Over at the bar sat an older man, his hand inside the dress of a young, very drunk woman. Her body was bending and curving into his, grinding and pressing, the bare flesh of her back exposed like a wound. Careful and still as a predator, he was looking past her incoherent eyes to another point in the evening, waiting.

Another man, probably near 60, had a mop of charismatic grey hair and carried with him the manner that suggested a confident expectation that things were going to work out in his favour. He’d talk to anybody, fully expecting that they’d be happy, even flattered, to chat and then move tables to accommodate him. Familiar in an indistinct way and able to immediately establish a hierarchy within the place, he had the aura of celebrity.

He turned out to be John McDermott, a Scottish-Canadian tenor and sort of middle of the road performer that your parents might really like.

Incongruously, accompanying him were a group of 20-something Bros, all dressed like they were ready for a night of poker and drinking in a buddy’s kitchen. There was a raw, unkind edge to them and they were treating McDermott like he needed them more than the other way around. They were egging him on, and in short order the room was called to silence and John McDermott sang Danny Boy for us while his crew, holding cell phones in front of their faces like masks, took disinterested videos while continuing their snickering conversations with one another.

The singing was lovely, and many people looked like they felt blessed to have been present for such a spontaneous gift. But still, there was something mechanical and imposed about it, like we were tourists who had just been taken advantage of by sneering locals who now expected us to pay.

I wanted to clear my head a bit from this and stepped out on the balcony. The city was soft, fuzzy and fog-lit, the skyline glowing.

Near me on the railing arrived one of McDermott’s young crew. He was wearing a black hoodie and had a smudge of a moustache on his upper lip, and rocking his body back and forth he pulled deeply from the back of his throat and horked over the side and down to the street 18 floors below. He then went into the bar and proceeded to talk the really drunk woman away from the older, predatory man, bringing her back to his group, a trophy now, for all of them to enjoy.

I’m a huge fan of Homeland, the show in which she’s the star, and it was startling to see her. I think that the thing that was most surprising was that she looked exactly like she did on TV.  This shocked me, as I always imagined that in real life celebrities were somehow unrecognizable. You know, they were all much smaller than you would have imagined, much more average and disappointing– just less.  However, Claire Danes looked exactly as she was supposed to look.

She was in a bit of a hurry, like she always seems to be on Homeland, and was rushing to add some sort of “healthy potato chips” to her checkout pile. Nobody else in the place seemed to be paying any attention to her, but I was trained on her like an owl. I was giving her a suspicious look (are you actually Claire Danes?) while also trying to give her a receptive, warm invitation to small talk. No doubt, she had seen my type before, many thousands of times, I suspect, and managed to avoid creating anything that might be misinterpreted as space in which a conversation might open.

It was driving me fucking crazy, that.

She was just four feet away from me and when I felt the moment slipping away, I blurted out, “That Mandy Patinkin (one of her co-stars on Homeland) sure can sing!”

I wasn’t quite looking at her when I said this and the declaration clearly caught her off guard. She gave me a quizzical look, like she does on Homeland when she’s trying to figure out a complicated mystery, and then nodded her head, a wary smile on her face, “Yes, yes he can.”

“It’s like God just filled the man with talent,” I continued.

Claire Danes gave the cashier a look that suggested it was very difficult to be a star, and then handed her a credit card.

“Personally, I think he should be doing the Super Bowl halftime show and not Beyonce.”

As she was passing by me she said in a clipped and sarcastic voice, “I’ll pass that on to him.”

“Enjoy your Super Bowl party!” I shouted cheerfully.

Claire Danes did not look back at me.