http://blogs.sltrib.com/sundance/index.php?p=10097&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1

My friend Clayton Chase Fullmer took this great photo of Bill Murray for WireImage, the festival's official photographer.

I never thought celebrity-seekers would be as excited about seeing Bill Gates as they are about starlets.

He made a couple events difficult to get into when he decided to go to them. Apparently, he was partying pretty hard this weekend, dancing and flirting with young women way past midnight. I know it’s hard to imagine. I’m glad he got the Sundance experience, but it meant a lot of people didn’t get into these events because they were taken over by Gates and his entourage.

The Roots performed with John Legend at a party for “Waiting for Superman.” Because Bill Gates was there, I didn’t get in to hear it. I was deeply, bitterly disappointed. The Roots are one of my favorite bands to see live, and since they joined Jimmy Fallon as his house band, they haven’t toured much.

So I stood outside, with snow piling up on me, cursing. “Stupid Bill Gates!” I said. And I trundled off to catch a shuttle home. On the shuttle, I ran into my dear friend Sean P. Means, movie critic for the Salt Lake Tribune. Like me, he was covered with snow. Also like me, he’d been waiting to get into a party and had given up. We shared a friendly gripe about our thwarted efforts.

I soon realized that if I’d gotten into that event, I would probably not have made it home. And as I slid along at 10 miles an hour through a sideways blizzard, gripping the steering wheel and gritting my teeth as cars slid off the road all around me, I thought about what’s really important in life. Not Bill Gates. Not even The Roots (though they’re up there). It was important to me at that moment that I made it home without dying or crashing my mom’s car. It was important that I made it back to my sweetie in Seattle. And chatting with Sean was a lot more fun than party conversation would have been. Friends and family, that’s what’s important. And good music, when you can get it.

The snow was just starting when this photo was taken at the Eccles Theater. (Photo by Brandon Joseph Baker, courtesy of Sundance Film Festival)