David Hasselhoff has always existed as an abstract to me; a pop culture construct that lives more in reruns and forwarded YouTube links than real life.

It was a bit of a shock to the system, then, to meet The Hoff, as he is known, Thursday night at the Bryant Park Grill.

Around 3 p.m. on Thursday afternoon, the skies above the intersection of Varick Street and Ericsson Place in TriBeCa opened up. A flock of preschoolers ran in and out of sheets of rain from beneath a large awning. They laughed in total amusement while their teachers looked on.

A few hundred feet east on Ericsson, a crowd of about 40 photographers and cameramen stood behind metal barriers in front of the New York Police Department's First Precinct. They huddled under beach umbrellas and plastic ponchos and refused to seek refuge from the downpour. Kiefer Sutherland could arrive at any minute to turn himself over to police.

This is the kind of symbolism a decent fiction editor might call too obvious. It's hard, though, to deny the slightly childish air that surrounds a celebrity perp walk.