Barry Williams knows how to deal with raving loonies.

Regardless of what you might read or hope, celebrities are not just like us. For example, when you visit a restaurant, a camera is never focused on each open-mouthed sandwich bite and thought-to-be-discrete nose-pick. And when you’ve popped into your local drugstore for a fleet enema to correct an intensely personal problem, you’re never confronted by an autograph-seeker with a camera phone. Just imagine what it would feel like if people all over the world were fascinated by everything that you say and do and wear and write.

Actually, that last part maybe doesn’t sound so terrible. Anyway.

Those circumstances above, however, are simply the trappings of every-day life as a celebrity. Most actors, musicians, directors and the like want that kind of attention and crave that scrutiny – and should consider themselves fortunate should they attain it. But what happens when things get awkward, uncomfortable? What happens when one is confronted with a fan who is completely and utterly bonkers?

Barry Williams would like to offer just such an example of this, in the “Ask Barry” section of barrywilliams.com in which the forever eldest Brady boy schools us on what to do when a fan brings the cuckoo:

From: swinstead:
I was watching the new show on NBC called “CHUCK”. Aside from him playing a “geek” and you “cool”, it is like you could be twins at that age. His girlfriend…… is like Maureen with long blond hair. The ONE thing that really stands out is You and Maureen have blue eyes, while these charaters on Chuck have brown. Another similarity is Josh Schwartz is the producer…………. a relative to Sherwood Schwartz?
Barry Williams:
I’ll have to check it out. Sherwood Scwartz has a lot of relatives and I don’t know if Josh is one of them.

Such mastery! Williams gives “swinstead” the online equivalent of a sidelong, cautious-but-barely-acknowledging glance, never providing weight or significance to the more logically and morally deficient elements of his fan’s query. There’s no reference to “swinstead”’s nervy comparison of two fictional characters to Williams and Maureen McCormick; there’s no panicked aside regarding the wacko’s obsession with uncomfortable personal details. Instead, Barry Williams dispatches any potential danger or harm by demonstrating the classic CPR method for dealing with kooks: Contain, Placate and Resume.

More celebrities should really be like Barry Williams.