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I thought he’d be taller.

This is how many people react when we meet famous people.

It’s not that all celebrities are below average height (though many are).

But thanks to ads, blogs and television, they take up so much real estate within our daily head space—be it affection, rancor or mindless trivial minutiae—we have a distorted view of even their physical proportions (except for Vince Vaughn, who really is 6 feet 5 inches).

And yet, if Beyonce Knowles or Ashton Kutcher walked into The Chimes tonight, they’d turn the heads of even the most hardened cynics. Whether to positive or negative effect, fame causes a buzz, some kind of collective and immediate tangibility. They walk in the room, and the room suddenly changes.

America is celebrity-obsessed, often to a fault. In the past century, substance has slowly been substituted for celebrity, while image has elbowed out integrity. MTV’s I Want a Famous Face is proof enough that our economy of fame is eating itself. The hit reality series recently featured Vived, a 24-year-old woman who, with her beaming mother by her side, spent thousands undergoing multiple liposuctions and breast augmentation surgery to look more like her idol, Carmen Electra, the B-movie starlet known mostly for posing nearly nude, and her quickie marriage-turned-divorce with NBA wild man Dennis Rodman.

For most of us, though, celebrity infatuation is an innocent, indefinable buzz that lights up when we meet someone famous. It’s about catching a minute with someone we admire, someone whose movie makes us laugh or whose song makes us dance. It’s about connectivity. And in a time when technology is both narrowing and distancing us from other people, connectivity is even more relevant.

We may talk to our friends and family by text message, instant message and e-mail—more even than face-to-face—but we can all agree that Mary-Kate needs to eat something, and Britney needs a really good life coach. We can all follow Brad and Angelina as they globetrot for their next adopted child. These shared subjects are strangely comforting for many people who look to celebrities as the great levelers, the common friends of a culture so fragmented, so devoid of any consensus of what is right or wrong, quality or crap.

What’s surprising is that on the local level, the power of celebrity, of a mass projected accessible image, still holds sway, even if few outside of the Baton Rouge area have a clue who George Sells, Andrea Clesi or Garrett Temple are.

Being a mid-sized college town, Baton Rouge’s vault of local celebrities is stacked almost exclusively with local sports and media figures. What does it say about our city when so few of the entrepreneurs, artists, industry titans and innovators who make the news remain virtually anonymous?

Baton Rouge as a populace is celebrity-obsessed in part because it is celebrity-starved.

After living just a few months in Manhattan, a friend and I were walking down Prince Street when we saw Moby standing on a stoop talking with another guy. “Hey Moby,” I said, as my friend waved casually. It just wasn’t that big of a deal. But if we had seen the Grammy-winning pop star in Baton Rouge at the corner of Third and Main, we both would have flipped.

Of course, plenty in New York City are celebrity-crazy, too. Gawker.com’s “Gawker Stalker” pinpoints the times and locations of star sightings submitted by readers, right down to detailed descriptions of clothing, companions and even snatches of cell phone gab.

Naturally, infrequency breeds more excitement for celebrities among Baton Rougeans than residents of New York, Los Angeles or even Austin and Nashville, where actors and pop stars reign supreme. To fill the gaps here, Baton Rouge has historically turned politicians and televangelists into its own pseudo-celebs. More than 70 years after his murder, a new downtown club is set to be named Huey P’s Speakeasy. Healing Place pastor Dino Rizzo is a well-known face and has one of the best multimedia sound systems in the city at his disposal. And this year Mayor Kip Holden served as king of the Spanish Town Mardi Gras Parade, a title the event organizers had been trying to bestow on him since he took office.

This Mardi Gras, King Holden took lots of photos with regaled parade-goers, people with that unquenchable urge to be a part of something, to get a picture with a celebrity, an autograph, a story to tell. The irony is that with the popularity of personal Web sites through Facebook and MySpace, meeting the rich and famous is becoming less about being a part of a celebrity’s story and more about the celebrity becoming part of ours.