Monthly Archives: February 2014

How To Be Near Celebrities (Or, Don’t Grab Zac Efron’s Bicep in a Bar)

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DON'T PANIC

DON’T PANIC [Via]

Celebrity is something that sounds very complicated. On one hand, if you make it to the point of being a celebrity, you likely have lots of money. On the other, that comes at a significant cost to your privacy. On a third, you probably already knew that privacy was something you’d have to give up a bit to achieve celebrity. On a fourth, who among us could even conceive of what that sort of lifestyle would feel like until we got there, at which point it’d be too late to back out? It’s tricky, and I do feel a great sympathy for them, even though they can dry their tears on their millions.

This is all to say that New Yorkers are historically fantastic about dealing with celebrities. Not that we don’t have our invasive moments, or gush about “celebrity sightings” when they’re over, but in general the rule is to treat a celebrity like you would any other person on the street/in a restaurant/at the grocery store. Don’t stare, don’t start talking about them, don’t yell “oh my god you’re Lucy Liu!” when they’re walking down the street.

If you’re a huge fan, you may be inclined to ask for an autograph or a photo. This is one of those things that seemingly comes with the territory of being a celebrity, but this is when common sense really needs to go into overdrive. Is the person in question at lunch or generally engaged with something or someone else? Then, like anyone else, they would probably rather not be bothered. If Helen Hunt is casually browsing books at a bookstore perhaps you can go up to her and say you’re a fan, but you should not if you see her in a restaurant eating with her family. Bill Murray always seems game though.

However, there is a catch to the “just treat celebrities like normal people” thing, which is if you are a total weirdo around people it might come off bad around celebrities. Here’s an example: A few years ago my fiance and I were at a fancy, “speakeasy”-style cocktail bar, and both on our third or fourth drinks (which were very strong), when who should walk in and sit down next to us but Zac Efron. He was there with another guy, and was wearing this tight thermal shirt, and I was never attracted to Zac Efron and had never seen High School Musical but holy hell was this man attractive. Just, arms. I was totally star struck, but also determined to keep my cool and not act like he was any different than any other insanely hot person sitting next to me. So I keep chatting with my fiance, when I hear Zac Efron order a drink I had. I whip around and say (let’s be honest, I probably yell) “Oh my god, I LOVE that drink” as I reach over and grab his bicep for friendly emphasis. Like you’d do to maybe any other normal person if you’re feeling flirtatious and casual but should not do to a really famous person! From what I remember, he was very gracious about the whole thing, saying he always gets that drink when he goes to that bar, and asking if we’d ever been before, and us wishing each other good nights as we turned back to our partners.

So, you know, don’t do that.

The Wedding Guest List

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If you are a princess, everyone wants to come to your wedding. [Via Library of Congress]

As we are coming to the end of “engagement season” and Valentine’s Day, we probably have a lot of newly engaged readers who don’t know where to begin. While we can’t help you pick out your napkin colors (trust us, we are too busy picking out Jaya’s napkin colors), we can help you throw A Perfectly Polite Wedding with our new series of posts on hosting a wedding.

When you begin to plan a wedding, the first two things you have to decide are your budget and your guest list because everything will come from there. The budget is up to you (but just let me say that you can have a beautifully polite wedding on $500 just as easily as you can have a $1 million wedding that is full of faux pas) but when it comes to your guest list there are a few things to remember.

Miss Manners’ advice about guest lists is to decide who you want to invite before you start looking at venues and getting limitations on the number of people you can include. Her opinion is that the day should be more about sharing a special time with the people you love rather than having the perfect venue that can’t hold all the people you love. This is pretty subjective of course. [Ed Note: We decided that we couldn’t handle being at the center of more than 150 people without a lot of social anxiety triggering, so we looked at venues with that limit, which gave us room to invite everyone we really cared about without there being a guest list of 300 4th cousins and “family friends” we’d never met. -Jaya]

Sometimes though, the people you love have people they love and those partners also need to be included. People who are married, engaged, or living together (in a romantic sense) are considered social units and must be invited together. Sorry if you’ve never met your kindergarten best friend’s husband, you must still invite him. Many people also extend this to long term romantic partners who don’t live together.

Luckily, there is no obligation to invite single people with an “and guest” or “plus one.” If you do know that a friend might want to bring some “special” that you don’t really know, you should ask them for the name and address the invitation to your friend and that person by name rather than just as a plus one. This way you also prevent a rude situation where a guest brings a plus one who you didn’t want at the wedding.

Invitations for people you know won’t be able to attend are a kind gesture for people whom you are very close to. However, be cautious about sending them to people who aren’t very close friends or family as wedding invitations often make people feel obligated to send a gift and sending them out willy nilly to far away people can seem greedy.

I used to be very against A lists and B lists, because duh, no one wants to be on the B list and it can be very hurtful if they find out they are. But I encountered a situation where a couple was having a wedding and in their long planning process had made some new friends that they weren’t able to invite as everything had already been set. However, a couple days before the wedding, they heard that a few guests weren’t able to make it, so they called up some of their new friends and explained the situation and said that they would love it if they would be able to come on such short notice. The friends were thrilled and came and had a great time. The moral of the story being that it can work, but it deserves a very personal phone call.