Yeah, a high school friend and I got lucky with our indie band ~15 years ago and have been touring internationally ever since.  I don’t consider myself famous but I do sign a lot of autographs and take selfies with random people who recognize me on the street.  Once was when I was Christmas shopping with mom and the cashier recognized me, which was cool because she’d recently moved to the US from Latvia. My mom was like “if you have fans all the way in Latvia, why are you still broke?” 

There’s also been a bunch of times where I see someone wearing my band’s merch and I go up to them and say ‘that band fucking sucks!’ to see if they’ll argue with me or recognize me.  It’s about 50/50.  

The best was when I got a job in a restaurant kitchen to cover bills after the band got stiffed on two festival feels totaling $100k.  I was fucking pissed at the world and especially the music industry.  So I’m in training on my first day and my band’s song came on the Spotify playlist, triggering me like a mf. So I go to the FOH and I’m like ay you think we could skip this track? And dude says “yeah totally I fuckin hate this band”. I didn’t tell him, but a few days later he found out and apologized like crazy because he was an aspiring indie rocker himself and thought he’d just blown an industry connection.  

Anyway, aside from myself, my middle school bully is a well-known ncaa men’s basketball coach now.  We were on the same team and he used to call me and the other 3rd stringers ‘f-slur squad’ and pantsed me more times than I could count.  His dad is way more famous than him though.

A woman I performed with in college is one of the most famous poets in the game right now, not sure if that counts. She performed at Carnegie hall recently.

Oh shit I already commented but I just remembered another one that’s way better…

Back when I was a sophomore in college, my (very very progressive) liberal arts school held its yearly school-sponsored orgy called the Sleaze Ball.  There were signs everywhere saying ‘no penetration on the dance floor’ that most people ignored.  This was like 2004-05, so before everyone had a camera in their pocket.  So this one dude, who was notorious for being a spoiled rich kid, shows up with a fancy professional digital camera and starts taking pictures.  A friend of mine confronts him like “yooo you can’t do that here, the whole point is that we can let loose get naked and not worry about pervs and outside judgement, etc” but he says “no I have a right to photograph in public”. So naturally, she smacks the camera lens out of her face, causing it to fall the floor. Without missing a beat, the dude winds up and cracks her right across the jaw, knocking her out.  Another friend of mine, who resembles a bear in both size and attitude, leaps up and tackles him, requiring about 10 of us to pull him off.  

This was weeks before the photo douche was supposed to graduate, but the school had a strict zero tolerance for violence policy. So the kid’s rich parents make a massive donation and he’s allowed to stay on campus and graduate.  

Fast forward a decade or so and I’m flipping channels at a friend’s house when the TV show Catfish comes on and I realize the host is the dude who knocked out a girl because he wanted to photograph her nude against her will. Now he’s probably the most famous person I went to school with.