Last night, my boyfriend and I ran into Drew Barrymore at the grocery store. My boyfriend deftly grabbed her attention by announcing that I had something to tell her, and when all eyes were suddenly on me, I immediately humiliated myself by reporting quite proudly that she and I share a birthday. It was sort of meant to be an innocuous factoid, although I have no idea why I thought she’d find it remotely interesting or flattering. I mean, she was very gracious, but written all over her face were the words, “Oh, great, another Crazy – try not to get stabbed.”  She kept repeating “happy birthday” to me in this kind of forcedly jovial way, the way you might humor someone of whose mental faculties you are suspicious; thus, in order to put her at ease I had to stress that I knew it wasn’t ACTUALLY our mutual birthday THAT DAY, but just that I thought it was an interesting bit of trivia.  I mean, to ME. Admittedly, it makes no difference to her that some dude in the grocery store is also a Pisces, but it was good news to me, and I wanted to share. I wasn’t trying to make a huge deal out of our “special connection” or asking her for some kind of blood-sister oath.

But, as it turns out, it’s a lot harder to convince a celebrity that you’re not a mentally unstable lunatic than you might think, and I kind of made the matter worse by telling her that our HALF birthday was just last month. Apparently, that kind of obsessive attention to the calendar is not an adequate signifier of sound mind. And although he meant nothing by it, I don’t think she was thrilled when my boyfriend innocently pointed out that, despite being born on the same day as I am, she’s still several years older than me.

But, all things considered, she was a lot more polite than anyone would expect of someone in her position. And her hair looked really, really good.

– Caleb Roehrig