Flash forward to Chicago and the Hollywood Celebrities Show that took place on Saturday, October 1, 2011. After having been familiar with the series for over 30 years, I was finally standing face to face with one those badass coppers. Starsky, in case you’re not sure, was the dark haired guy who was played by Paul Michael Glaser. Although the role of Starsky was clearly the role with which he is most commonly identified, I think I was a little more thrilled to be meeting Perchik from the 1971 film Fiddler on the Roof.

In fact, Glaser is multi-talented, having worked extensively as an actor, director, and now author of the book Chrystallia and the Source of Light, a fantasy volume aimed primarily at teens and young adults. He was really pushing for us to purchase this book, but I took the typical course of action and bought a singed Starsky & Hutch shot, hoping all the while that one day I might meet David Soul and get the signature set completed.

He seemed a little bit taken aback by my striking a deal with him to pose for $10 instead of $20, and then questioned whether I was going to sell my signed picture on eBay since I asked not to have it personalized, but overall, he seemed like a pretty nice guy. I guess there’s a reason he was usually the ‘good cop.’

Celebrities of the Fall 2011 Chicago Hollywood Celebrities Show will continue…

For fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the photo above is quite awesome, but innocuous enough. However, there is a story or two about it. The setup itself isn’t all that exciting. I simply paid the exorbitant fee for the photo op while attending the Wizard’s World Comic Con in Chicago, Illinois, on Saturday, August 13, 2011. That was the easy part. I worked for my money and I plunked it down.

In order to do this, you might guess that I have an affinity for all things related to Buffy and her cast of slayers…and you’d be right. You can see from previous postings that I have met many people involved with the show (and movie) including Mercedes McNab, Clare Kramer, Emma Caulfield, Richard Herd, Elisabeth Röhm, Charles Martin Smith, Candy Clark, Ken Lerner, Kristy Swanson, Juliet Landau, and Mark Metcalf. I had even seen the original Buffy House and the location for Wolfram & Hart. We won’t even count my missed chances like meeting Felicia Day or Serena Scott Thomas. Nor my encounter with the Buffy wax figure. This was my track record up until now.

Understandably, I was excited to attend this Comic Con with the chance to meet four of the major Buffy cast members for the first time: Nicholas Brendon (Xander Harris) , Charisma Carpenter (Cordelia Chase), James Marsters (Spike), and Julie Benz (Darla). As a bonus, Nicholas Brendon’s twin brother, who had acted as his stand-in and prominently played his look-alike in many episodes of the series, was present. Also three were two actresses whom I had met earlier in the year: Mercedes McNab (Harmony Kendall) and Clare Kramer (Glory).

My goal was to get photos with the main four, but I soon found out that they were not posing for any photos at the tables. The only way to get good pictures with them was to pay for the professional photo op offered by Froggy’s Photos. As I understood it, you were free to take pictures at the tables, but they were instructed not to look at the cameras. Silliest thing I’ve ever heard. It caused me some stress, but I soon decided that I was going to just try and enjoy my meetings with them and then shell out the (choke, gasp) $190 to get a group photo with them all. Kill seven birds with one stake, so to speak.

But first I had to get the autographs I wanted. I began with Charisma Carpenter. At this point I hadn’t quite made up my mind about getting the group photo. Being nervous, I accidentally chose a photo of her from the TV series Legend of the Seeker. I also noticed that when my friend Jason snapped a photo of us, she did in fact look at the camera at the last minute. But since we were trying to be sneaky, she didn’t have time to smile. But I could tell that she was snubbing Froggy’s instructions. Like her character Cordelia, she had the attitude, but also like Cordelia, she was utterly lovable.

Charisma tries to pose as she signs the photo that I’d later return

Eventually I got the guts to go back and admit that I chose the wrong photo and ask her to swap it for a Cordelia picture. He handler refused me, but she said sure. As I handed her a picture and she began to sign it, she said “you know this is from Charmed right?” I said “oops”, so she chucked it aside with a huff. I was loving this. It was like meeting Cordelia Chase in the flesh. I ended up walking away with a signed photo of her as Cordelia. This was our second of four encounters of the day.

Now, this is Cordelia

I then moved on to James Marsters who played Spike. His fee was $40 for a signature, which was $10 more than the others. For this $10, you got nothing but utter friendliness. He was quite talkative and accomodating. But he did spout off Froggy’s instructions (actually saying “Froggy taught me well”) when it came to the picture taking. He said to take all the pics that we wanted, but he couldn’t look at the camera. A sigh for Spike.

The inimitable Spike

James Marsters makes $40 for two seconds of work

And he does it without looking!

But I’ll admit, he was probably one of the most friendly guys at the show

Finally, I went through Nicholas Brendon’s like. He was sitting with his twin brother Kelly Donovan, and somehow Kelly looked more like Nicholas than Nicholas did. I could have sworn I got it right when I approached Kelly to sign a Xander pic, but he told me that this was his brother. So I nicely bypassed him and moved down to the real Xander Harris. (Remarkably, it wasn’t until doing this posting that I figured out who was who in the photo at the top of the posting – even getting it totally wrong in my Christmas Newsletter.)

The real Xander, not his twin

Chatting with Nicholas Brendon, telling him that some guy at his table looks like him

No ask, no look, no tell

I had already had a signed photo of Julie Benz, who played the beautiful Darla. Bob had picked it up for me at a Hollywood Collectors Show in the early 2000′s. Therefore I only needed to get a photo taken with her. The group shot would cover that.

My signed photo of Julie Benz

The time rolled around at 3:40pm for my group shot. Froggy’s was dramatically behind schedule at this point, so when I finally got close to the Buffy gang, we were herded through like cattle. James Marsters was doing most of the talking and told me “ah, welcome back!” He posed me between him and Nicholas Brendon, whom I thought was Kelly Donovan at the time. When the single bulb has flashed and I was dismissed, I walked over to get my bag from Jason and he informed me that Charisma Carpenter had looked away. Uh-oh. Turns out I should have gone back and demanded a retake. When I got my photo later on that day, this is what I found:

Standing: Nicholas Brendon, Brad F., James Marsters, Kelly Donovan. Seated: Clare Kramer, a distracted Charisma Carpenter, Mercedes McNab, Julie Benz

So there it was. $190 for this ruined photo op. Trying to get the photo in the first place was a melee so I decided to bide my time and approach Froggy’s later on. In the meantime, I decided to approach the culprit, the delightfully snippy Cordelia… er Charisma Carpenter.

As per usual, the handler tried to stop me from making any requests, but I asked her anyway. “I was really hoping to get a nice picture with you, but you kind of looked away. So can I get a nice picture with you now?” Of course I could…and did. She apologized for ‘ruining the picture’ and grabbed it and signed it – for free, of course.

A great shot with the beautiful Charisma

The “look-away’ version, signed by Charisma… Oops, she says

Weeks later, I decided to deal with Froggy’s. I demanded some recourse for the lackluster way that this photographer treated this photo op, having a full or partial refund in mind. Instead, he had his fix-it guy do some alterations to the photo, and I ended up with the picture at the top of the posting. Admittedly, it was flawless. No one on earth including me could tell that this had been doctored in any way.

Of course it led to the moral dilemma of having an ‘honest photo’. I mean Buffy herself could have been added to the photo using this method. Froggy sent me two hard copies of the fixed photo, jpeg images of both, and I have the original ‘look-away’ photo signed by Charisma. In the end, after having been somewhat appeased by Froggy and especially by Charisma herself, I decided to let it drop.

Like the show itself, there wasn’t a dull moment in assembling autographs and photo ops with the cast members of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. My hopes are pretty high that I’ll stake a few more.

Celebrities of the 2011 Wizard World Chicago Comic Con will continue…

Still, whenever I see a Twilight Zone photo among the collection of offerings from various celebrities at various shows, I try to snap it up. The following are three such celebrities, all of whom were in attendance at the Hollywood Show in Burbank on October 8, 2011.

The first of the three appeared in one of the spookiest episodes of the series, Twenty-Two. In the episode, Arlene Martel is the lady who utters the sinister phrase “Room for one more, honey!” first at the entrance to a morgue, and then at the entrance to an airplane. She also appeared in the TZ episode What You Need. Among her other credits were appearances in The Monkees, I Dream of Jeanie, Star Trek, and Columbo. She was a very sweet lady and took delight in adding the inscription on the photo as I requested it.

There was room for one more picture with her

H.M. Wynant

Next up was H.M. Wynant, who portrayed the leading role of David Ellington in the TZ episode The Howling Man. He would later return to perform on a handful of Twilight Zone radio productions including Of Late I Think of Cliffordville. He also made appearances in Batman (as Frosty), Get Smart, Dallas, and The West Wing. He too was an exceptionally nice fellow.

Scene from The Howling Man

A couple of howlin’ mens

Finally, I got the chance to meet the extremely attractive Morgan Brittany. She had begun her acting career on The Twilight Zone in two episodes, Nightmare as a Child and Caesar and Me, under her birth name Suzanne Cupito. As a child, she also starred in The Andy Griffith Show and the movie Yours, Mine, and Ours.

Morgan Brittany aka Suzanne Cupito

She would go on to bigger (but perhaps not better) things as an adult actress, scoring a recurring role on Dallas as Katherine Wentworth. She’s also had roles in The Dukes of Hazzard, The Love Boat, and Married…With Children. Like her Twilight Zone counterparts, she was very kind as well, and quite impressed that I not only chose the TZ photo, but could name the episode in which she appeared.

Caesar and Me

Morgan and me

I’m sure there will be more Twilight Zone celebrities in the future of my Twilight Zone-ish life. At least that’s what the signpost up ahead says.

Celebrities of the Fall 2011 Hollywood Show will continue…

But despite those fancy schmancy films, she is still too closely associated with her role in Laverne & Shirley not to embrace it. I met the other half, Cindy Williams, in Chicago in the Fall of 2009. So it would have taken quite a bit to stop me from getting Penny Williams to add her signature to my photo of the pair, when she appeared at the Chicago Hollywood Celebrities Show on October 1, 2011.

Despite having seen Penny Marshall in person amongst a crowd of theatre-goers in 1995, I had never gotten a picture with her. So this was a must – even if it did cost an extra $20 to do so. Her counterpart Cindy Williams was also there, but it would have been quite a hassle, and probably rather expensive to get a picture with the both of them together, so I’m settling with having my two individual shots. And for whatever reason, apparently it was too much effort to write Laverne, so she just went with the letter “L”. What the L?

Although she looked unsurprising rather haggard, she was still pretty nice and friendly. And she was smoking one of those odd water cigarettes, which must have been part of an effort to quit smoking. Surely those can’t be all that satisfying. And don’t call me Satisfying.

Celebrities of the Fall 2011 Chicago Hollywood Celebrities Show will continue…

This dates back to 1997 when I was informed by a customer shopping at the Spinning Road store where I was working that there was a toy and memorabilia expo going on at the Hara Arena in Dayton. Appearing here would be Butch Patrick, who had portrayed Eddie Munster in The Munsters. I believe he was only charging $5 per signed photo, so I picked up two of them, the one at the top of the posting and the one below. I didn’t even think to bring along a camera to get a photo with him.

The next year I was able to add an authentic Al Lewis signature to my collection by sending him $20 through the mail. This was a bit pricey for that time period, but I’m glad I got one since I never got the chance to meet him. (I also obtained a jointly signed Car 54, Where Are You? photo that had been inscribed by Al Lewis and Charlotte Rae around the same time).

Around this same time, my friend Bob picked up a nice Pat Priest – who had portrayed the disturbingly normal Marilyn Munster in the series - signed photo for me at one of the Hollywood Collectors Shows that I didn’t attend.

In 2010, I passed Butch Patrick at L.A.X. airport, but didn’t see him. Bob pointed out this fact as he picked me up at the curb. At this point all I needed was to get a picture with him.

Finally, my chance came to get pictures with both Butch Patrick and Pat Priest when they appeared at the Hollywood Show in Burbank on February 12, 2011. Butch seemed like a nice guy (although one of the other celebrities at the show would tell you otherwise; more on that later), and willingly posed for a picture with me based on the strength of me telling him that I had met him before.

With one of the photos that he had signed for me 14 years earlier

Pat Priest was equally sweet and although her prices indicated an extra fee for posing for pictures, she only collected the $20 for signing the photo at the top of the posting, and beamed her infectious smile for a picture with me.

I’m actually quite excited to give The Munsters another chance one day once I’ve obtained the two seasons of the show on DVD.

Celebrity encounters of the Winter 2011 Hollywood Show will continue…