Out of necessity on Friday, I made up a new word: nonlebrity.  A nonlebrity is a untalented celebrity-like person who has briefly been in the perception field of a small segment of the population, but who for the most part needs to be introduced or explained before people say, "Oh, THAT guy!  Now I know who you're talking about....but why are you bringing him up?" 

non·leb·ri·ty [nahn-leb-ri-tee] –noun, plural -ties
1. a not-famous or not-very-well-known person.
2. a person who has used up two of his fifteen minutes of fame making a fool of him/herself on American Idol
3. someone famous only because I told you about him awhile back, but you pretty much forgot about him until I reminded you just now, and even now you're just saying you remember him because in actual point of fact,  you totally forgot.

With a celebrity, even a D-lister, you could say "I saw Clay Aiken logged in to Manhunt yesterday under the name 'happychappy'" and most people would know that you were talking about the American Idol guy, even if you only caught a few episodes of the show or walked by a billboard.  With a nonlebrity, you'd need to make sure you've seen every episode of the current season of American Idol, and even then you probably wouldn't care that I saw Ian Bernardo at the Ritz unless I said, "Remember that guy who came on with a sweatband around his head and talked/sang 'Gloria' with a really thick Brooklyn accent and sounded like an idiot?" and you'd go, "Oh, I didn't see that episode," and I'd say, "Oh, well, I saw him but never mind."  That's a nonlebrity.  Nonlebrities can invade any anecdote you might be telling and make it anticlimactic, so it's very helpful if you can identify and root them out before they bring your conversation to a standstill.

So I saw Ian Bernardo, who requires several paragraphs of introduction, a Google search, and the creation of a new word to describe, at this funny gay bar called The Ritz on Friday.  He swept in with the posse of three girls that he's pictured with on his Myspace page, which I had to look up so I could find out what his name was, and I thought to myself, "How low do you have to be to be a member of the posse of a nonlebrity? I mean, who wants to dedicate herself to eating up what scant crumbs fall from that particularly talentless table?" 

They almost immediately swept out of the room, only to return a few minutes later, when (the guy who I now know is named) Ian sat down and rather pointedly flipped through the pages of H/X Magazine to look for somewhere better to go.  I found that more than a little funny - I mean, if you're too cool to be seen in the bar that you're in, what makes you think the actual cool place you'd rather go to would be listed in a club listings magazine that's given away for free in the front of the uncool bar? 

Clearly, we were all in the same boat together, and that boat was called the Ritz.  (If you've been to the Ritz, which is decorated like a boat, you'd realize I've just made a joke...but jokes aren't really funny when you explain them, are they?)

It was Mister Goats who originally suggested we go to the Ritz after we had gone out to dinner with Glennifer and Nolanita, but I quickly agreed because the writer of the poorly-written blog once threatened to go there and write with his laptop and I was hoping to catch a glimpse of my own personal nonlebrity when we dropped in.   I'd been to the Ritz once before with Dan Dan the Amy Fan but we didn't see him that time.  This time I still kept an eye peeled for someone who puts more periods than verbs into his writing, and I was rewarded when I realized he was sitting down at the couch right next to ours.  I was able to watch him out of the corner of my eye as he sucked on a lollipop and thought of new and interesting ways to insert more periods into fewer sentence fragments than ever before..  He was the real nonlebrity of the evening - someone who's really only famous to me, and only because I dislike his atrocious grammar, spelling, and punctuation and carefree disregard for learning to improve them.. 

NKOTB showed up with Xiu-Xiu, the Sent-Down Boy, and we all giggled mightily as I gave the  nonlebrity introduction, "You know that guy that I wrote about on my blog who writes a blog with really bad grammar that annoys me?  The 'writer' who used the phrase 'the bananas foster went on fire?'  He's sitting over there." 

NKOTB looked over and said, "Oh, really? Neat," and then we talked about something else entirely.

That is all.