Have you ever felt as utterly conspicuous as a baby zebra in the middle of a pride of lions? I suppose comparing myself to a zebra is a bit of an exaggeration; I somehow doubt the members of the Seattle press were interested in eating raw Thomas for dinner. But entering a movie theater full of professional reporters as a high school writer was similarly awkward. Luckily, the peculiar looks I received as I skulked over to my seat were quickly diverted to the guest of honor as he strode to the front of the theater.

“Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the one and only Jerry Seinfeld.”

But let me start at the beginning.

Dumb Luck

Near the end of the summer, as a sort of personal challenge, I decided to find a way to interview a film director. I didn’t aim for any big Hollywood directors, because let’s face it, what do they have to gain from speaking to me (besides getting to spend 20 minutes talking to such an awesome guy)? Instead, I investigated online and found contact information for several directors I had seen presenting movies at the Seattle International Film Festival this past May.

To my surprise, one of the directors responded within several days and agreed to an interview. He requested that I contact his publicist beforehand, which I promptly did. Before long, I found myself receiving relatively frequent emails from a sizable public relations firm.

Most of the emails were about preview screenings for various movies opening in Seattle that I didn’t have time to attend, so I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to them. One day, however, the subject line of an email caught my eye. “Jerry Seinfeld Interview?”

Seinfeld was coming to town to promote his new film, Bee Movie, and I was offered a chance to see a special screening of the movie and participate in a roundtable interview with him. I weighed the pros and cons of the situation carefully, and after roughly two seconds, replied to the email.

“Yes, I think I might be interested in meeting Seinfeld.”

The Buzz About Jerry

Two days later, I was bound for Pacific Place to see selected footage from Bee Movie. The long escalator rides up to the fourth floor had given me far too much time to think about what I was doing. (What was Jerry going to say when he walked in for a professional roundtable interview and found a teenager sitting there?)

After the interminable journey to the top floor, I found myself at the entrance to the movie theater. I wasn’t entirely sure where to go, but I spotted a man carrying a massive movie camera over his shoulder and assumed that he was a TV cameraman there to film Seinfeld’s arrival and not just an incredibly blatant movie pirater.

I followed him in and found a mass of reporters and cameramen huddled in a corner like penguins keeping warm in the Antarctic winter. The combination of yellow and black balloons filling half the lobby and a massive poster for Bee Movie made it painfully clear that I had indeed found the correct place.

I walked over to the check-in table and received a warm greeting: “Are ­you here for Bee Movie?!”

My pass in hand, I entered the theater. I felt the audience of reporters eyeing me as I walked in, sharing similar sentiments to the gracious greeter, but after a few moments everybody returned to anxiously awaiting Seinfeld’s entrance. An aura of anticipation and excitement permeated every inch of the theater. As I sat down, I wondered what I was missing at school. The thought quickly passed.

The clicking of dozens of cameras and the clamor of reporters all trying to speak simultaneously just outside the theater silenced the audience. A few more reporters began to pour in, apparently having sufficiently added their voices to the cacophony of noise outside. I overheard one man comment to his friend as they came in from the media madness, “Dude, I’ve never seen you that excited before!”

The final few reporters trickled in, and the moment we’d all been waiting for was upon us. The lights went out and a number of people in the audience began to cheer enthusiastically. A spotlight fell on Seinfeld in the front of the theater.

“This is the first city where people would come to see me,” Seinfeld opened. “I owe it all to Seattle.”

For the following fifteen minutes, he delighted the audience with stories of his early career, his marriage, and his children. We essentially enjoyed a free dose of his signature standup material.

“I got tired of dating,” he said in regards to finally getting married at age 45. “It was 25 long years of acting fascinated.”

As for fatherhood, his only complaint was Father’s Day.

“Let’s buy him a gift that shows how little we know about him!”

Eventually he moved on to the topic of Bee Movie, explaining his reasons for writing the film.

“I just made it to be funny,” Seinfeld said. “Seriously.”

He had been having a low-key dinner with Steven Spielberg in the Hamptons when he jokingly pitched the idea for an animated movie about bees entitled Bee Movie. Spielberg, taking the idea seriously, contacted Jeffrey Katzenberg, head of DreamWorks Animation.

This left Seinfeld with a bit of a problem, given that the extent of his idea for the movie had been the title.

“I never plan anything,” he said. “They can’t control me!”

He pondered what Bee Movie would be about, and ultimately came to the conclusion that honey was the most fascinating subject.

“The big thing that seems to be going on is that humans are stealing their honey,” Seinfeld said. “They work so hard to make this stuff, and we just take it away without them really knowing.”

And so Bee Movie was born.

With that, he introduced the two directors of Bee Movie, Simon J. Smith and Steve Hickner. The British-native Smith acknowledged his roots in “the land of jams and jellies” and joked about the four long years it took to make Bee Movie come together.

“We had a lot of disagreements about food,” said Smith. “We’d have ‘offs’ to find the best foods. Cupcake-offs, donut-offs, pizza-offs…”

Hickner followed him, adopting a more formal tone than Seinfeld and Smith as he presented the movie clips. Bee Movie was not yet completed at the time of the screening, so they could only show us about 45 minutes of special footage from it. Hickner outlined the basic premise of Bee Movie before starting the film.

Recent college graduate Barry B. Benson (voiced by Jerry Seinfeld) desires more from life than the monotonous job of producing honey for the Honex Corporation. When he leaves the hive for the first time, he discovers the glorious world outside and forms an unlikely friendship with a human florist (voiced by Renée Zellweger). But he also uncovers the dark secret that humans are stealing honey from the bees and selling it in grocery stores. Infuriated, he decides to sue the human race.

The clips we saw from the movie weren’t particularly inspiring. The plot seemed too far-fetched, and the animation looked significantly inferior to that of Pixar. The best parts of the movie appeared to be the simple observational humor and pop culture references that made Seinfeld so funny.

“TiVo. You mean you can just freeze live TV? That’s insane. We have ‘Hivo,’ but it’s a disease. It’s a horrible, horrible disease.”

The final few clips we saw hinted towards an unexpectedly strong ending for the movie. The court scenes with Oprah Winfrey as judge and witnesses like Sting came across as far funnier than the earlier excerpts. Unfortunately, we did not see the film in its entirety, so I honestly have no idea what the finished product is like.

The lights came back on, and the directors thanked us for attending the special screening. With that, I had an hour to kill before the real excitement of the day.