2 celebrities - 1 sighting, 1 encounter

celebrity sighting

A little more than a month ago, the husband and I and a friend were wandering around Disneyland doing rides, and we got in line for Big Thunder Railroad. We had gotten to the front and were assigned 2 rows, so we waited for the next train to come in so we could board. I noticed across the track that a ride cast member (CM) was taking a girl to be measured to see if she was tall enough to go on the attraction. It occurred to me that the man with them looked a lot like Noah Wyle. And then I realized that it was in fact Noah Wyle. I was actually a little surprised that I still recognized him because I haven't seen anything he's been in for quite some time, but then, he didn't look any different from the last time that I *had* seen him. The girl (presumably his daughter) was tall enough to ride, so Noah and his daughter (and the plaid-dressed CM who was presumably their assigned escort) all ended up getting into the same train that we were riding. So, I pretty much spent the entire ride watching the backs of their heads. I saw Noah turn to his daughter a couple of times, and Noah was smiling, so I'm assuming his daughter was enjoying herself as well. After we got back into the station, we exited behind them, and I saw them join up with several other people. And yes, I managed not to follow him around the park for the rest of the evening.


celebrity encounter

My niece was on a JetBlu flight from New York to Burbank, and the row she was in was empty except for her, so she was enjoying that she could lay across the seats and be comfortable taking a nap. Shortly into the flight, she heard a woman ask if she could have the aisle seat in that row because her row was very crowded. My niece was not happy about having been awakened from her sleep and now having to share her empty space, but she begrudgingly agreed. She still took up the remaining two spaces but said she pretty much had her "feet and butt all up in her [woman's] face". She said she also had to get up to use the restroom a couple of times during the flight, so the woman would have had to let her in and out of her seat. She was half-asleep, and she'd taken her contacts off and didn't have her glasses on so really hadn't paid that much attention to the woman now sitting in her row. She said she was also a bit distracted because she'd noticed that Peter Facinelli (No, I had no idea who he was when she told me his name. She said he was married to Jennie Garth, so I looked him up on imdb.) was sitting in the row or two in front of her. She said she did notice at some point that the woman had a script with her, but it wasn't the couple pages of sides that you'd get if you were auditioning - they were full-size scripts, so my niece had a fleeting wonder about who this woman was. Hours later, as the plane was about to make its final descent into Burbank airport and the flight attendants were collecting all of the remaining drink cups and trash, my niece overhead one of the flight attendants approach the woman and say how much he liked her in "Leverage" and other projects. That's when my niece realized the woman she'd allowed to sit in her row was Jeri Ryan. She put her glasses on and looked, and yep, that's who it was. She was mortified at that point that she hadn't been nicer to her. I asked her if Jeri had seemed annoyed at all, and she said no, she was nice, and she even passed her beverage to her from the the flight attendant when they went around with drink service. My niece said she also thought about her hair being a mess and such, but since she'd had her feet and butt all up in her face already, it was pretty much too late by then. She said she did kind of stare at her once they landed and Jeri got her things to leave. My niece said Jeri was dressed simply in jeans and didn't have any makeup on and was very unassuming. I told her that she hadn't actually done anything wrong. She did give up the seat, and being on the aisle, you pretty much expect that you're going to have to get up if someone wants to use the restroom. I also figured that since she was flying fairly incognito (neither my niece nor I had expected that Jeri Ryan would be flying in a regular seat in JetBlu), she might have actually liked just being treated like a normal person, and it really wasn't like my niece was rude to her or anything. My niece said that she knew she had to tell me this story because she knew I was a Star Trek fan. So after she told me her story, I told her my Noah Wyle story, which she enjoyed.