Stalked Jemaine Clement, then he followed us around.

Long haul flights are a love/hate situation for me. The only 'hate' is obviously the very long amount of time cooped up in an airplane that will never have enough space. The 'love' is having enough time to fall asleep for more than 15 minutes and to catch up on some shows. For me, a trip to Asia = catching up on Flight of the Conchords. A friend of mine sent around a video of the guys doing Business Time about a year ago and I've been a fan ever since.

I waited for M. yesterday in the lobby of MOMA and alternated between looking through old messages on my phone and scanning the room of museum goers. I look up and see this guy walk by with his girlfriend. OMG. It had to be Jemaine Clement from FotC! I follow him into the MOMA store and start looking at random gadgets at the kiosk next to him. I pick up a paper robot kit and look past it and directly at the guy in thick black rimmed glasses with a black knit hat instead. I couldn't quite tell if it was him or not. Actors tend to look a little different on TV than in real life... M. showed up so I pulled her into the store and we both picked up random accessories and looked past them at this guy. I looked up his height on Wikipedia and it said he should be 6'1", so I tried to estimate if he was tall enough. In the end, M. said "No, it's not him...the lips are different, just look at his face..." I agreed and we headed upstairs to wander our way though the museum.

We walk through the architecture room and over to the railing that overlooks the big lounge space. I take a few shots of the crowd and look to my right to see the other museum goers walk past us and there he is! 6'1", dark rimmed glasses, dark tossel-headed Jemaine. The real one! The guy in the store was just a guy who looked eerily like the real Jemaine that was standing in front of me. He walked past us and into the architecture exhibit. I forced M. to follow him with me. After about two minutes of looking at bogus models of buildings and thinking of the coolest way to talk to him, I finally convinced myself to walk over to him and say "Hi, sorry to bother you, but I really love your show, just wanted to let you know..." He awkwardly replied "Oh, thank you very much..." His New Zealand accent confirmed it was him. Then I had to follow right behind him to get to M. Awkward! M. and I head out of that exhibit and moved into the next room. Then we noticed Jemaine was on the same museum route we were on. We followed each other from floor to floor. It just became more and more awkward because I was the girl who walked up to him and said 'Hi!'...and he knew I knew he was Jemaine. So, we avoided and ducked past each other from room to room, floor to floor.

The only way I could have upped the ante in awkwardness would be to sit next to him on a plane while I caught up on episodes of Flight of the Conchords...