Well...huh...

[BYapes]

 (Because I can't think of anything else to put as the subject.)
 So, last night, I went out with my family to celebrate my middle sister's graduating as an RN.
 (FYI: the party for this consisted of: Me, my parents, the newly graduated RN sister (middle child), and my youngest sister and her husband.)
 So we're all standing there, waiting for a table to open, and since this is a Friday night , that would take a while. I'm standing there, next to my brother in law watching him play a mobile game, when I spot a group of people coming in. Naturally I move to help hold the door open for them, and that would be that, right?
 Something about this group of people sparked something in my family, and in minutes they were all talking about it...except me, who had no clue what was going on.  In fact, that was my very question ("What?") to my brother in law, who finally clued me in on what I had done...
...which was to hold the door open for Muhammad Ali and his family/retinue.
 Holy. Shit.
 (In my defense, the only sports I pay any sort of more than usual attention to are the Super Bowl-for the ads, whatever Olympics are running at the moment, and occasionally gymnastics)
 As you can imagine, that was the talk of the night.
 So..yeah, that happened.
Brian Y.
Seed Chronicles

[ordnance11]

Well, in your defense have you ever seen him in photos? It was the same thing with me back in the 80's. In was getting out of LAX when there was a who gaggle of paparazzi following a guy coming up from behind me. Didn't figure out until I got home that it was Tom Jones!
__________________
Into terror!,  Into valour!
Charge ahead! No! Never turn
Yes, it's into the fire we fly
And the devil will burn!
- Scarlett Pimpernell

[Star Ranger4]

Huh! and I bet they never realized that you held the door just cause your that sort of nice guy, not that you recognized them
Hear that thunder rolling till it seems to split the sky?
That's every ship in Grayson's Navy taking up the cry-
NO QUARTER!!!
-- "No Quarter", by Echo's Children

[Stephen Mann]

In college, I belonged to a group that brought people to campus for one-man plays, that sort of thing. My freshman year, we had Vincent Price doing a play about Oscar Wilde (it was very good). On show nights, the group member would meet at the theater about an hour ahead of time to keep people out. The theater had lots of side doors, and people were always trying to sneak in early. That caused us problems, so our priority was keeping everyone out until 15 minutes before the show.

About 45 minutes before show-time, I see an old man coming through a side door and hurry over to give him the bum's rush. My hand is out to shove him back, and just before I say something insulting (some customers can be annoyingly persistent), our group leader pops out from behind him and introduces me to Vincent Price.

In my defense, his huge black glasses disguised him well (I didn't know Price wore glasses!).

After the show, and the audience left, he stayed for about an hour and a half to talk to us and answer our questions. He was very nice and incredibly gracious.

[Bob Schroeck]

I've had my share of celebrity encounters, most of them when I was in college, oddly enough. From 1981 through 1984 I was in the Princeton Triangle Club. My senior year, a freshman by the name of Brooke Shields was also in the club, and while we weren't more than acquaintances we occasionally bantered. I missed a chance to meet Jimmy Stewart one Reunions weekend, but as I mentioned some years ago on the event of his death, Peggy and I ended up friends with Clark Gesner, the writer of You're A Good Man, Charlie Brown, who was also a Triangle alum. Michelle Robinson (now Obama) and I travelled in adjacent, very slightly intersecting social circles during the years we were both living in the same residential college, although it probably doesn't count as she was a pre-celebrity at that point. And those are only the ones I'm certain of -- it's possible that I had encounters with David Duchovny, Jeff Bezos and other now-famous names, but I couldn't tell you at this late date.

However, the event in my life closest to BYapes' story took place during spring break of my freshman year. A high school friend of mine -- the only other grad from my class to get into an Ivy League school -- was going to Yale, and I went up to New Haven to see him. Of course, that was the year that Jodie Foster was also a freshman at Yale. Saturday morning we're walking across a quad while talking, passing people going the other way, and Brian says, "Bob, that girl we just passed, that was Jodie Foster!" I look back and see a retreating head of blonde hair and think, "oh well, there goes my chance to catch a glimpse of her."

The next afternoon, I'm leaving the campus for the train station, talking to Brian as we walk through an arch out to the street. I'm not looking where I'm going and wham! I walk right into someone. I back up, muttering apologies, and realize that I've just come yea-close to bumping noses with Jodie Foster. Which just makes me even more flustered. We do the usual little "both try to get out of each other's way" dance before we manage to actually do so, and she heads on into the campus, while I continue out onto the street and my friend Brian laughs at me.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[ECSNorway]

I'll start this one by saying I never actually met the man myself.

But once upon a time, about 25 years ago now, when I was young and we had first moved here to Rochester, we stayed for a couple of weeks at the University Club, since our house's previous owners weren't fully moved out yet.

And while wandering semi-aimlessly about the place looking for something to do, I came across a stash of yearbooks from, of all places, Annapolis. The US Naval Academy.

So flipping through the yearbook for the class of '46, I hit a familiar name -- my grandfather's. He was the cadet class commander. And only a few pages away from him was another familiar name and face. I showed the book to my father, asked him if that other face was who I thought it was... and it turned out I was right.

It was only a few years ago that that face had stopped being on the nightly news all the time. Because it was Jimmy Carter, former POTUS.
--
Sucrose Octanitrate.
Proof positive that with sufficient motivation, you can make anything explode.

[DHBirr]

Being in the Army for a couple of decades naturally meant I came into contact with some officers who went on to higher rank.  I was just two or three months into my first assignment when Lieutenant Colonel Eric Shinseki, who later became Army Chief of Staff and had a very publicized falling out with Defense Department civilian leaders over the number of troops needed in Iraq, took command of my unit ... and I was in the staff section, so I spoke with him more than a few times.  It's not impossible that he'd remember me if prompted.
At Fort Irwin, I almost failed once to salute the post commander's van.  What saved me from an ass-chewing was that the van's occupants saw me start to salute, then abort it, making them realize the plate indicating the general was in the van hadn't been put in its holder.  That, and that something felt wrong to me, so I kept my eyes on the vehicle as it passed, saw the general staring out the rear window at me, and snapped my best salute.  He returned it in a very deliberate manner.  He was a brigadier general at the time; he went on to four stars, and after retiring, had a brief presidential candidacy.  Yeah; Wesley Clark.

And at more close quarters, during my time with the Defense Intelligence Agency, I one day paid a call on the latrine while visiting DIA Headquarters (which wasn't where I normally worked).  I didn't look closely at the two men who came to stand at the urinals on either side of me; restroom etiquette, y'know.  It wasn't until I'd finished and stepped back that I realized I'd been almost brushing shoulders with the Army lieutenant general who then commanded DIA and the command sergeant major who was the Agency's senior noncom.
-----
Big Brother is watching you.  And damn, you are so bloody BORING.

[Logan Darklighter]

I was doing volunteer work at a Dallas Sci-Fi convention once and said I could drive folks to and from the Airport or other spots if needed. 
So I wound up driving (and doing some bag holding and such) for J. Michael Straczynski and Claudia Christian the evening the convention started. (This was right on the cusp between Seasons 2 and 3 of Babylon 5 during it's broadcast run). A fellow acquaintance/volunteer at the con was the actual "Con Representative" tasked with meeting them at the airport and such. But his car was in the shop so that's why I was there. I was just the driver and paying attention to directions and traffic so I didn't have much chance to talk. But they were nice, funny people obviously having a pretty good time at the time. A couple of jokes about "should we tip the driver or not?" were made IIRC, and I said something to the effect that the company was tip enough. Which I think won me some points. ^_^

[Stephen Mann]

Well, if it's unknowing brushes with celebrity you want:

When I was 8, my family visited Colonial Williamsburg, and after a long day of walking around we had dinner at some dimly-lit place where the table candles put my brother and I to sleep after the peanut butter soup. The next day my parents told us that we had missed the people eating dinner at the table next to us: Chet Huntley and David Brinkley.

[Foxboy]

I used to ring Captain Kangaroo's groceries towards the end of his life, and the first ever Bass guitar I ever held belonged to the first Bassist for the Flaming Lips, who was the elder brother of one of my friends in Boy Scouts.
''We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat
them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.''

-- James Nicoll

[SkyeFire]

The only one I have like this was the time I passed by Michael Moore in the Flint airport (this would have been pre-Sicko, post-Farenheit). I managed to restrain my urge to strangle the lying propagandist ass...

A co-worker of mine was working at the Tesla factory about a year ago, installing the robotic assembly line, and unknowingly ended up explaining how his part of the assembly line worked to someone who wandered by and started asking questions... who later turned out to be none other than Elon Musk.