Margin Notes: Star-Studded Vacations

The summer after my high school graduation, my mom and I took a road trip to Tennessee, stopping in North Carolina and South Carolina along the way. The purpose of the trip, in what we imagined to be the style of Lorelai and Rory Gilmore backpacking through Europe after Rory’s high school graduation, was for us to spend time together. The location of the trip was as equally fueled by television for, at the time, we were plowing through Nashville, the now-finished drama series with Connie Britton about country singers in the city.

Our pop culture-obsession didn’t stop there: Nashville, too, we knew, was the home of Taylor Swift. On our first night we made a beeline for The Bluebird Café, where Taylor was discovered. Later in the week, hiding from the summer heat, we drove around the city looking at the mansions and apartments, trying to determine which ones were hers. We didn’t see Taylor, but that wasn’t the point — the thrill came from looking and imagining that we might.

Many of our trips have included, if not centered around, some aspect of celebrity (usually Gilmore Girls). My mom and I have gone to Austin, Texas to try to spot the Gilmore Girls cast at a television festival, shaking hands with Luke as he walked past the long, long line of people we stood in and seeing the cast reunited on stage from the high, high balcony seats of an auditorium. We’ve ran through Times Square one time we were visiting New York to make it to the backstage door of Guys and Dolls to see Lauren Graham emerge. We’ve considered going to the Gilmore Girls festival in the Connecticut town that Stars Hollow is supposedly based off of, only to decide that to be among swarms of other fans — and within a staged replica of the show — would feel too artificial.

This star searching (searching, not stalking!) has rubbed off on me. In college, for three years straight, my friends and I would wake up early one Saturday in the fall to drive 30 minutes to Patrick Dempsey’s bicycle race fundraiser so we could hear the Grey’s Anatomy star give a speech post-race. Even now in D.C., I often choose to take the running route that leads me past the Obamas’ house (well, street, which is blocked off by a Secret Service car) and Ivanka Trump’s (which is not blocked off but guarded by large black vans).

This habit is somewhat surprising because neither my mom nor I are into tabloids or keep up with pop culture. But this adventuring is about more than the celebrities themselves. During our Austin trip, it was still exciting to see the football field used in Friday Night Lights. When my parents came to visit D.C., of course we sat (or tried to — others had the same idea) in the restaurant booth where JFK proposed to Jackie and we looked at the couples’ many former Georgetown townhouses. We walked past the Watergate, thinking of Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman’s Woodward and Bernstein. Having stories, fictionalized or otherwise, connected to a place makes it more interesting, makes it easier, I think, to imagine a life for oneself there.

It’s easy to say that all of this is artifice. It is — these people are strangers and these places are unknown to us. My mom says watching The Ellen Show hasn’t been the same after her and my aunt finally went to see the show after years of being avid fans. I went to a book talk with Ryan Gosling (he took photographs for a book about the Congolese resistance) where he came on stage only in the last 10 minutes to answer softball questions, casting the whole event as a kind of bait-and-switch so that the audience would listen to a promotion of the book (granted, a good-cause promotion) before being rewarded with a sighting of the name promised in bold, big font on the tickets.

Still, to look for tangible roots of the stories you love makes sense. Even visiting my grandfather’s house in Italy was its own kind of star searching: We no longer had any real connection to the town, but we were still going to see the place of family lore, to pay tribute to where he once lived, to imagine the younger character of him walking around or peering out a window. Monuments and museums are testaments to times and places that changed the world. It only makes sense that we’d seek out the same in our own lives, whether that be family story or favorite television show or beloved book. The appeal is the same: looking to make the stories of us and our world as real as possible and to insert ourselves into them.

Rachael Allen is a lifelong Canton resident and a 2018 graduate of Bowdoin College. She is currently working as an editorial fellow at The Atlantic in Washington, D.C.

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Posted by Rachael Allen on May 3 2019. Filed under Featured Content, Opinion. Both comments and pings are currently closed.