The Chuck Colson Award

Daniel Finkelstein of the Times of London is running a "Chuck Colson Award" contest, so named because he once passed Chuck Colson in the street. He writes:

I am looking for all contact - spotting in the street yesterday, autograph collected in your youth, meeting held with, picture taken with, gift received from, or whatever - with political figures.

Now famous is fine but semi-famous is even better, faintly ludicrous is best of all. Pictures are particularly welcome, especially if they show the semi-famous figure doing something prosaic.

Oh what fun. By all means go to the blogsite and share your entry. But include it in the comboxes here too.

I have three entries:

1. In college, I got drunk with washed-up Sixties radical Abbie Hoffman (who was also loaded on pills), and went speeding through the campus of Jimmy Swaggart Bible College after midnight, with Hoffman leaning out the window shouting, "Lock your doors! Bar your windows! Heathen Jew on campus!" The Jimmy Swaggart Bible police stopped us for trespassing, and nearly took us in.

2. Once, while a writer at the Washington Times, I met the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, who shook my hand and said, cryptically, to an associate, "Young man."

3. I was standing in a press pool onsite at Ground Zero, when it was still a smoking charnel house, covering a presidential speech. When the most powerful man on the planet walked directly in front of me, as we both stood in the pit of hell, and at the very spot where the 21st century began, all I could think was, "Oh wow, I'm taller than him."

(Hat tip: The guys sitting in for Andrew Sullivan this week. Hi Clive! You guys are doing a great job.)