Chuck Colson Award: latest update

The quality and quantity of submissions to the Chuck Colson Award have been astonishing (click here for further explanation). You need to read them all.

I hope you keep them coming, with multiple entries allowed and a premium on live spotting and photographs.

Here are just a few moving, life-changing encounters I have learned about in the last 24 hours:

Chris C once queued up behind Commons Speaker Bernard Weatherill at a pharmacy as he waited to pick up a prescription.

B. Barth once stood in line behind Robert "Bud" McFarlane to buy tickets to the movie "My Life as a Dog."

Ed Koch stepped on Brian's foot at a county fair.

VAR shares a dry cleaner with former Governor Tommy Thompson, who has, apparently, a lot of dry cleaning.

PM's wife once dated Jimmy Hoffa's grandson.

Keri possesses Gray Davis's gubernatorial cufflinks.

Steve Schwartz has been kissed by President Kenneth Kaunda.

Jim Perrin sat next to C.Everett Koop on an airplane.

and Dwight Weeks had a bagel bought for him by Governor Jim McGreevey.

Top that.

Comments

[Norman Briffa]

In the 1970's (must have been 1974) stood at the bottom of the stairs outside Auberge de Castille , where the office of the Prime Minister of Malta is and saw your mate Dom Mintoff greet Colonel Gadaffi with a warm hug.

[Gabor Kovacs]

I once left a comment on Danny Finkelstein's Times blog.

[Pete Craske]

I once met the President of Namibia in the capital of Swaziland at a "traditional Swazi village" on his State Visit to the country.

[Islington Neil]

I possess an uncashed, personal cheque for the sum of £10.00 made out to me from former Chancellor of the Exchequer Ken Clarke, dating from May 1997.

[tank]

my former friend Gerard who claimed to be an Alumnus of the University of Arkansas claimed to have been given Chelsea Clinton's Teddy Bear, in gratitude for his baby sitting skills. Depriving your child of a much loved comfort seemed like a weird way to thank your baby sitter, and i never saw the Bear. There you are.

[Islington Neil]

I met the Prime Minister of the Cook Islands (twice) during a week's stay there. Its not a very big place.

[Steve C]

I once queued for the ATMs at Waterloo Station behind Chris Patten. I think he withdrew £50

[David Gillies]

I've hung out a few times with the niece of the ex-President of Costa Rica.

[Sam]

I once worked with the son of a former Prime Minister of Barbados in the kitchen of the Pizza Hut in Cambridge, England.

Also, while walking with my girlfriend in front of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1990, we crossed the path of science fiction writer Ray Bradbury walking what I swear was a cat on a leash. He was wearing short shorts that exposed large and distressing purple blotches and painful-looking varicose veins. He made eye contact with a glare that could have peeled paint.

[Derrelynn]

I worked at a South Texas FBO (fixed base operator)- a sort of gas station for private planes. I once saw Henry Kissinger, and I made coffee and put together a cheese and fruit plate for Ed Meese (who was Attorney General at the time) to take on the next leg of their trip. Lots of Secret Service guys, of course...

[Kevin]

I was working for an investment firm in Chicago, and we'd been in DC for a couple days of meetings. We were heading back from National Airport to O'Hare, and our flight was overbooked. One of our partners was booted off the flight and I was upgraded to first class (nice to have a lot of miles) to make space in coach. I took my aisle seat in the first row, and seated directly across the aisle from me was none other than Illinois congressman Henry Hyde, one of the House managers of the Clinton impeachment. Weirdly, the window seat next to him was empty. I waited to see if they would let our partner or any of the other 20 or so people in the standby line on the plane to take that seat, but the door closed and off we went. I was totally baffled by this until dinner came.

First-class tray tables fold out from the armrest and across one's lap. I hadn't really noticed just how obese Mr. Hyde was until he opened the tray table on the empty seat and ate his dinner off of it. He had apparently bought two first class tickets back to Chicago because he was too fat to eat off of his own tray table. We gave our partner who got bumped from the flight in favor of Mr. Hyde's stomach a very hard time about his relative clout.

Rod Blagojevich, now the governor of Illinois but then a junior congressman, was way in the back of coach but worked the crowd throughout the flight and seemed a genuinely friendly and outgoing guy.

[Mark]

When I was 8 years old, just after the election returns came in, I wrote then U.S. president-elect John F. Kennedy a congratulatory letter with a crayon drawing of Abraham Lincoln on the back. JFK wrote me back on his U.S. Senate stationary thanking me for the "very kind" letter. I've still got the letter, in excellent condition, 46 years later.

[Joe Hogan]

Sometime around the time of the U.S.'s 1991 war to drive Saddam out of Kuwait, I stopped for lunch at a restaurant on City Island, a neighborhood of numerous seafood restaurants in the Bronx, NYC. As we drove up to the valet parking station we noticed quite a few blacked out SUV's and limos parked in the area.

We were seated at a table next to a door leading to a back room. After about five minutes the mystery of the black cars was solved when Tariq Azziz, then Saddam's foreign minister, exited surrounded by US and Iraqi security types.

He was in NY to appeal to the United Nations to not approve any action by the US and its coalition. He was apparently also a man in need of a good seafood meal. I sometimes wonder if he ever fantasizes about that meal in his current prison cell.

[Joe Hogan]

One other sighting worth posting was a regular encounter with Ayn Rand, accompanied by her husband, Frank O'Connor at the Main Reading Room of the NYC Library Main Branch on 42nd St.

In the mid 60's, as a college student, I was a regular customer of the library's vast resources. On at least three occasions I saw Rand and O'Connor, usually as they were leaving and I was entering or vice versa, she leading and he following respectfully behind.

[Andy Bates]

I used to cook at a restaurant in Seattle and cooked an omelet for Barry Commoner the year he ran for president, 1980, I believe. I took the omelet to him and wished him good luck. He seemed so startled that anyone even recognizsd him he was speechless.