If you don’t know who I’m talking about, you can just start Googling “Hot Irish” and “Hot Irish Guy on TMZ” will come up. That’s what’s so funny about it.

His name is Peter O’Riordan and a discussion about him came up over a liposuction under local in my office yesterday. We were still on the first thigh and my patient—who had refused to take even a vicodin—was getting bored. If you hadn’t realized that you might have to bring your own source of entertainment while you are having a liposuction done under local, please see the Can’t I Just Have Lipo Done Under Local post.

Since it’s just women in the room, these discussions over lipo-under-local inevitably degenerate into conversations about clothes, men, and Fifty Shades of Grey. Her friend (who had come along to watch the procedure) had already whipped out an IPad for a repeat showing of the Fifty Shades of Grey Saturday Night Live skit, so we were done with that. I was a little too worn out from a long week to go into my usual stand-up routine, so when her friend said she was going back into the waiting room where TMZ was on, I thought of something.

“I never watch TMZ, really,” I told my patient. “But have you seen that hot—“

She cut me off immediately with: “The hot Irish guy?” and so I knew I could kill ten minutes with a story she would appreciate.

Before I moved in with my husband a couple of years ago, on an impulse I briefly lived in a studio in Laurel Canyon. It was the picture-perfect artist’s hideaway with a breathtaking view but it was not as cool as my married friends with kids and big houses imagined it to be. For one thing, it did not have a kitchen. So I frequented that Trader Joe’s at the corner of Sunset and Crescent Heights quite a bit, as Trader Joe’s is your best bet when all you have is a microwave and a mini refrigerator.

Back then, I used to spend most Saturday nights working on my book alone at home. Fortunately my then-boyfriend-now-husband saw this as his opportunity to live it up in the South Bay with his last few single friends, which gave me the time I needed to write. And since it was taking him longer and longer to recover from trying to drink like a twenty-five year-old, I usually had the whole next day to myself as well.

Anyway, one of those Saturday nights that I was at Trader Joe’s there was an uncharacteristically hot guy working one of the checkout lines. It would have been difficult not to notice him, as you can imagine how out of place he looked working at the Trader Joe’s at Sunset and Crescent Heights looking like this:

I figured he had to be gay, because no straight men in that part of town take such good care of themselves. But gay eye candy is better than no eye candy, especially when you’re looking forward to a long evening ahead of writer’s block in a three hundred square foot studio that is starting to look like it wasn’t such a great idea after all, so obviously I chose his check-out line.

But as soon as he started chatting me up in that overly-friendly Trader Joe’s kind of way while he rang up my collection of ready-made food, all I could think was, he’s  sooo not gay and why didn’t I put on makeup and a cute outfit to go to Trader Joe’s? And is that amazing Irish accent for real?

He asked how my night was going. I said fine, I had a lot of work to do. He asked if I was a writer (not exactly a compliment, to “look” like a writer in L.A.) I said yes, I was writing something, but to clarify, I was not a writer. So he asked what I did for a living and I told him I was a surgeon. He then informed me that he had started at a medical school in Dublin because it was his dream to become a physician, but he quit after a year because he had been too distracted, “having too much fun.” I told him I could only imagine how distracting it must have been having women throwing themselves at him all the time while he was trying to study.

Then I didn’t even ask him—I just stated the most obvious fact: “So you came here to be an actor.”

“No,” he said. “I came here to go to school at UCLA–”

Yeah, right…

“But,” he continued. “After I’d only been here for two weeks, I got hired to be on a show.”

I assumed it must be some kind of soap opera or show on the CW because again, this is what he looks like:

So I told him he must have a lot of enemies, because people spend their whole lives here and get nothing. Then again, most of them don’t look like he does in real life. He agreed that some of his new acquaintances had become pretty pissed off.

Alas, he did not take my phone number, but he did tell me that he really respected what I did for a living, and his comment seemed heartfelt.

I think I got some good writing done that night—having someone like that bagging your groceries can certainly put a spring in your step—but I moved out of that hellhole soon after that, and stopped going to that Trader Joe’s, and I never saw him again.

But then a year later while I was on the elliptical at the Equinox in West Hollywood, there he was on the overhead TV # 3!

As soon as I got home, I confirmed with a Google search (again, all I put in was “Hot Irish” and his name came up.) Turns out he has a huge fanbase. Some site called “The Data Lounge” reports: “His name is Peter O’Riordan, and he is an ‘actor/model’ from Ireland, who Harvey Levin supposedly found working in the produce department at Trader Joe’s.”

Well, the second part is true, but we really need to set the record straight. He was an aspiring physician who was torn from his true calling by whatever media frenzy they have over there in Ireland because of the way he looks. A tragic tale.

I don’t know how to end this except to say: Life just isn’t fair, is it?

Have a great weekend!

XO

LQ

P.S. Feedback on that hot pink Victoria’s Secret Very Sexy® Knockout Bra™ from last time is that it fits great and does wonders