Pop culture obsessions come to life! My ride with 'Gossip Girl'

On an ordinary Sunday night, I was riding the subway with my boyfriend to Chinatown for some pork dumplings and General Tso’s tofu. On the last stop in Brooklyn before Manhattan, the doors opened and a group of hip kids got on. While admiring one girl’s necklace, a strategically dingy-looking guy in the group walked past me to the middle of the train. I did a double take and looked to my right, my eyes locking with a pair of familiar baby blues: I was sandwiched between Chuck Bass and Nate Archibald — known in the real world/outside the halls of Constance Billiard as Ed Westwick and Chase Crawford (pictured) of Gossip Girl. The girl with the necklace? Jessica Szohr who plays Vanessa Abrams on the show.

The wittiest thing I could come up with on the spot was to say, “Chuck Bass rides the subway? Ha, ha!” and run swiftly off the train. Another idea was to approach one of them and whisper, “Spotted on the L train, C and N…” Instead I sat there, elbowing my bruised boyfriend, and throwing all shame out the windows to gawk at them for the entire seven-minute ride. Either no one else on the train knew who they were, or they were being much more discreet about their appreciation for the show. I felt like turning to my neighbor and whispering, “Don’t you know who these guys are?? Dude! It’s like we’re on the set of Gossip Girl! Be affected by this, please!”

Visiting your pop culture friends while you snooze is weird enough, but when they visit you in real life — like when Felicity‘s hunky barista Ben (Scott Speedman) used to come into the coffee shop where I worked — it’s just as bizarre.

So open up your diaries, PopWatchers! What music, movie, or TV phenoms have crossed your path, leaving you stranded in the continuum between fact and fiction?

addCredit(“Giovanni Rufino”)