ABSTRACT
Celebrity sightings feature a unique tension between stranger (for whom approach is prohibited) and intimate (for whom approach is required). They are also marked by major status differentials as the famous rub elbows with the obscure and the extraordinary and ordinary collide. The presence of a celebrity in an ordinary setting provides an extreme example of what sociologist Erving Goffman (1963) called a “situational impropriety,” or something that is out of place in its social setting. In this case, it’s the celebrity who is out of place or unexpected, and the ordinary person who has to figure out how to solve the problems this situational impropriety creates by deciding how to respond to the celebrity.
