One morning earlier this week, for some incomprehensible reason, I woke up with with cringe inducing memory the time I tried to hug Rachel Dratch on the subway, and I buried my head in my pillows in shame.

I haven’t been to Manhattan often in the last several years.  But it seems like every time I visit, I bump into someone I knew from college as I am navigating around the city.  It happened once in a Target in Brooklyn, but most of the time in happens on the subway or in a subway station.  I am assured that this is a very typical Manhattan phenomenon which occurs when you put so many people on a small island. 

The first time it happened to me, I was in the city because one of my short plays was in a showcase presented by a small theatre company near Times Square.  I was there with my sister and a few friends from acting school, and someone we knew from our University days boarded our subway car.  We spoke briefly – there wasn’t much time to catch up before our stop – but I couldn’t stop thinking, “what are the odds?”  I’ve never lived in Manhattan and I know so few people in the city.  And in order for me to have bumped into this friend, it wasn’t enough for all of us to be traveling through the same section of the same crowded neighborhood via subway, all at once.  If he had stepped onto the car behind us, just one subway car ten feet away from where we were sitting, we would never have seen one another.  But he walked through the door of our car.  What was even more random was that we ended up bumping into that same friend the next day in a different subway station in another part of the city.  It was insane.

Which is why, I think, there was a part of me who was prepared to bump into Rachel Dratch.  Well, not Rachel Dratch, obviously.  But someone that I “knew.”  I was expecting it.  After all, as my friends say, “That’s New York for you; it happens all the time.”

It was back in 2009 and we had tickets to see The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.  Demetria, Budgie and I took the A line to a subway station on West 50th street and got off the train.  We were walking up the stairs and exiting through the turnstile when I looked up and saw a woman coming down the stairs toward us.  I knew that I knew her, and even though I couldn’t quite place how, I threw my arms open toward her and inhaled deeply to call out to her.  She was only a few feet away from me and her eyes met mine and she smiled, waiting to see what I had to say.  But as my lungs reached capacity and I was about to yell, “holy cow, how ARE you?!” or something similarly inane, I realized with a chest-punching start, “Hey IDIOT! You don’t KNOW this person.  She is, in fact, FAMOUS.  Do not HUG her!”  That is to say: I knew her.  But she didn’t know me.

There was an awkward pause then.  We stood there looking at one another, me with my arms out-stretched for a hug, her waiting with a pleasant and decidedly not-yet-terrified look on her face.  Her arms even lifted slightly, absurdly opening to accept my embrace. 

What I should have said was, “I’m sorry – my mistake.  I thought you were a friend of mine.”  Or “I love your work!”  Or anything really.  I definitely should have said something.  But instead I dropped my arms and ran out of the subway station like a kooky simpleton, leaving Ms. Dratch to wonder if she should get a body guard.

The other morning, when this memory popped into my waking brain, I felt that nauseating pinch in my stomach, as if it had just happened.  I relived the moment in my head a couple of times in my head, playing the “what I should have said” game and wishing I weren’t such a dork.

The thing that makes it so embarrassing (other than the fact that I truly am a fan of hers and I missed an opportunity to meet her) is that I think the reason I thought she was someone I knew from my life and not TV is because Rachel Dratch is… Well… Not….  Beautiful.  She looks like a person.  Someone who might have taught a class I took, or sold me socks, or hit me up for a tampon in a lady’s room somewhere.  If she looked like Angelina Jolie – who I assume has Barbie girl parts and therefore never uses tampons – I wouldn’t have mistaken her for a friend.  And I wouldn’t have been as excited to see her.

Now I am insulting all of my friends, in addition to Rachel Dratch, by insinuating that that you are all a bunch of sock-buying tampon-users.  This is not my intention at all.  What I really want to say is that Angelina Jolie is a big-lipped giraffe, and I can’t wait until the next time the universe decides to spend a little magic on me by arranging for me to bump into a long lost friend in a Super Target in Brooklyn (which has also happened).  Because celebrities are everywhere.  You are bound to encounter one sooner or later.  But when someone you have known slips away from you and is carried away in the wind, only to be brought back by chance, that is nothing short of miraculous.

But if you are still insulted, I’ll be working on my “what I should have said” speech in advance so that when I do – with luck and delight – bump into you, I will be prepared.

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