Here’s how it feels to be suddenly famous in Vegas

How do you define fame? The first TV show? The first award? The first mention in a gossip column?

Maybe it’s just the first time a stranger recognizes you in public.

Good or bad, being famous, even to the most minuscule degree, can change everything.

We asked several “famous” Las Vegans about the moment they realized they were known. Their stories provide something of a cautionary tale about how fame can be both nice and incredibly annoying.

RICK HARRISON

Rick Harrison, co-owner of Las Vegas’ Gold and Silver Pawn Shop and star of the History channel TV show “Pawn Stars,” has been in the pawnshop business since 1988. He knew there was an outside chance the show would do well and might even make him at least mildly famous.

“I thought we’d get a season or two,” he recalls. “I never thought it’d be this insane.”

The show is broadcast nationally and internationally and has made Harrison a certified celebrity. He had his first inkling of things to come just a few weeks after the show began to air in July 2009.

“I’d be in the pawnshop, doing business, and people walked by (asking), ‘Can I get a picture with you?’ ” he says. “And it was really weird the first time, like, ‘Oh, here’s my autograph. I don’t know why you’d ever want it.’”

About six months in, “it was maybe once a week somebody would come up to me and get a picture, things like that,” Harrison says.

And about a year in, Harrison returned from a week off at Christmas and found a line in front of the pawnshop.

“Oh, my, god, that was one of those big moments where, ‘Whoa, this is getting a lot bigger than I ever thought it was going to get.’”

Today, Harrison is recognizable enough that he attracts a crowd of fans whenever he’s in public and even occasionally has to travel with a security guy. On the upside, his fame allows him to pursue his interest in helping charities, including serving as a celebrity spokesman for the Epilepsy Foundation.

Still, Harrison admits that he still doesn’t quite understand why anyone would even consider him to be any sort of celebrity.

“I have six kids and I’m definitely not special to them,” he says. “They keep me grounded.

“I mean, my wife still makes me go in the backyard and pick up the dog turds. You don’t feel famous when you do that.”

MARK HALL-PATTON

For most of his career, Mark Hall-Patton has labored in the relative obscurity of museums. The Clark County museum administrator gained some minor celebrity through public talks and guest newspaper columns.

A few years ago, Hall-Patton became an accidental celebrity as a resident expert on “Pawn Stars,” offering information about historical items. Hall-Patton discovered just a few months into the show’s run — after just two appearances — that TV celebrity is a weird breed of animal.

“We were over in California at an Arco station, filling up the tank of the minivan, and I was starting to step in the van when a guy ran across the parking lot and ran up to me.”

The man recognized Hall-Patton by his now-signature beard and hat and his vehicle’s license plate.

The stranger said, “‘You’re the guy from ‘Pawn Stars.’ I said, ‘Yes, I am.’ He said, ‘I hate you.’ And I realized that was the first time anybody ever said to me that they hated me at an Arco station in California.”

The man apparently had a problem with how Hall-Patton prices items that were to be pawned on the show.

“He said, ‘Why don’t you give the man a price?’’ so, obviously, he watched the show. I said, ‘Because I don’t sell this stuff. I run a museum.’

“He said, ‘OK,’ and he walked off.”

Before then, Hall-Patton had had a couple of friends call and tell him they saw him on television. “But that was the first time out in public that you kind of go, ‘Wait a minute. Something is really weird here.’ And since then, it’s gotten to the point where, literally, I can’t go out without being recognized.”

Most people are polite, and Hall-Patton is happy to say hello or shake a hand.

“You never can assume that you’re not going to be recognized, and it’s not ego,” he says. “That’s the thing: It sounds like ego when you say that, but it isn’t. It’s just that your daily reality shifts, and when you never wanted to be famous in the first place, all of a sudden you realize you can’t go anywhere without people recognizing you.”

What does his wife, Colleen, think about all of this?

“She says the thing she most enjoys is the fact she can walk four feet from me and be anonymous,” Hall-Patton says. “She’s a sociologist … and she has actually published a paper in (the academic journal) Celebrity Studies about how this has affected our lives.”

Hall-Patton loves talking about history with fans and loves that his visibility on the show gives greater exposure to the Clark County Museum (which, he notes, saw an attendance increase of 6.5 percent last year).

“This is good for me because I want people to come out here,” he says. “It’s a great place.”

But, Hall-Patton says, being recognized because of a TV show is “the most surreal, bizarre thing.”

JENNIFER STOWE

Jennifer Stowe has been dancing since the age of 3 and performed in numerous shows over the years before joining “Crazy Girls” at the Riviera about seven years ago.

Yet, it was only after joining that show that Stowe — who still dances in the show occasionally and who serves as its choreographer and company manager — was recognized, sans “Crazy Girls” wig and makeup, in public.

Granted, “the other shows, they were huge shows where it’s hard to pick someone out,” and, even in “Crazy Girls,” she jokes, “everyone is blond.”

But “Crazy Girls” also is performed by a smallish cast, in an intimate showroom, and each dancer gets a solo number, making it easier for its individual dancers to become recognized by audiences. Still, even with all of that, it’s bizarrely coincidental that the first time Stowe was recognized as a “Crazy Girl” in a neutral setting, she was out with her mother.

It was the first time her mother had seen her in the show, Stowe recalls. Afterward, they went to the Foundation Room at Mandalay Bay, because “I wanted to show her the Strip, and someone came up to me and said, ‘Oh, we just saw this show, and there was this girl named Jennifer and she looks just like you!’ “

“I said, ‘That’s me’ ” Stowe recalls. “And my mom said, ‘And I’m the mother.’ ”

The guy happened to be staying at Mandalay Bay and ran to his room to get the poster he had bought at the show for Stowe to sign. What did Mom think of that?.

“She was, like, ‘Oh, you are a celebrity now,’ ” Stowe answers with a laugh. “She was so cute.”

TERRY FATOR

Fator has been performing since he was 10 and had only a vague understanding then of how this celebrity thing worked.

“I always described it this way: I always kind of thought the celebrity fairy would come in and hit me with a wand and say, ‘You are now a celebrity,’” he jokes.

“But I still, to this day, don’t feel like a celebrity. I don’t expect people to recognize me and want to get a picture with me and want to get an autograph. I just don’t. It’s weird.”

Even now, says the “America’s Got Talent” winner and Las Vegas headliner, “it’s a very jarring feeling. When you hear your name whispered as you walk by, and somebody goes, ‘Oh, my God, that’s Terry Fator,’ believe me, I’m not as exciting as you think I am. In fact, I’m kind of a boring person.”

So, it’s probably not surprising that Fator can’t recall a specific instance when he finally felt famous. However, he does recall an early brush with the feeling, when he arrived in town to perform at his first Jerry Lewis telethon.

“I’m walking in the airport, and this lady gets excited and runs up to me and says, ‘Oh, my, god, I can’t believe it. Can I get your picture?’ “

The woman explained that she had come to Las Vegas in hopes of seeing a celebrity and that, she told Fator, “Now, I just did.

“I looked at her and said, ‘Who was it?’ And she kind of gave me a weird look and said, ‘You.’ That’s how clueless I was. I had no idea she was talking about me.”

“You do kind of get used to it, but it’s not a big deal,” Fator adds. “I still live my life totally the same way I did before. I just hope I don’t forget and pick my nose in public, because people might be watching.”

ROBYN CARR

Few authors are recognized on the street, unless by their own fans. So Robyn Carr, the author of more than 40 novels and a regular on New York Times best-seller lists, hasn’t had to spend too much time coping with what she would consider fame.

But, three years ago, Carr was scheduled to give the keynote speech at a romance writers convention in Anaheim, Calif. Her daughter, Jamie, accompanied her on the trip, and they decided to catch lunch before checking into the hotel.

As lunch ended, “I said, ‘Let’s go register for the conference before we get our room,’ ” Carr recalls. “We get up from the table and, as I often do, I yanked my pants up and got them back to where they’re supposed to be and blew my nose and picked up my purse.

“As we’re walking down the hall to register, (Jamie) looped her arm through mine and said, ‘OK, see, you can’t do that anymore because all those people in that crowded bar, you don’t know any of them and they all know you.’ There apparently was whispering and pointing, and I was oblivious to it.”

At the same conference, Carr was sitting in the hotel lobby with a friend, fellow best-selling romance author Susan Elizabeth Phillips, before dinner and noticed people were “edging closer, trying to hear what we’re saying to each other. And a woman loped across the lobby of this hotel and literally threw herself in the sofa right in front of us so she wouldn’t miss a word.”

“I jumped back about three feet,” Carr says. “I mean, what did she think we’re going to be talking about, our face lifts or our next plot?”

All things considered, Carr is fine with her relative degree of nonrecognition among the general public. With the Internet “and how easy it is for people to get your address, I think it’s just as well I’m not any more famous in the mainstream than I am,” she says.

“I can’t imagine what it would be like to be a movie star and have paparazzi sifting through your garbage.”

DANNY KOKER

Danny Koker has experienced at least two notable periods of being-recognized-on-the-street fame.

From 1989 to 2000, Koker achieved local fame as “Count Cool Rider,” the Elvis-inspired vampire host of a Saturday night horror movie program here. Now, as himself, Koker has achieved national fame as star of “Counting Cars,” a History channel reality show about his car and motorcycle customizing business.

But being recognized by the public preceded even those efforts. Koker’s father, a musician, “brought me up in music,” he says. “I used to sing gospel music years ago. I was onstage growing up, so being in front of people was kind of normal and comfortable for me.”

While Koker never was intimidated by being recognized in public, his first glimpse that “Counting Cars” had elevated him to a whole new level of fame came in 2013.

That “moment when it hit me,” he says, came when Koker was a guest on “The Late Show with David Letterman.”

“You shake a lot of (fans’) hands and take a lot of pictures, and people are kind. But, man, oh, man, when they fly you to New York and you’re a guest sitting in that chair next to David Letterman — who’s a fan — that, I would say, is the real moment that it dawned on me that ‘I think people know who I am.’ ”

Koker and Letterman talked cars, of course, and Letterman even surprised Koker by showing a clip from his Count Cool Rider days.

“It was hilarious,” Koker says, and the entire experience “surreal. I met Paul Shaffer and the band, and it was, like, this insanity. So if there was one definite moment, that was it.”

Beyond that, though, Koker doesn’t take the celebrity thing very seriously.

“I still laugh when I hear the word ‘celebrity’ because I don’t see myself that way,” he says. “I don’t see myself that way, I don’t feel that way, and I don’t think like that. I’m a guy who’s got a shop that builds hot rods and motorcycles, and thankfully there’s a television show about it and people seem to enjoy it. That’s how I look at it, and I’m happy about that.”

Contact reporter John Przybys at jprzybys@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0280.