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I heard actress Olivia Wilde interviewed by Howard Stern a short time ago. She told a story about growing up in New York, attending a performance of Saturday Night Live for her tenth birthday and the late Chris Farley.
She had always wanted to go to Saturday Night Live and she was ecstatic when her parents made it happen for her birthday present.
When the show was over they took her to an after party, too.
At one point, in the midst of the jumbled merrymaking, she made her way over to the snack table all by herself. Ten years old, quiet and insecure, avoiding the adults and their oblivious revelry, she was picking on a brownie.
Comedian and Saturday Night Live cast member, Chris Farley, meandered over.
It's a moment she will never forget.
Farley noticed her standing alone, misplaced in the sea of milling adults; overwhelmed by the moment, shy, feeling the misfit.
He considered the receding little wallflower.
Suddenly and out of nowhere, much to her shock and amazement, with lightning speed, he grabbed a brownie and stuffed it into his own mouth, all the while looking at Wilde for a reaction. Apparently encouraged, he grabbed another one and stuffed that one in. Then another.
He didn't stop there.
By the fifth or sixth about as much brownie was falling out of his mouth as was going in.
This was no show to gather attention to himself. He had but an audience of one. It was for no one else. It was for her.
Little Olivia laughed at the sight of this big, gigantic, oversized man with the king-sized head jamming brownies into his mouth like a half-crazed gorilla.
Twenty or so years later she told the story through a wistful smile, a sweet moment caressed in her memory, shared with us.
A nervous little girl felt better.
Maybe Farley saw some of himself in the loneliness Wilde was experiencing at that moment. His friends will tell you that he always had a feeling of being out of place himself.
One day Farley would die because of his own deep insecurities and his desperate attempt to deaden them with drugs, alcohol and female companionship.
Maybe I'm making it too complicated. Maybe psychology is too crude for it.
It could be he just saw a fading little girl alone and unsure and was sensitive to her trouble and wanted to make her smile.
An inelegant moment of spluttering brownies written elegantly across Olivia Wilde's heart forever.
That I could be so delicate.
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