Tom Hanks Befriends NYC Cabbie
The world is such a small place. In a city with what feels like a million cabs, it seems that one particular New York City cab driver gets all the famous people. Through we don’t know his name, an NYC cabbie posted a photo of himself and actor Tom Hanks to the Humans of NY’s website this week. His story, it seems, is one that’s pretty amazing.
Imagine working as a cabbie in NY, spending your days fighting awful traffic and essentially dealing with people in a rush all day long. That’s what this guy does, but one night he makes the decision to pick up just one more fare on his ride home. He’d already finished work for the day, but he stopped anyway. A man climbs in the back of his cab, talking quickly and with a lot of excitement and the cabbie pays him no attention. It doesn’t dawn on him immediately that he recognizes the voice of his new fare but when it does, he looks in the mirror and sees Tom Hanks sitting in the back of his cab. After yelling, “WILSON,” to reference Hanks’ former movie, Castaway, the two quickly bonded and Hanks invited him to come backstage at his performance in Broadway’s Lucky Guy.
“He walks in and screams, ‘Mr. Ferrari,” said the cabbie in reference to the hat he was wearing when he picked Hanks up that night last year. “Can you believe that story? And you wanna know the craziest thing? The name of his show was Lucky Guy. How crazy is that? Cause that was me. A lucky guy!” He goes on to say that the two then posed for a photo, which is the one that ended up online.
To make the story even more incredible, TODAY show co-host Hoda Kotb also rode in the same cab, saw the photo of the driver with Hanks and posed for her own photo with him. What a small world.
Photo by Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images for BFI
