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Meeting Jack Sparrow



One of the cool things about living in Hawaii is that they are always filming a movie or a television show here. There are various celebrities working or at the very least, vacationing, here. There's a section of the newspaper dedicated entirely to reporting who has been sighted where.

I'm not one of those people who gets star struck (usually). I don't go chasing down the movie stars to get my picture made with them. They are just regular people and probably would like to not be hounded all the time by complete strangers following them around and blinding them with flashbulbs.

Nevertheless, when we found out that Johnny Depp had been coming out to greet his fans every evening for a few minutes while filming "Pirates of the Caribbean 4" we thought it would be fun to go check it out. I thought we might get to see some of the action being filmed and it just seemed like something different to do.

We went early and, following the advice of friends who had already been, staked out a spot right up against the fence. We brought games and snacks, books and cards. We made certain we had enough stuff to keep the kids entertained so we wouldn't have to listen to bored whining. He's come out at different times each night, so we didn't know how long we would have to wait.

Fortunately, it was only about 9:30 P.M. when he made his appearance. The crowd had been very civil and calm. We had all sat around and chit chatted for several hours.

When Johnny Depp arrived it was like a shot of electricity ran through the crowd. Everyone was suddenly up on their feet and surging forward.


Because we had positioned ourselves up front early on, we were nearly pinned against the fence by the crowd behind us. Emily was standing right behind Katie and had to brace her arms on the fence to keep from being smushed up against her. Some of the women were shrieking and every person had a camera flashing as fast as it could go.



They had warned us ahead of time that there would be no time for autographs, or posing with him for photos. He would just come down the line to shake hands and we could snap photos as he did that. When he got to us, he squatted down in front of Katie, put his hands on her shoulders, and said in his Jack Sparrow accent, "How are you, love? No squishy-squishy?" She told him she was only being squished a little, and he said something else (for the life of me I can't remember what!) and then shook our hands and moved on.


We also got to see the director, Jerry Bruckheimer.

And we did get to see a little of the action taking place during filming. I don't want to spoil the plot of the movie for you, but I managed to capture this video while they were filming on the ship behind us.



I wonder if I can sell the rights to this to Entertainment Tonight?

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