Hollywood Boulevard offers up its own very particular freak show, and I’ve written before about rampaging Wookies and the like. Now it seems, per E! Online, that a Marilyn Monroe look-alike has called the cops on a Chewbacca character, alleging that someone touched her on her right shoulder “without her permission,” LAPD officer April Harding said on Monday. She also told officers that about a month ago a man in a Chewbacca costume grabbed her hand and placed it on his genitals, hence the filed battery complaint. Wait a second… battery and/or sexual harassment, or just some good old role-playing hanky-panky? Hmmm… maybe I’ve revealed too much…

Actually, one funny thing is that this entire incident was apparently set off by a group of tourists approaching the Monroe character — whose name police refused to release — and telling her that she was the worst Marilyn Monroe impersonator they’d ever seen; “Marilyn” then thought that the guy dressed as Chewbecca had egged them or convinced them to say that. The funnier thing is that two weeks ago I was in Hollywood, right around the Hollywood & Highland complex and Grauman’s Chinese, where these folks congregate. From about 30 feet, I saw what I presume to be many of the same characters described herein, and I remember being struck by and even saying at the time to a couple friends of mine, “Jesus, who’s that supposed to be… Marilyn Monroe?” She looked awful, really. Donn Harper, though, quoted in the aforementioned piece, shouldn’t get too uppity… his run-down Elmo costume was equally pathetic and derisible.