It’s fun to watch an entertainer give their life story or swallow whole living creatures on stage, but sometimes their after-Veishea antics can be just as intriguing as their performance.

Take Stevie Starr, a Veishea regular. Known alternately as “The Regurgitator,” Starr’s act consists of his amazing ability to swallow things. Predictably, this power can get one into trouble.

“He is something else,” said BJ Brugman, this year’s entertainment committee co-chairman. “He likes to do some weird things.”

Last year, some of the Veishea committee members took Starr to Perkins after his act because he was hungry. While there, Starr began to do those “weird things.”

“He broke a fork,” Brugman said. “He heated it up with a lighter, I think. And then he held it between his fingers and just broke it. And he was messing with other people in the restaurant. He was making a scene; he was pretty loud. All of the people that were working at Perkins, I think there were four or five of them, they had all stepped out and were watching him. I think they were more upset with what he was doing than pleased that he was putting on a show. And he, I’m sure, thought that that was what he was supposed to do: put on a show, you know, and they all liked it.”

The truly memorable part came when the group was getting ready to leave.

“He had been swallowing his lighter before, and coughing it up, and then he picked up the salt shaker, and one of the managers at Perkins was like, ‘Do not put that in your mouth. You will not swallow that,’” Brugman said. “And I think he thought of it as like a challenge. So he pops it in and she just freaked out. And she was like, ‘Spit that out right now!’”

Starr did his trademark chest thump to get the saltshaker back.

“He just coughs it up and throws it on the table, and then we ran out,” Brugman said.

Just a few months prior, though, Starr had returned to Iowa State after a huge turnout at Veishea 2008.

And that is where he met Megan Rodenburg, Veishea’s general co-chairwoman for 2008.

“I had been engaged for probably less than a year,” she remembered, “and he swallowed my engagement ring.”

Horrific as that sounds, the situation quickly worsened. Several audience members were lined up on stage, and all of their rings had been swallowed by Starr.

But then, “he went through the line and said, ‘Whoever’s ring I regurgitate last has to stand across the stage from me and I’m going to spit a goldfish into their mouth and they’re going to have to swallow it,’” Rodenburg said.

“And here I am, freaking out, because one, my ring is in his stomach; and two, I was freaking out that I was going to have to swallow the fish.”

Rodenburg’s ring was regurgitated last, but the part about the fish never actually happened. There was still a catch. “My ring did come up slimy,” she said.

Sometimes celebrities can be disappointing in person. For Rodenburg, that was the case during Veishea 2007, when she worked as the Veishea office manager.

That year, Rodenburg and several other committee members had an opportunity to have dinner with Jodie Sweetin, known for her roll as Stephanie Tanner on the popular sitcom “Full House.”

“We went to the Gateway Hotel; that’s where she was staying. And we went to meet her, and we kind of had a hard time figuring out where she was,” Rodenburg said.

“She ended up coming down the elevator — we thought we’d meet her at the main desk — she came down and she was wearing sunglasses, totally how I’d imagined a celebrity being.”

Sweetin had come to talk about her addiction to methamphetamine and other abusive drugs.

But at dinner, the meth problem was “just one of those uncomfortable topics you don’t want to bring up,” Rodenburg said.

In fact, the dinner conversation in general was uncomfortable. “Conversation was super awkward,” Rodenburg remembered.

“We met a lot of different people through being involved with Veishea, and a lot of times they’re really normal-acting. They’ll just shoot the breeze with you. But it was really hard to converse with her.”

The cause of Sweetin’s close-lipped demeanor was not readily apparent. “She wasn’t very social,” Rodenburg said.

Other times, celebrities can be surprisingly kind. That was the revelation Elyse Harper, Veishea 2008’s campus and community involvement co-chairwoman, had.

She took Jeff Timmons of 98 Degrees to the airport after he emceed for Cyclone Idol in 2008.

“Jeff had a blast,” she remembered. “He loved the students.”

Harper said he was very polite, insisting that he sit in the backseat, and a gentleman, too — even when it surfaced that Harper preferred Justin Timberlake to 98 Degrees.

Where other celebrities might side with their own wardrobe, Timmons “wore a Veishea T-shirt” the whole night.