On Sunday, after receiving the first pedicure of my life (It was called the Sports Pedicure, and it may now become part of my pre game Super Bowl ritual) I went to a gourmet food store in the Yorkville district of Toronto called Pusateri\u2019s. It was here where I saw actress Claire Danes.<\/p>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n I\u2019m a huge fan of Homeland, the show in which she\u2019s 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. \u00a0This 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. \u00a0However, Claire Danes looked exactly as she was supposed to look.<\/p>\n She was in a bit of a hurry, like she always seems to be on Homeland, and was rushing to add some sort of \u201chealthy potato chips\u201d 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.<\/p>\n It was driving me fucking crazy, that.<\/p>\n She was just four feet away from me and when I felt the moment slipping away, I blurted out, \u201cThat Mandy Patinkin (one of her co-stars on Homeland) sure can sing!\u201d<\/p>\n