I received the call a week before as my name had been picked from a hat along with three others from my seventh-grade class to conduct the celebrity interview for the "Kidsday" insert of the Sunday edition of Newsday, which we were chosen to put together. The subject, a fresh-faced kid named Sarah Jessica Parker, was known for her work on the TV series Square Pegs and was then part of an ensemble cast in the TV mini-series A Year in the Life. Of course, I had not seen either of these shows.
It was an hour before the interview. The team had gathered on the train speeding toward Manhattan with our parents and the "Kidsday" editor in tow. We diligently used this time to brainstorm what questions we could ask that would both entertain and inform our readers while not alienating our subject. Once we had them scripted, we debated over the order and arrived at the following:
2) Are you dating?
3) On a scale of one to ten, how would you rate yourself?
4) What roles do you like to portray? Good or bad?
5) In your spare time, what do you enjoy doing? What hobbies?
6) After you complete a production, does the whole cast go out for a celebration?
7) Right now are you working on a new movie?
8) Do you follow your horoscope?
9) Was becoming an actor difficult?
10) Are you related to Fess Parker (TV's Daniel Boone)?
Upon arrival, we exited Penn Station with a sense of purpose and found the designated restaurant in a timely fashion; however, our interviewee had not.
We looked at each other nervously and stirred our straws around our water glasses. Our editor used the pay phone and was able to track down Sarah Jessica Parker at a different restaurant across town with the same name. Minor mix up, we were told she was then on her way.
I recall a sense of excitement when she came in the room. She was seated at the head of the table and I to her left. I remember the obligatory small talk and then taking a cue from our editor to begin. I immediately abandoned the script and got down to brass tacks ... "Are you dating?"
My colleague, Patricia, recalled my asking Sarah Jessica Parker for a date rather than who she was dating and her telling me diplomatically, "if I were only ten years older ..." Unfazed, I hammered away until she confessed that she was dating Robert Downey Jr. I followed up by asking her what she did with her money and our editor gasped, but the team perked up in their chairs and Sarah Jessica Parker smiled and said that she and Robert had just purchased an old house in L.A. Her money was spent fixing it up.
Years later I would find the questionnaire I had abandoned, tucked away in a desk drawer with the inscription, "to david, it really was a treat speaking w/you -- my best to you -- love Sarah jessica parker."
Our starry paths would cross again four years later when she was filming Honeymoon in Vegas. Her trailer was parked on Hester Street beside P.S. 130 where I was working as a janitor. I did not have cause to see her then, but fate would save its best laugh for last. A decade after that I would gain free admission to a night club in Manhattan as the bouncer mistook me for Berger, Carrie Bradshaw's boyfriend on Sex and the City.
(Editor's note: Special thanks to Patricia Alcamo McCulloch for sharing her pictures and recollections of the event.)