just so happened that I managed to watch at just the right moments to catch the only parts I really wanted to see – the Leibovitz parts. She called the Queen “your majesty” half-mockingly and a little apprehensively, as if she were a real Brit and believed in that sort of thing.

And now, writing this, I am remembering that I not only thought about Annie once this morning, but again when I was reading mail at work about the Corcoran Gallery in D.C., and how bummed I was to have missed Annie’s photo exhibition there in January.

I’ve never been as pleasantly flummoxed by someone so very much out of Young Hollywood, but come on you guys, I witnessed a piece of living American history (and my exchange with Mayor Giuliani does not count, no matter how much he did to clear Times Square of the prostitutes who would’ve inevitably been hurt taking my shortcut home from work last night). No, Annie deserves better than to be put in a category with him. She’s an American legend.

[Photo courtesy of ScandinavianDesign.com]