star sightings

Steve and I went downtown after work today to see the big parade with all the stars of the A Prairie Home Companion movie on their way to the premiere. Just for fun. Just for the camp factor, really. (That's what we told ourselves, anyway!)

The whole thing was maybe two minutes long. The Highland Park High School marching band went by first in their red-plaid tartan. Then came a quartet of police officers on horses. Just as they passed us, one of the horses on our side of the street unloaded a huge pile of poop maybe 10 feet away from us. A huge pile.

And then came the horse-drawn carriages, full of people I didn't recognize and a few I did. I didn't see Lindsay Lohan, but Steve did, and he said she was staring at something in her hand the whole time - her cell phone, maybe. Everyone loves a parade - unless you're a too-cool-for-school starlet, I guess. (Addendum: She was smiling and signing autographs in the newspaper photographs, though!)

A bearded Kevin Kline went by, and he was cool, waving to people on the street, which wasn't very crowded on our part of the route. We saw Virginia Madsen, John C. Reilly. There were sometimes as many as six people in a carriage, three on each side, so you really had to scan faces to pick out the famous ones. And then in the last carriage came instantly recognizable Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin, sitting next to each other and looking like they were having so much fun - laughing and waving and engaging with the crowd. I understand why Meryl is such a star. She is magnetic. For a moment, I thought she was looking right at me, as if she were really noticing me, and then she moved on and cast her gaze on other people, and the parade was past us.

The image that sticks the most in my mind came when the carriage carrying Garrison Keillor and Robert Altman went by. Robert Altman caught sight of the horse poop that had dropped moments earlier, and as the carriage drove by, his eyes stayed on that poop, never once looking at anything or anyone else.