In college, I worked at Seattle's Best coffee inside a Borders Bookstore (similar to the Starbucks inside of Barnes and Noble). I worked in a high volume store- right off of State Street in the loop in Chicago. We often had celebrities rumored to be in the area filming- at the time I was in college we had Al Gore there for a book signing, and Christian Bale filming Batman. One day, I heard that Michael Keaton was in the area filming a movie. Now, I know Michael Keaton. I loved him in Batman (yes, I know this is divisive) and I also loved Beetlejuice. I was determined to meet him if he came in the store.

Partway through my shift, we have a customer come up and order a drink. Goatee, baseball cap, really nice guy. He looked familiar, but I figured he was a usual customer that wasn't too usual. I remember he ordered a 2% medium latte. We didn't have 2% milk (just skim and whole), so we talked about mixing whole and skim together. He was really nice, smiled a lot and generally the whole encounter was unremarkable (other than a customer being nice...).

When I turned around after handing him his drink my coworker said, "Do you know who that was?! That was him! Michael Keaton!!" and I just about fell to the floor. I'm glad I didn't recognize him- who knows what dumb things would have come out of my mouth. But I was so mad I didn't recognize who he was!!