The time the president asked me "what's up?"

Every year, on the Friday after Thanksgiving, my family gets a bunch of wine, makes a ton of pasta and then sits around for hours talking. It's hands down one of my favorite days of the year. Somewhere between the last course and the sixth bottle of wine, various friends of mine come over to join in the festivities. It always ends with dancing- often to the Roots (my mom got really into the Seed 2.0 during Thanksgiving '05 causing Caroline mid-dance to sashay over to me, furrow her brow and say "Does your mom know what this song is about?")

This year we went around and asked various questions like "Tell us something that no one at this table knows about you" or "What's your dream dinner date?" It also included the question "Who is the most famous person you've ever met?"

Now I've been pretty fortunate in this category. I chalk it up to simply noticing famous people in my vicinity and then going up to talk to them. Granted, I can't talk to a cute hipster at Union Pool but give me Elvis Costello in the Uffizi and I can go on for hours. Anyway, in honor of last nights White House Correspondents dinner this is the story of the most famous person I've ever met.

In 2006 I was an intern for a production company right outside of Washington, DC (this actually was video production but having it on my resume got me a job as a PRINT production project manager, something I knew nothing about. But that's a funny little anecdote for another day.) ANYWAY, in addition to cataloging hours and hours of B-roll footage of things like airplanes, I also got to drive a big SUV around Capital Hill (it was used to haul all the equipment but no one wanted to pay to park it anywhere so I had to drive it around for hours while the real employees worked inside) and go to Starbucks. One particular day I was in one of the Senate buildings making sure that no one tripped over the light cords. This is literally what I did for eight hours. I stood a bunch of cables that were taped down to the floor and pointed them out to people like Joe Lieberman. (similar to shown) "Oh excuse me Senator, please mind the cords." No one tripped so I consider that a success. Funnily enough (again, foreshadowing) the only person I really, really wanted to see that day was Hilary Clinton. I saw a bunch of B-list senators like Dianne Feinstein but, alas, no Hilary.

About half way through my day I was leaning against the wall when I saw a tall black man heading towards me. Wanting to make sure he didn't trip I cleared my throat in preparation of the "Please watch the cords" I was about to say. As he got closer, I realized who he was: Barack Obama. Now this was at the time when I could never remember if his first name was Obama or Barack (whatever, I'm not ashamed to admit it and you shouldn't be either) so rather than risk calling him Senator Barack which would have been weird, I just said "Hey Senator, what's up?" I COMPLETELY forgot to tell him about the cords putting both him and (as I know now) our great country's future in grave danger. Luckily for us, Mr. Obama is a smart, intuitive man who is capable of STEPPING over cables taped to the ground with not only ease but grace! So he stepped over the cords, looked at me, HEAD NODDED and said "Hey, what's up?" and I said (giggling) "Not much."

And that is the story of how I met the most famous person in the world.