Twenty years ago, Jerry Seinfeld would do an interview with anybody, anytime, anywhere.
That's only a bit of an exaggeration. With astonishing regularity, NBC publicists used to call and pitch me interviews with the star of their struggling sitcom.
And I'm a small fish in the TV critic pond.
If I had it to do over again, I might have more readily taken them up on the many offers. But 20 years ago, Seinfeld was just one of many standup comedians with their own sitcoms.
And, even though "Seinfeld" looked promising, it was pretty much bombing.
During a Television Critics Association press tour in 1992 — even after the show had started to catch on — NBC arranged a pair of small-group interviews during the lunch break. They took place at opposite ends of a hotel restaurant at the same time.
Seinfeld was at one end of the room; Valerie Bertinelli (there to promote a TV movie) was at the other. And there were more people there to talk to Bertinelli than to Seinfeld. Really.
Which is not to say that Seinfeld and "Seinfeld" didn't get lots of support from the critics. On more than one occasion, he thanked TV critics for helping to keep the show on the air when the ratings were in the basement.
As recently as January, when he returned to the press tour to promote "The Marriage Ref," which he produces …
"Well, I have a lot of you people to thank, to tell you the truth," he said. "It was a lot of the critics that kept us on the air."
Of course, he snubbed us and wouldn't do interviews when "Seinfeld" was going off the air. That would have helped us out tremendously … but by then, Seinfeld didn't need us anymore.
Oh, did I mention that my Deseret News colleague, Scott Iwasaki, was turned down when he asked for an interview before Seinfeld's Friday appearance at Abravanel Hall?
Not that we were surprised. Seinfeld certainly doesn't need us to help sell tickets. Heck, he doesn't even need to sell tickets, for that matter.
He's making hundreds of millions of dollars off the reruns of "Seinfeld." He doesn't have to work, period.
(As of this writing, however, there are still tickets available for the Utah appearance.)
Don't get me wrong. I'm not upset or angry. I've been doing this long enough to know how it works.
What none of us can really know is what it's like to be as famous as Seinfeld is.
Back in the mid-'90s, a bunch of us TV critics were walking into a Los Angeles delicatessen when who should walk out but 40-ish Seinfeld and his teenage girlfriend, Shoshanna Lonstein.
Not only did we recognize him, but he recognized us. Probably because we were traveling in a group ... and because he'd just seen us a couple of days earlier.
Seinfeld greeted us politely, cracked a couple of jokes — but, from the look in his eyes, he clearly wasn't all that thrilled to see us. Who could blame him?
We weren't gossip columnists, but he and Lonstein were very much in the gossip columns at that point.
Hopefully, he understands the difference between the two. After all, Seinfeld has done this a long time. He knows what to expect.
When he appeared at January's TCA press tour, he was just waiting for a question about the whole Jay Leno-Conan O'Brien situation, which was in the process of exploding.
What surprised him was that the question didn't come until midway through the interview.
"I can't believe you held it in that long. What willpower you have," he deadpanned.
And press tours had changed in one rather obvious way from when he used to appear at them so frequently back in the early '90s. We're not sitting there with pads and pens anymore.
"All of these laptops I see open — are you people paying attention at all?" Seinfeld jokingly asked. "What are you doing here? Is anyone doing their job?"
(That's how we do it nowadays.)
But it was interesting how Seinfeld identified himself in the interview. He didn't mention his TV career at all.
"I'm a standup comic," he said.
And he's always done standup, even when "Seinfeld" became a hit. Although, back in the '90s, he acknowledged that it was becoming hard for his fans to distinguish between Seinfeld and "Seinfeld."
"The crowds have definitely changed," he said. "They've been larger and they've been more excited about the show and less excited about me.
"People that come to the concerts now come there because there's someone from the show going to be on the stage ... And then they don't realize that I've come with my own agenda, having worked up a standup act, which I don't seem to need anymore because they just yell at me and ask me, 'Where's Kramer?' 'Where's George?' 'Where's Elaine?'
"And then I have to explain to them the very sad reality that these characters, while being very likable and entertaining, are, in reality, fictional individuals. Whereas, I am a real person."
And he'll really be in Abravanel Hall Friday night.
If you go
What: Jerry Seinfeld standup comedy tour
When: Friday, June 11, 7:30 p.m.
Where: Abravenel Hall
Tickets: $61 and $76 at arttix.org and the box office