My Lunch with Francis Ford Coppola

Le Marais, Paris.

I was walking to my apartment along the rue Réamur, looking for a place for a quick late-lunch, when I noticed the moving dishes at this sushi bar called Eat Sushi—

Francis Ford Coppola

—and spotted Francis Ford Coppola sitting at the window.

I thought, “That can’t be him—that’s way too random. But I sure could eat!”

So I walked in, and plopped myself just two stools over from him, thinking he was just some random Frenchman who looked a lot like the Big Man of films.

The guy sitting at the stool in the sushi bar looked like a random French gentleman: Big and portly, plump of lip, froggy-eyed behind his round steel bifocal glasses, in a light brown beret and colorful but old scarf. And of course the beard: Snow white, and surprisingly well groomed.

Was he him? Nah—can’t be him: I’ve just arrived in Paris and I run into Francis Ford Coppola? Of all people? When, just two nights before—true story—I had been berating my girlfriend for never having seen The Godfather or The Godfather, Part II? And telling her—at length—that everything you needed to know about men was in those two Coppola movies?

Too weird and random to be true.

I’m not particularly interested in celebrity or celebrities per se. But for some reason, I’ve met an awful lot of them—all by chance.
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