So a couple of nights ago I was walking back from Starbucks after a late night coffee / programming session.  I live about 5 blocks away from the Starbucks on Mission and 4th in downtown San Francisco so I was crusing back on MIssion Street, Pandora blasting through the headphones. This was around 9pm.  Mission St. at that time is actually pretty empty besides the occasional weirdo, (which I spoke of here). So when a guy who was approaching me from the other direction passed me, I was able to get a fairly solid look at the guy’s face.

Since I had music blaring, I initially was not very focused on staring at this guy’s face but hey, why would I care, right?  But I had one of those weird and awkward double take moments where you think you recognize someone but it happened so quickly that you passed up the opportunity to really confirm what you think you saw.  After I passed the guy and walked like 20 feet, I thought to myself, wait a minute.  Was that guy Dave Chappelle?  I went back and forth in my mind at first, from ‘I’m pretty darn sure that was Dave Chappelle’ to ‘Sean don’t be such a racist bastard, the one black guy you see walking towards you and you think it’s Dave Chappelle?  Gimme a break’.  As these two voices were back and forth in my caffeinated head, I couldn’t help think, what if it was really the man him, Mr. Dave Chappelle?  So I stopped, turned around and was surprised to see that he had also stopped, just in front of an apartment complex that I had just passed.  This was all actually right beside the San Francisco Chronicle building, if you know where that is (if not, here go).  He seemed to be waiting for someone to open the door, giving me the perfect chance to get a better look at the guy and confirm for myself if it was the real Dave Chappelle.

I turned around, performed a magnificent “fake” phone call motion, as if this guy was really concerned about catching me “spying” on him.  I like how my first reaction to anything I do that might not be totally open and honest is to do it in the most ridiculously covert (and obvious) way I can.  Whenever I’m at the supermarket and I decide for some reason or another that I’ve chosen a product that I no longer want and I am in a different section of the market, I do this move where I pretend to bring the product up to the shelf, look at another product and smoothly walk away as if I’ve “accidentally” forgotten about the product that I’ve left in the shelf.  I think to myself that I’ve fooled the ‘eyes in the sky’ who watch over every move I make in the supermarket.  Oh, I live in a real life Truman Show, you are all in on this adventure, right?  I get it now. Is anyone else this ridiculous?

By the time I was able to actually get close enough to see this guy’s face, the person he was waiting for had opened the door and swooped inside the lobby part of this apartment complex.  Just my luck.  Anyway, I was still able to get about the same view that I got initially from the street and I’m still fairly confident this was Chappelle.  Just really really odd.  The guy was walking by himself on Mission and 5th at like 9pm by himself and met a small Asian woman in a mediocre apartment building?  Very very odd.  So odd, it makes me skeptical…

I will say though that my ‘celebrity’ spotting has some merit to it.  I was getting a cup of coffee at Coupa Cafe just around the corner from the office a few weeks ago and almost the same thing happened.  I was leaving, walking back to the office and I thought I spotted a guy that looked just like Phil Hellmuth, the famous poker player. Every poker player knows of this guy but outside of poker, nobody knows of him.  So I kind of did the same thing where I walked all the way back to the office, going back and forth in my mind about whether or not this guy was who I thought it was.  When I got back to the office, I decided I couldn’t continue the day without knowing for sure, so I walked all the way back, did another one of my super duper secret covert maneuvers, in an attempt to catch a glimpse of this guy without “anyone” knowing I was only there to confirm a Phil Hellmuth spotting.  Sure enough, I caught a glimpse of the guy’s hat before I could see his face and it had large lettering on the back spelling out “PHIL HELLMUTH”.  My internal dilemma went away