My (Very Quick) Brush With Fame

I have two pictures here of two year-old Kylie playing at a park with a celebrity. The quality of the pictures is rather poor. I'm way too lazy to drive over to my parent's house and figure out how to use their scanner, so I took pictures of the pictures with my cell phone.

See if you can name the famous person. When someone guesses right, then I'll tell the story of my brush with fame.

My friend Kirsten guessed correctly that this is Diana Taurasi. She was a basketball star at the University of Connecticut, and the top pick in the 2004 WNBA draft. The Phoenix Mercury, somehow, had the #1 pick. Oh yes, because they sucked the previous year.

I'm not a huge women's basketball fan. In fact, I'm not really a basketball fan at all. But this is the day we met Diana Taurasi.

When Shannon was about 10 years old, she played on the same softball team with a little girl named Emily. Emily's dad was either the owner or part-owner of the Mercury. I was never quite clear on that. My mom would know, because she used to have season tickets to the Mercury. She had season tickets and sometimes the girls would go with her. However, she dropped her season tickets and stopped going to games after a few seasons, when it dawned on her that a majority of the women in the crowd were lesbians. Yeah, my mom's a little slow on the uptake sometimes, God love her. I'm not sure why this prevents her from going to games, but I think it may be because she's afraid of catching the gay cooties.

Anyway, one day during the winter softball season at the beginning of 2005, Emily's dad brought Diana to one of the kids' softball games. I have no idea why, but there she was. She was very nice, and spent most of the time during the game playing with the little brothers and sisters of the players. In the picture, she was playing scoop-ball, or whatever that's called, with Kylie.

The bummer was that at the time, my mom was a huge Mercury fan. And she almost always went to Shannon's softball games. But she missed this particular game, because I think they were out of town. This was before every cell phone had a camera, but luckily for me, one of the other moms there had her camera and took a couple of pictures for me.