Lee Arenberg was at the Hollywood Show on Saturday, October 9, 2010, as part of a reunion of actors from the Pirates of the Caribbean film series. I didn’t care about that. Lee Arenberg had also guest-starred in all four of the Star Trek spin-off series: The Next Generations, Deep Space Nine, Enterprise, and Voyager. I didn’t care about that either. But I’m guess that it was those qualifications that led him to charge $20 for a signed photo and an additional $20 for a photo op. But it turns out, those prices proved to be phony.
My interest in Lee Arenberg was due to his two Seinfeld appearances (particularly the first) in the episodes The Parking Space and The Susie. In the parking space, it is revealed by Kramer that Arenberg’s character Mike Moffet had called Jerry a “phony’. When Jerry confronts him about this, Moffet tries to recover by telling Jerry that it was meant as a compliment, akin to someone using the term ‘bad’ to mean ‘good’. When asked to use it in a sentence, Moffet declares, “Man, that Michael Jordon is so phony!”
Arenberg reprised the Mike Moffet role in a later episode, in which he somehow fears that Jerry is a member of the mob and that he was responsible for purposely breaking Moffet’s fingers and throwing him into the trunk of a car.
So I approached Lee Arenberg with the offer to just pay one $20 fee for both the autograph and the photo. He couldn’t have been nicer about accepting the offer, posing for a couple of pictures, and of course adding the inscription “Such a phony!” to my Seinfeld photo. I jokingly asked if he’d be willing to pose in the trunk of my car, to which he laughingly replied that his broken hands had just healed.
To say that Lee Arenberg was a phony is the nicest of compliments – just like Michael Jordan. His prices were lower than advertised and he was certainly a cooler guy than his alter ego Mike Moffet.
Celebrities of the Fall 2010 Hollywood Show will continue…
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