Q-List Celebrity Moment: Theo Von

You never know what you are going to see or experience at a wedding reception, especially a very large one filled with people you don’t know. At such moments, you can re-invent yourself as whoever you like, try to pick out the person most likely to be a wedding crasher (hint: it is usually the middle-aged guy with the rarified ‘stache-mullet combo who scoffs at signing the guestbook, then loudly introduces himself to the bartender with a “We gonna be good friends t’night, pardner!”), people watch like a champ and covertly pound free alcohol.

During the ceremony, I saw a severely underdressed person one-handing his communion during the Mass, and I realized that I actually somewhat recognized the dude. Being that I was in New Orleans, this would have been more than a coincidence. After wondering who he was and pointing him out to some fellow wedding-goers at the reception, a couple of the girls quickly announced that it was “Theo! You know, from ‘Road Rules’” (later, I would find out that I actually recognized him from “Last Comic Standing”). Shrugging, I didn’t think much of it, until I bumped into him at the bar later in the evening. He saw me ordering a beer and said, “What’s up, man.” After I returned the greeting, his girlfriend sidled up. She was a six-foot, brunette, anorexic, possibly coked-up model type, so apparently reality TV has treated him fairly well.

Anyway, I corralled the groom at one point and asked him how he knows the guy from “Flavor of Love,” and he laughed and said that Theo was his bride’s first boyfriend. I guess Theo has since changed his name from “Vonkurnatowksi” to “Von” and uses a lot of Hurricane Katrina jokes in his stand-up repertoire. Since he’s “from” New Orleans, he must have license to do so.

So there you have it … in the first (and probably only) installment of Q-List Celebrity Moment, I salute Theo Von. He seemed like a nice enough dude (you can even support him through his MySpace page), so I wish him good luck, many “Road Rules” reunions and several more minutes of psuedo-fame.