Next up on Dining With the Stars, Robert Redford was awarded the ShoWest Visionary Award. The tone of the award was set during the introduction by Paul Richardson, head of Sundance Pictures, who announced that Redford has "made everyone in the room a lot of money over the years." (Yaaay! Big applause! Lots of money! Yaaay!) Redford, who is indeed both shorter and older in person, discussed his vision of Sundance, taking care to say repeatedly how much he loves Hollywood, how much Sundance is not anti-Hollywood, and even offered a lengthy explanation/apology about some Sundance-related business venture with which I was totally unfamiliar but apparently lost a few people in that distinguished audience some money. (Yaay! Robert Redford is sorry he lost us money! Let us give him more! Yaaay!)

I was a bit disappointed in Redford's address, not because of what he said about Sundance, which only made sense given the context of the audience, but because he opened with a joke about salad dressing. Before I went toShoWest my brother and I had one of those conversations which can basically be summarized as "If you encountered a famous person, what profound witticism would you offer that would make them immediately see how cool you are and promptly invite you to join their table/ skiing/ become their personal assistant." For Robert Redford, I had a salad dressing joke which would simultaneously acknowledge that people confuse him with Paul Newman all the time, that I know how ridiculous such confusion is, that I respect his great body of work, and I eat vegetables. His opening remarks, about constantly being complimented for his salad dressing, pretty much killed my joke dead. Apparently, I'm not the first to have thought of it.

Next up on my agenda: my first "real" screening of a future Hollywood hit, Kung Fu Panda. Before my allotted screening time I had time to visit the Kung Fu Panda dinner reception which was all you could imagine a Hollywood dinner reception to be. Kung Fu Panda himself was there and, although I had strong reason to suspect that Jack Black was not inside the costume, he nonetheless made himself available for photographs. There were huge Kung Fu Panda banners and a Chinese food buffet with cute little Chinese takeout boxes to eat your food out of. There were acres of cute wee desserts which, due to their tiny size, I had to assume were completely calorie free! There was even an open bar which at first so overwhelmed me I ordered a vodka and OJ, a drink I haven't ordered publicly since college, just because I was so addled by my choices.