The popular magazines tell us that celebrities everywhere are having trouble with overzealous fans.

Julia Roberts, the sexy young movie star, is so upset about the intrusive admirers who show up at her house that she’s hired a cop to stand outside her door. And David Letterman, the late-night TV host, came home four times to find the same love-sick female stranger waiting for him inside.

That kind of thing doesn’t happen here in Maine, though. Our celebrities are treated with the highest respect. When they move into our midst, they become one of us — like it or not. We don’t bow and scrape, we don’t beg for autographs. Mostly we try to act as if they’re not there.

When Stephen King, the most famous author in the world, pushes a cart through his local Shop ‘N Save do we trample each other for a glimpse? Do we peer shamelessly at his porkchops? No, we don’t. We avert our eyes and start squeezing tomatoes, that’s what we do.

Even Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger sat unmolested at a Bangor airport coffee shop recently while waiting for a plane to Cannes, France. The muscled movie warriors had suits on, but an eyewitness reported that they still looked pumped. They would have been besieged anywhere else, but not here. The local media never mentioned them. We just let them sit there, a pair of famous beefcakes drinking coffee and thinking deep thoughts.

In our efforts to make a celebrity feel like one of us, however, we sometimes get too familiar. While covering a story near Machias, a photographer and I went to the bar in town to kill some time after work. The local boys were all there, in truck caps and T-shirts and those low-rider blue jeans that are always in fashion in rural America. Maudlin country songs oozed from the jukebox while a few guys played pool.

One of the boys took a pull off his tall-neck beer and mentioned something about “Magnum P.I.” buying a summer place for his mother, the lovely Mrs. P.I., somewhere in the area. That led to talk of Diana Ross, the former lead singer of the Supremes. She, too, it seems, had bought a place down that way, and one of the guys at the bar said he’d seen Ross skulking around town.

“I think she was buying some smokes,” he said nonchalantly. “She had on one of them kerchiefs and sunglasses, but I could tell it was her.”

His buddy turned to me and said, “Lotsa people seen her. You guys oughta do a write-up about it in the paper.”

It sounded interesting, but I said I didn’t think Diana would care to be interviewed after coming to Maine to hide out.

“No problem,” said the guy with a shrug. “You could go over there right now if you want. Go ahead. She don’t mind.”

I looked around the bar and wondered what Ms. Ross would think if she peered through the curtains at home and saw these burly young men tromping up her driveway for a neighborly visit.

“Oh my God!” she’d shriek to her housekeeper. “There’s at least 10 of them and they’ve got six-packs hanging from their belts! Have the car brought around. We must flee.”

So I left Diana alone.

My friend, Tom, has met a lot of celebrities. He never recognizes them at first, which spares him the embarrassment of being awed in their presence. He used to run the only general store on Swan’s Island, a little fishing community with four churches, no alcohol, and a lot of summer tourists. One day, the singer Billy Joel and his model wife Christie Brinkley walked into the store, looking for beer. Tom didn’t recognize Joel. The fetching Ms. Brinkley had her hair tucked under a cap, which led Tom to mistake her for a boy. Perhaps Tom had lived on the island a little too long by then.

“We don’t sell beer,” Tom said. “This is a dry island.”

Joel settled for soda, Tom told me, and then began complaining about the 55-cent price. Why, he could get soda for 50 cents in New York. Tom reminded the pop-eyed rocker that this wasn’t New York, that no one was twisting his arm to buy the soda, and that he’d had it up to here with pushy summer people.

“There’s the door,” Tom said. “Watch out. It’s been known to slap people in the behind on the way out.”

Joel bought three cans and left in a huff with his wife. Two hours later, they returned with three empty cans. One was stomped flat.

“I want my 15-cent deposit,” Joel said gruffly.

“We don’t take squashed cans,” my friend said more gruffly, throwing a dime on the counter. Fortunately, he didn’t find out until later to whom he had been gruff. Saved himself a nickel.

Tom said he once gave Ted Turner a lift in his one-gear “island truck” without knowing who his passenger was. Turner rattled on about a new cable station he was starting, but Tom wasn’t impressed. He didn’t get cable.

He didn’t recognize Walter Cronkite either, when the famous ex-newsman asked if he could shuck some corn behind the store. Tom’s neighbor knew, though, and walked right up to Cronkite.

“One thing I want to know, Mr. Crankcase,” the island man said. “Is that really the way it is?”