A BRUSH WITH FAME MIGHT VALIDATE YOU AS A PERSON.

Byline: >MELISSA HECKSCHER

So there we were, eating a frighteningly excessive heaping of fried food at some Sepulveda Boulevard diner on the first morning of our first weekend together, when he said it.

He had told me other secrets -- how he wasn't good at having girlfriends, how he used wrinkle cream, how he actually cried while watching "The Notebook." But this? This was going to be a tough one to take:

Katie Holmes once asked for his phone number.

Apparently, it happened long before Suri and Scientology and Tom getting freaky on the couches of TV talk shows. This was "Dawson's"-era Katie, when she was just a typical teenager with a beat-up car and a really, really cool job, and when she, apparently -- for a moment -- thought my (ex)boyfriend was cute.

Crap.

Sure, I want the guy I'm dating to be cute. But not so cute he's got, like, Avril Lavigne and her friends chasing him down the street for his phone number. I mean, who wants to worry about losing a significant other to an MTV award winner?

But I could beat him at this game. I had a past, too.

"Oh yeah?" I said breezily. "I once went out to lunch with Matt Dillon."

"Really?"

"Yeah, he was a nice guy."

It was true. (So what if it was totally unromantic and 10 years ago and when I worked as an over-ambitious intern for an entertainment magazine?) I said it as if Matt and I were old friends, as if he were right then waiting for my call, as if, "Oh wait, sorry, I've gotta go; Matt's on the other line."

It worked. My (ex)boyfriend -- the guy Katie Holmes once noticed but who was at the time going out with me -- stopped eating his fries and onion rings for a minute and looked up at me, seeming just a little bit ... jealous.

But wait, why does it matter again?

"It makes you important," said Judy Kuriansky, author of "A Complete Idiot's Guide to Dating." "It gives you a vicarious sense of, 'I am a somebody -- you should pay attention to me,' and it makes the other person feel that there must be something special about you because somebody who could have had anybody was interested in you."

"It's like getting the Good Housekeeping stamp of approval."

Yeah, OK. Maybe. But nowadays, with reality shows overthrowing everything that's not HBO and with everyone knowing someone who has been on TV somehow, who isn't a celebrity?

Speaking for myself, I've got an "American Idol" top-10 finalist living below me, an ex-"Road Rules" girl living above me, and a "Blind Date" (does that count?) living down the street. And that's not even counting the fact MTV's uber-hip makeover show, "Made," just filmed a whole episode in my building. Yes, even my windows are famous.

So I say, celebrities schmelebrities.

In Los Angeles, where your Coffee Bean barista may have just signed a deal with Columbia Records and the person passing you on the the Hollywood Freeway might be Mel Gibson, isn't it maybe a little bit cooler and more interesting to go out with someone who's not famous but who has the sort of character all those famous people work so hard to emulate?

You know, the doctors, the (ahem) writers, the teachers or the rocket scientists? The real deals, instead of the impersonators?

I think so.

So next time, when a guy tells me his last girlfriend just happened to be, say, a Laker Girl or a Fox reality-show star, I'll respond differently.

"Oh yeah?" I'll say. "Well, my last boyfriend was a veterinarian. He saves dogs."

Seriously, does it get any better than that?

Melissa Heckscher [phone], Ext. 329,

melissa.heckscher @dailybreeze.com.