Paparazzi Drive By

Last night around 9 pm I was driving with two friends on Main Street in Santa Monica, a nice hub of stores, boutiques, restaurants, and local activity. We'd just dropped off another friend at his apartment around the corner and in the process had seen what looked like a large crowd including paparazzi huddled in front of some restaurant or store. We decided to do a drive by, and because "paparazzi love to talk" (or at least that is what I claimed to my friends) we thought that for such a crowd there had to be someone worthwhile inside.

It had been a long day, but in our semi-comatose states, we drove up to the front of the restaurant and yelled out the window to the crowd of paps and very stern looking bouncers and in our weak voices screamed, "Hey! Who's in there?" A few of them turned, looked at us incredulously, said nothing or mumbled something incoherent and irrelevant, so we figured it couldn't have been much of anything and we drove home, thinking nothing much of it.

Well, if paparazzi did love to talk, then they would have told us that inside that restaurant were Victoria and David Beckham, Kate Beckinsale and hubby, Eva Longoria Parker, Will Smith, Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, Gwen Stefani and Gavin Rossdale and a whole slew of celebs out to dinner for a Scientology gathering, oops I mean, for Victoria Beckham's birthday party. Let's be honest, if those paps had told us who was there, even in our state of exhaustion we probably would have parked the car and joined the crowd--I mean, what other obligations did we have on this Sunday night? That's a pretty good random celeb spotting. I could have asked Tom Cruise to give me a little more info on Dianetics, or what it's like to be L. Ron's chosen prophet. Maybe Eva could have given me the 411 on her new restaurant and we could have become besties after I told her I was a fan of San Antonio. Maybe Gwen Stefani would have wanted to hire me to be the new nanny for her young one and bun in the oven. But, no. We proceeded with our drive by and returned home. I went to bed. Bygones.

On a side note, one of my friends, Roomie #1 in fact, asked if we could still just say that we'd seen all those people. I don't think a crowd of annoyed paparazzi is quite the same thing.