I'm walking my dog early Tuesday night when my wife calls me on my cell, and she's going all Gladys Kravitz on me.

Mrs. Kravitz was the nosy neighbor who lived across from Samantha on the '60s sitcom, "Bewitched." She has entered our neighborhood lingo as something of a reverse icon. Anyone spreading gossip is Kravitzing and, if the dirt is good, can at least temporarily hold the title "Gladys of All Kravitzes."

My wife tells me she and our two daughters are going to walk around the corner to Shannon's house because Shannon had called to say Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway were talking in the vacant lot outside her bathroom window.

These actors are in town shooting the movie, "Love and Other Drugs," about a Viagra salesman. (I've already apologized to my brother, The Incredible Dullboy, a penile implant salesman on Long Island, for not writing such a screenplay for him.)

A line of trailers arrived to park in West Park earlier this week, so I knew "Love" was near -- but then, where hasn't it been? The movie has been filming for six weeks, everywhere from Brownsville to Sewickley. Earlier this month, it took over the Gandy Dancer in Station Square and kept me from a rendezvous with a plate of linguini with red clam sauce.

I told my wife I'd head over to Shannon's after dropping the dog at home, but I dawdled. Hollywood is no stranger to our North Side neighborhood, Allegheny West (better known as Up The Hill From The Stadiums). In the early '90s, when I was single, I spent the better part of a night drinking beer in a neighbor's apartment waiting for a stunt vampire to jump from a gargoyle high on the gothic Calvary Methodist Church.

That was for your film classic, "Innocent Blood," about vampires in the Mob. Once you've seen a stunt vampire leap from a gargoyle, there really isn't much more Hollywood can do to impress you.

So I was in no hurry to see Gyllenhaal and Hathaway. I fell into a conversation with Fred Tait, the neighborhood barber, before heading down the street, and by then the girls were already coming home.

They never got inside Shannon's. There was no need. While they were still on the stoop, Gyllenhaal ran right past them for the corner coffee shop, Hoi Polloi, evidently to use the bathroom. (Pennsylvania's film tax credit buys a lot of coffee.)

My family also reported that Linda Hansen was right there on the stoop when Gyllenhaal and then Hathaway passed by. Hansen's appearance was no surprise at all.

Some North Siders can top Linda Hansen on neighborhood news, but for anything out of Hollywood, Linda can beat anyone with her People magazine subscription tied behind her back. She was once in the stall next to Jamie Lee Curtis' in the women's room at The Renaissance. When it comes to celebrity sightings, Linda is the Gladys of All Kravitzes.

My wife had texted her about Shannon's bathroom window, but by then Linda was already racing down the Parkway North from her office because Jessica in the coffee shop had tipped her that the moviemakers were on the street.

Linda beat my wife to the scene. Still, she allowed later that my wife showed promise.

"I really do think she's getting better and I'm confident that, in time, I can get her where I need her to be," Linda said.

It was our daughter Clare, celebrating her 10th birthday that night, who provided the best reporting of the evening. When I asked what she thought of seeing a famous actor on her birthday, she said, "It looked like he really had to go because he ran into Hoi Polloi."

Coffee will do that to you, I explained, but if she thought Gyllenhaal was fast, she should see a stunt vampire fall.