The fact that you sport faded blue jeans and prayer beads on your wrist as regularly as you don your Dolce & Gabbana suit to pick up your Academy Award.
The fact that you were a slacker in “The Big Lebowski” before you were the star, albeit one that fell from country grace, in “Crazy Heart.”
The fact that you’re in Yonkers one day and on a Boston film set the next.
The actor and his small entourage exit an SUV with tinted windows across from the Maitri Center for individuals with HIV and AIDS on a less-than-Hollywood block in southwest Yonkers.
Bridges has that unmistakable star quality.
Like he isn’t trying.
Like he just happens to roll out of bed every day at 6-foot something with the presence of a Greek god and the personality of a jolly giant.
“I’ve seen him before,” Maitri client Audrey Wilson tells me as the rugged star readies to chat with a small group at one of Greyston Foundation’s facilities. “Bernie (Glassman) had a party two or three years ago down in the city. I’m from the Bronx. I went down, sang, and Jeff sang. He had his keyboard. We talk about singing together.”
He had a ponytail three years ago, she tells me.
Not now.
Now he rocks long tresses of gray and dirty blond, which he frequently combs with his fingers.
“I made these little heads,” Bridges says with semi-naughty smirk, playing with a ceramic sculpture he holds in the palm of his hand. “This is such a complicated thing to talk about. I like to do ceramics and I always had a hunk of clay left over. I found myself making these little heads in sort of an aimless place. I kind of let my hands rip. Before I knew it, I had a whole slew of these little guys and they all had different spirits.”
The one he’s holding this particular day goes by “Charlie,” and Charlie has traversed the globe with his “Head Keeper” Bernie Glassman, an American Zen master, founder of global social advocacy group Zen Peacemakers and the community development organization Greyston Foundation.
Charlie was given to Glassman for his 70th birthday by supporter Bridges, an avid Zen Buddhist himself.
“I mean, it was just a lump of clay, I thought nobody would love the head as much as I do. But I thought every now and then, it’d be nice to give my friends a little head,” Bridges says before an intimate gathering that promptly erupts in embarrassed laughter. “Hey, that’s your dirty minds, not mine.”
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