Reply #81: My grandfather taught the Andrews Sisters in high school in the 1930s

[Lydia Leftcoast]

Kevin Sorbo's father was my eighth grade science teacher, but I remember Kevin only as a little kid running around in corduroy overalls.

My last year as a grad student at Yale was the year Jodie Foster was there. I saw her around a lot, but she was trying hard to blend in.

I walked into Sterling Library one day and there was a woman standing by the circulation desk who looked a lot like Lily Tomlin. It was reported in the Yale Daily News the next day that she had been on campus visiting her nephew, who was a student in the Forestry School. (This isn't as good as my roommate who saw Solzhenitsyn in Sterling Library.)

I also met Dick Cavett, who was attending a play a friend was in.

Meryl Streep and Sigourney Weaver were both at Yale Drama School when I was a grad student. I once happened to sit at the same lunch table as Meryl Streep after she graduated and came back to Yale to tell her friends about life as an actress in New York.

I saw New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman eating in a local restaurant, but I refrained from punching him out for his cheerleading for the Iraq War.

Traveling in Europe as a 17-year-old, I saw the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi changing planes in the Amsterdam airport.

I once rode on the same flight from Minneapolis to New York as Dear Abby (Pauline Philips), who lived in Minneapolis.

I once played on a broomball team with Peter Agre, Nobel Prize winner in chemistry a couple of years ago.

Ann B. Davis (of the Brady Bunch) once showed up at my church in Portland for Sunday services.

While in Portland, I was in a circuit training class with Micaela Watkins, who was on Saturday Night Live for a while a few years ago.

Amy Tan came to speak at the college where I was teaching, and I was one of the people whom the president invited to have dinner with her.