Thou Shalt Not Question Stephen Fry

We were going to eat out tonight… after a trip to the book store… So… totally creeped out by the recent article in Harpers about toxic chemicals in your blood and a report on Trans fat that I read… I ventured out with the rest of the fam… and, even though it was a few more miles drive, I just had to take us to Knoxville’s La Costa, which promised a dedication to local and organic ingredients, and, as learned in many past brunch visits was pretty damn good. So… we’re sitting down and going over the menu. I look up and make eye contact with an incredibly tall person, who was leaving the restroom. I asked my wife if she’d noticed him. “Yeah, that’s the guy who asked them to bring in an extra table from outside”. Oh… did, uh, he have an English accent? So, for the length of our meal I marveled that Stephen Fry was inexplicably in Knoxville… eating dinner… just a few tables down from us. Jeeves. The voice of the Harry Potter books. The voice of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. The librarian in MirrorMask. Deitrich in V for Vendetta. And Lord Snot in the Young Ones!

How? Why? In Knoxville, Tennessee?

I pretty much never ask for autographs. I asked Jack Kirby for his once. I absolutely never pose for pictures with celebs I meet. But this was Stephen Fry. The smartest man in Britain. And there he was in Knoxville. He graciously posed with us (It took two takes, maybe if we’d gone for three little boy and me might have looked better. This is seriously the worst photo of him ever), we gabbed a bit about his project of visiting all 50 states. I almost wished he was going somewhere next other than Savannah (he’d never been), so that I didn’t have to gush so much about how pretty it is. (It really is, and I felt for the presumably Knoxvillian folk he was dining with).

It’s no joke that Stephen Fry is smarter that the rest of us, and he has recently started doing a blog. You should read it. He seemed genuinely surprised that I even knew he did such a thing.