I am at a gala to benefit children who were affected by Chernobyl, the unintentional nuclear explosion in the USSR in 1986, and Jesse Eisenberg walked into the cocktail ballroom and he was swarmed by girls with braces who wanted to take pictures with him. One of them knocked my phone onto the ground in a rush to get closer to Jesse Eisenberg and I had to get on my hands and knees to grab it from in between someone’s feet which was sort of humiliating.

And then I stood back up, and between me and Jesse Eisenberg there was a woman who looked and sounded like one of the moms from my town, talking to Jesse Eisenberg with this suburban mom accent that’s like a Brooklyn accent but delivered in chirps, and she looks at Jesse Eisenberg and pulls a teenage girl out of the pack of girls that’s swarming him and says, “This is my daughter!” She starts talking about her daughter and the girl is standing there looking nervous.

And Jesse Eisenberg looks over at me and I’m smiling because this whole thing is a little surreal, like this woman is trying to set Jesse Eisenberg up with her daughter at this gala for children affected by an unintentional nuclear explosion, and then he starts smiling too because he knows what I’m smiling about and I guess if you are in an uncomfortable situation and there’s nobody around to agree about how weird it is than you just suffer through it, but if there’s someone else there who gets it than you can smile about it. One time last year I was at the beach and a bird crapped on my hair, and if Joe and Beau and Justin weren’t there, I just would have had bird crap on my hair and it might have ruined my afternoon, but because they were there, we laughed about it and that was that.

Anyway, so then a few minutes later, Jesse Eisenberg’s handlers clear a path for him to go take a picture with the DJ and I catch him near the DJ booth. I go up to him and say, “So have you listened to My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy yet?” I feel like I should do some coverage of that record given the subject of this blog.

And he smiles at me, but then looks nervous and says he hasn’t listened to it yet.

I say, “Well, do you like Kanye West?” He thinks about the question and goes, “Wait, why are you asking me this?” and I go, “I write a Tumblr about music,” and he thinks about this and wrings his hands, which is something I do a lot, and if he was just some other kid who was here reporting on a celebrity gala, and not a movie star, I might have made conversation with him comparing nervous habits, but he is a movie star in a rush so I refrain, and then he says something to indicate that he doesn’t want to tell me if he likes Kanye West, and then he says, with unexpected gravity, “I’m not… I’m not a voice in the music industry.”