Historical Meet-Ups

Alexander Kerensky
Successor to the Russian Czar

meets

Ted Danson
Tender of a sitcom bar

In November of 1917, Bolshevik forces led by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin overthrew the provisional government of liberal socialist Alexander Kerensky. In November of 1999, former Cheers star Ted Danson received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. At some point in the intervening 82 years, their paths crossed. Danson and Kerensky first bumped into each other on the campus at Stanford University in the late 1960s. Danson was a young student just beginning to cultivate a passion for theater. Kerensky was a seventysomething visiting professor, living in exile and teaching a weekly seminar on the Russian Revolution. They would come together in the cafeteria, or on one of the benches that dotted the tree-lined campus, where Kerensky would feed the pigeons and opine in his thick Yiddish accent about space exploration and his distaste for hippies. At the time, Danson had no idea who the old man was—or why he seemed curiously unwilling to talk about his past life. Only later did he learn that the genial altercocker who chewed his ear off every day on the quad was in fact the man who had deposed the Czar.