Actress Zoe McLellan
Elletu's daughter was in Acting Ensemble with her in high school, and j's daughter graduated with her. Her name is Zoe McLellan, and last night was her premier as the female lead in CBS' "NCIS New Orleans," a spin-off of the veteran top TV show, "NCIS." Being a fan of "NCIS," I watched the two-part pilot for the spin-off last spring and was glad to hear it was picked up for the fall schedule. Little did I realize at that time that Special Agent Brody was portrayed by a Port Orchard girl (woman), Zoe McLellan, who it turns out graduated from South Kitsap High School in 1992 (where she was the homecoming queen) three years before my daughter did. When the article about this local girl who made it big in Hollywood showed up in our local newspaper, I had a feeling two BVGO's would have known her. I remembered j's daughter being in musicals at the high school and Elletu's daughter being in Acting Ensemble. Sure enough they did know her, and they follow her on Facebook. This will be their 'Jimi Hendrix Story' in their lives.
It's always exciting to think of celebrities being from your area. Yes, Jimi Hendrix' funeral was at my Seattle church and I taught Sunday school to his little (step)sister, Janie Hendrix. Yes, I know best-selling author Debbie Macomber, went to church with her and taught piano to her. National radio personality Delilah also lives in and broadcasts from Port Orchard (right by Debbie's house). Since I tell these stories over and over and over again, I'm starting to think I might be kind of a 'star-struck' sort of person.
I have a weird little 'knack' for being loosely 'associated' with--perhaps just by proximity--well-known people. I don't know, maybe that's true for everyone. Of course I wish I could have made it big myself, but it's fun to take a look at how a truly ordinary person can brush past the truly notable people in a lifetime. It's true, most scenarios I cite are what you would call a real reach, and how many times have I heard that from my three children regarding my 'Jimi Hendrix Story'? As I mentioned before, they would groan whenever I mentioned it, that was until they found out that the pastor, my pastor, who officiated at Jimi Hendrix' funeral also dedicated them when they were babies. That changed everything. Then it became THEIR story.
But there were others, and allow me to take this little trip down Memory Lane:
**Royal Brougham Way near the stadiums in Seattle was named for a nationally-known Seattle sports reporter who went to our church. Royal Brougham, who was with the Seattle Post-Intelligencer for 68 years, was one of the longest tenured newspaper employees in the U.S. in history. He was friends with athletes such as Jack Dempsey and Babe Ruth and movie stars such as Bing Crosby. When I was two years old and crying about going to Sunday school, he gave me two pennies to put in the Sunday school offering, and I am told that made me quit crying. My family knew him until his death in 1978.
**I met Nanette Fabray at the Seattle airport when we were both waiting to take flights. I recognized her as Mary's mother on the "Mary Tyler Moore Show," my favorite.
**Kenny G went to the same junior high school (Sharples) and high school (Franklin) as my four siblings did. A Franklin classmate of his is in his band today. Not only did my daughter meet Kenny G in college, but he actually played one of her compositions (she graduated with a degree in composition) and he taught a seminar she attended.
**Wynton Marsalis also came to my daughter's university. When she met him she said she knew he was from Seattle and that she was from Port Orchard. He said, "Port Orchard? I spent a night in jail in Port Orchard!"
**Branford Marsalis taught my son while he was working on his master's degree at North Carolina Central University, and they appeared together in concert. We have a picture of the two of them out front playing together. Now they are professors together at NCCU and their names appeared together in Downbeat Magazine this month and their pictures will be in Jazz Times in a few months.
**David Foster also came to my daughter's university, and she had the incredible experience of being asked to transcribe a song for him before his Saturday night concert there. She was alone with him for several hours, he would play, she would transcribe. Then he invited her to stick around for his concert, getting her in for free as part of his crew. Good thing she said yes, because before the concert they realized his synthesizer would not work. None of his guys could get it working. My daughter asked if she could give it a try. They looked at her skeptically, her being a girl, with long blond hair no less. But she fooled them all---she fixed it! David Foster, by the way, gave her his card and told her to give him a call if she had a composition she wanted him to listen to. She should have done it, but she never did.
**I met author Corrie ten Boom and Christian singers Evie Tornquist and Don Moen, talked to them all personally. I took a class at Seattle Pacific taught by Ralph Carmichael, the grandfather of contemporary Christian music and met him too. Ten years ago I wrote a letter to him and he sent back the nicest letter and also a bunch of his CD's. I met numerous other Christian singers and musicians over the many years of attending Church Music Northwest.
**When my daughter was working in the music technology field in California, she was sent out to a home to repair a top-of-the-line synthesizer owned by Andrew Sievright. Most people wouldn't know who he was, but my daughter did because of me and she called me right away after not only repairing his whole system but also playing his grand piano. Andrew Sievright was the second husband of Melody Green, the widow of Christian songwriter and singer Keith Green. She told him, "My mom raised us on Keith Green's music!"
**My son who is a jazz saxophonist/clarinetist/flutist, has backed up so many famous singers and groups, it's hard to keep track. The list includes Chaka Khan, the Temptations, Frankie Avalon, Brian Horton, Joey Calderazzo and Branford Marsallis. At our church in Hawaii he also backed up singers such as Matthew Ward, Wayne Watson, Bryan Duncan and the group Point of Grace. When he played with Matthew Ward he brought him out to meet me after telling him, "Man, my mom raised me on your music!" When he played with Frankie Avalon for a New Year's Eve gig, he hung out with him during breaks and told him, "My mom rented "Back to the Beach" so many times, my brother and sister and I had all the lines memorized before she eventually bought the movie." Then he and Frankie sat their trading off lines from the movie. ("Train up your children in the way that they should go.")
**Most of the stars of the TV show "Lost," which was filmed on Oahu while we were living there, lived in Lanikai, which was part of Kailua where we lived. I was behind Jorge Garcia (Hurley) at Safeway, and my husband and I, sadly, watched Evangeline Lily's (Kate) house burn down one morning. She lived about five minutes from us, but we were at Starbucks doing our Bible study that morning, and it was even closer to her house.
**Oprah Winfrey bought a house/compound right on Kailua Beach, which was five minutes from our home. The Obamas spend every Christmas at Lanikai in Kailua.
**Greg Evans, cartoonist for the Luann comic strip, had his Luann always in love with a character who had my son's name, going back to when my son was in elementary school. When we lived in Hawaii and my son was in the university there, I wrote to Greg Evans, and he wrote right back. It turned out he and his wife came to Kailua every year for a vacation with friends in Lanikai. When he spoke at the Kailua Library during one of those vacations my husband and I went to meet him and his wife, who were very well aware of us and our story, that we moved to Kailua because of my husband's job. Sometime after that we were shocked to see Luann's love interest move to Kailua--our Kailua!--because of his father's job transfer! This was even written up in the Honolulu newspaper. I joked with Greg Evans that we deserved something like royalties since we handed him our son's life scenario for his story line. We have kept in touch from time to time.
**I met radio personality Sean Hannity at our church in Hawaii. He walked right up to me, shook my hand, and we talked. I threatened never to wash my right hand again.
But now, back to Zoe McLellan. Two BVGO's will always remember knowing her. Her life probably sounds big and exciting to them, and I thought that when I was reading about her. But all too often fame comes with big price in your personal life. That is true in Zoe's life. She had her first role in a movie in 1994. She appeared in "Mr. Holland's Opus" in 1995, as Girl 4. From then on, year after year, she appeared in not only movies but also TV shows. In 2008 she made what I think was a poor decision: She posed nude in Allure Magazine. In 2012 she married fellow actor J.P. Gillian, had a child with him 18 months ago, and now they have been going through a bitter child custody situation that is playing out in public. There are numerous big articles with headlines blaring phrases about her 'loser husband' and that he was only going after custody so he could get money from her TV success.
Personally, I think our quiet lives as BVGs--and for our children, as BVGOs--is far more appealing. We'll never show up in the tabloids. Nobody really cares what we say or do. It's okay that our blog doesn't go viral (or, as I say, bacterial). Obviously, we treasure our anonymity, hence the cucumber slices over our eyes (or some other reasonable facsimile). Hence Firstelle, Elletu, Cool and j. Nobody snaps our picture as we walk out of Fred Meyer.
But then a photographer did catch j outside of Hobby Lobby, and Home Goods, and Goodwill, and even while eating out on the deck at the Tides Tavern.............
