While Grocery Shopping, Kate Winslet Called Me a Gentleman.

Not together. Shopping, I mean.

There was this great detail in a very good story by Susan Dominus the other day in the New York Times about Kate Winslet — Streep’s successor in American movies, am I right? It’s my blog, I’m right. — wherein the writer gets into Winslet’s car so they can drive to Winslet’s beach hut southeast of Sussex,

which first belonged to her husband’s grandmother (the hut, not Sussex), and the writer spies a half-eaten bowl of oatmeal on the floor of the back seat, and not from that morning. That I once dropped half a plastic bowl of oatmeal from the Marriott Courtyard breakfast bar down that unreachable space between the driver’s seat and the transmission hump, where it congealed and became an integral part of the car, which ended up with field mice eating its cables, possibly because they sensed the presence of petrified oatmeal in it, immediately made her even more human than I already knew her to be.

So we live in a part of the world north of New York City that, for various reasons, attracts some people you’ve heard of sometimes. Anyway, in 2008, when I was teaching at a local private middle school, I came around a corner of the small grocery store that serves this part of northwestern Connecticut to see a woman coming toward me sort of confusedly and frazzledly pushing a shopping cart full to the brim, with a four-year-old son riding herd on the groceries in the cart. I think maybe she’d finished filming “Revolutionary Road” down in Fairfield,

and maybe Streep had offered her the local Streep spread up here to recover from the shoot, the place with the lake with the heron on the spillway. (Requests to both Winslet and Streep for clarification have, as of this writing, gone unanswered.)

No makeup, dark roots. Pure beauty. Me being me, I had to introduce myself so that, if nothing else, years later I could write about it. So I had to quickly find a way to make her like me, as I always did with famous people back when I met them for a living, and so I told her that I taught ninth-grade Ancient Civilization at a local school and I would always have the class watch certain scenes from “Titanic” to explain how since the beginning of civilizations there have been class systems like the one on the boat, which I did, because whatever works.

Meanwhile, her four-year-old son Joe, by her second husband Sam Mendes, was loudly insisting, in a four-year-old’s way, that a product he was pointing at in the nearby shelf was something he really, really wanted, really badly. Winslet was pretending to be fascinated until, in the middle of my fumbling anecdote, she snapped her head to the right and said, to her son, a little more loudly and emphatically than shoppers in our little supermarket generally spoke, “Will you PLEASE be QUIET! I am _TALKING_ to this GENTLEMAN!”

Then she turned back to me, entirely composed, and we chatted a little more. I don’t remember anything after that, but reading about the oatmeal, I could totally see it, if that makes sense.