Starstruck NYC
You never know what you’ll see when you’re in New York. People who’ve lived here all their lives claim that they’ve seen it all, and I really would like to believe them, but something tells me there’s more to anything than meets the eye. Nothing new under the sun, maybe, but there are possibilities for infinite variation in the replications, so when I did catch a glimpse of Yoko Ono standing outside of a limo, while on my way to my New York hotel suite, I knew I’d entered into an eternal moment. This sense of being star-struck, and by this particular star, was new to me, but dozens of people experience it at least every week, if not ever day.
It depends on how often she goes out, I suppose, and I’m not really sure, and not stalky enough to want to try to find out. So, I am only imagining that I’m not alone, and it really isn’t hard to do. The phenomenon of celebrity-ness in NYC is the same as everywhere else, and entirely different. I have run into the same famous people in Los Angeles as here, and the feeling the people give off is very much the same, but the crowds are entirely different. And the experience is packaged in a different way. In L.A., it becomes a major event, and people try to mark the occasion in ways that they can broadcast it later. Here, it’s more coincidental, and there’s something about New Yorkers where we try to keep it unremarkable.
We like to have lives outside of all this, and it’s an unspoken agreement to keep things in perspective. When people photograph stars here, there’s usually a sense that they’re only using the photos for themselves, for their own personal collection. This Yoko sighting was remarkable to me, because no one had a camera out. People wanted to talk to her, and she seemed to want to talk to them. It was a moment between real people. A few years ago, my friend showed me a candid he’d snapped of John and Yoko in Central Park. Again, there was a sense that it was no big deal, and the photo was only there to help the person remember later, and in that case, to poignantly mark the moment that those particularly enchanted cells were walking on the earth’s surface. His life was a variation on patterns that will never repeat.