My Embarrassing Celebrity Encounters

Anne Marble
5 min readAug 31, 2024

Three Times I Met a Celebrity and Did Something Embarrassing

Have you ever met a celebrity and said or done something embarrassing? Join the club! In these cases, my brain ran off just when I needed it the most.

Ray Bradbury

I once attended a talk from Ray Bradbury (yes, THE Ray Bradbury) with my father. We were fortunate to get to attend — and I’m grateful that my father was willing to drive me to Johns Hopkins after a long day at work to see Ray Bradbury.

A black-and-white photograph of Ray Bradbury talking at the Miami Book Fair International in 1990. He has white hair and glasses with black frames. He is holding his hands up while talking into a microphone. He has a ring with a dark jewel on one finger.
Ray Bradbury at Miami Book Fair International in 1990. (Source: MDCarchives, CC BY-SA 3.)Ray Bradbury

Because Dad was always punctual, and because I was nervous, we got there about an hour before the talk started. So we were very close, probably in the first or second row. Talk about a great view! I read from his latest anthology, The Toynbee Convector, while we waited.

The talk was amazing! Dad stayed awake the whole time even though he’d endured a full day of work that day. (He joked that he didn’t dare fall asleep because Ray Bradbury was looking right after him.) But everybody paid attention. This was Ray Bradbury!

He talked about the future — but more importantly, the past and the present. This was in the late 1980s, and Ray Bradbury predicted that one day, fans would be able to pool their resources together and have movies made of their favorite stories. People chuckled at this…

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Anne Marble

I’m a writer and a copy editor with experience in editing science and engineering articles. Click Lists to find my most popular articles. And hidden gems.