There I was, in Dayton, Ohio, eating my dessert, and my eyes were glued on the space across the room where the evening's guest of honor sat. There he is, I thought. I am in the same room with Dave Barry. I was so excited I could hardly chew.

		Hear this column Listen to this Samantha Bennett column in mp3 audio format.

Sure, it was a big room. And the intimacy was somewhat reduced by the presence of the entire attendance of the Erma Bombeck Writers Workshop, which was something like 350. Still, I was in the presence of the master, and I had somehow not spilled salad dressing on my pants yet. It was a magical evening.

But this was not my first close(ish) encounter with the man who made me want to write a column instead of doing something other adults would take seriously. I had met him 12 years before, when I was living in Connecticut and he was touring with his band, the Rock Bottom Remainders.

You don't easily forget an evening spent watching Stephen King sing old teen death songs like "Last Kiss" and Amy Tan in a black dominatrix outfit whose boots were made for walkin'. There was a best-seller list of literary talent on the stage, and the weird part was that they came to play guitar and goof around.

Well, who wouldn't, given the chance?

When the show was over, I hung around with my friend Karen, who wasn't a particular fan of anyone in the alleged band but was up for a road trip to Northampton, Mass., and waited for Dave Barry to appear.

We finally went looking for him and found him, incredibly, standing at the bar downstairs where a local real garage band was playing cement mixers and jet engines, by the sound of it. He was just standing there, waiting for drinks.

I walked up to him, tapped him on the shoulder and bellowed, "I'M A HUGE FAN OF YOURS!"

He smiled, leaned in conspiratorially and shouted, "I CAN'T HEAR A WORD YOU'RE SAYING!" He gathered up three or four cups from the bar and nodded toward double doors leading to a stairwell.

"LET'S GO IN THERE," he suggested.

Wow. I get to play "Two Minutes in the Stairwell" with Dave Barry. Karen may have to carry me to the car.

In the stairwell, Dave, whom I now dared to think of by his first name, excused himself to deliver the drinks to his fellow band members, safely secreted behind a VIP curtain. My heart sank. He was ditching us, surely. I flung a cynical look at Karen that said, "Harumph! Mr. Big Shot National Humor Columnist has cleverly duped the naive --"

But here I was cut off mid-look by the astonishing reappearance of Mr. Big Shot Etc. He sat down on the stairs. And he talked to us for about 10 minutes. Because I had almost completely lost the ability to form sentences.

There I was, having a private audience with my idol, and my brain abruptly went out for a pack of smokes. It left a vast whistling emptiness between my ears, some of which remains to this day.

Karen was left to hold up our end of the conversation by herself, except for the shining moment when I roused myself from my stupor long enough to worry aloud that spooky obsessed Stephen King fans were liable to do anything, like lobbing Lawn Darts up onto the stage. Dave was startled, and his reaction electrocuted me into instant paralysis.

He revived me after a few awkward moments by pointing to the pocket of my jacket and asking gently, "Is that one of my books you have there?"

I nodded.

"Would you like me to sign it?" he prompted.

"Yes!" Yes! Of course! What a genius this man is! Somehow I have one of his books in my pocket! It's a miracle!

And so he signed it, and I have no idea how we got back to Connecticut, and that was my Brush With Celebrity of all time.

Until the Bombeck workshop. I roared with laughter at the talk he gave (he may have given up his column, but yes, he's still got it), and afterward I found a spot near the tail of the long, long line of supplicants waiting to have their books, clothing or perhaps even body parts blessed with a few drops of the master's ink.

When I got up to the table, approximately four days later, I was in much better condition than at our first meeting -- which, thank God, Dave did not recall. I even mustered a cautious pride.

I have 12 more years of gravitas now. I work for a larger newspaper and I am, myself, a columnist -- though I can never hope to craft a booger joke the way he does.

To be honest, that may be for the best.