C.J.: Danny Glover remains protective of his "Lethal Weapon" co-star and friend Mel Gibson.

Danny Glover, in St. Paul to introduce Jeri Brunoe's "Salmon Woman" at the Ordway, wasn't completely dressed when he arrived for our ­interview.

He was late getting to St. Paul Hotel's Cedar Room because he had overslept during a Saturday nap. Completely understandable for two reasons: Glover flew into the Twin Cities from Salt Lake City where he is shooting a movie, and he gets up to exercise at 5:30 a.m.

The actor and activist — "Salmon Woman" was a benefit for the American Indian Prison Project Working Group — arrived wearing an expensive suit and shirt, with his tie draped around his neck. Still groggy from his nap, Glover took a few minutes to tie the cravat. Nancy Kelly, AIPPWG's D.C.-based research evaluation policy lead, and yours truly played the roles of Glover's human mirrors because he told us he wanted to look turned out on camera.

After I finished smoothing his collar, I told Glover that I should go on Twitter and say that I had helped Danny Glover put on his tie.

"A better tweet," said Kelly, "would be, 'I just got done dressing Danny Glover.' If you want to get him some publicity, that would be the tweet!"

Kelly's quip brought a smile to Glover's face.

The actor had a loquacious answer to each of my questions, right up until the one about Mel Gibson. Glover and I disagreed about when my Mel Gibson queries should cease and he snapped at me pretty well. When I post the video of the interview, it will be important for readers to know how much laughing we did after the kerfuffle. In fact, Glover asked me to give him a hug and I was honored to do so. As a result, I can report that he feels like a man who gets up to exercise at 5:30 a.m. He's in terrific shape.

Glover draws a crowd

Danny Glover might still be talking to me if Nancy Kelly hadn't interrupted.

He might still be making his way from the hotel to the Ordway were it not for Kelly. They were crossing the street "when car horns were honking and people were talking to him from their cars," Kelly said Monday.

A family stopped their car and got out to meet him. "They had an accent and he said, Where are you from? They said Nigeria," Kelly told me. "This family wanted to take their picture with him, so I'm taking their pictures. Another family stopped; all these people are swarming around him and I said, 'That's it. That's the last one. I've got to get you to the theater.' "

There was a big young man watching all of this activity without comment, from one of the benches in Rice Park. It didn't looked to Kelly as if the young man was going to speak to Glover.

Glover "stops and touches his shoulder and goes, Where are you from in Nigeria? The kid goes, Huh? I'm from St. Paul. It was hysterical. So I got him across the park, and at the end of the evening he ended up going to dinner with Jeri."

Glover said he met Brunoe when they were filming "Buffalo Soldiers."

"He gave his honorarium back to AIPPWG," Kelly told me. "Very sweet, really nice. He said, It was my pleasure."

A public address from PA

KFAN's Paul Allen was very excited to let me know that he's become a nonsmoker.

The voice of the Vikings finally heard the shaming he deserved from his daughter. "It was somewhere in March my 11-year-old daughter gave me a 3½-page letter calling me a fraud," Allen told me at KFAN's State Fair booth Thursday. "With me being the undertaker I would tell them [his two children] I was the last person to ever let them down. She said you're not the undertaker, 'cause all you do is let us down. So I quit two days later. A far cry from when you [videotaped me] having a cigarette, and I was embarrassed and didn't want to talk about it! Now I'm willing to look into the camera and say I smell so good I could even take a hug from C.J."

In addition to the hugging and kissing, my startribune.com/video of PA includes footage of WCCO-TV's Lauren Casey that'll be of interest to Ring Watchers, and a clip of Jamie Yuccas doing something she'll no doubt explain via Twitter.

C.J. can be reached at cj@startribune.com and seen on FOX 9's "Buzz." E-mailers, please state a subject; "Hello" does not count. Attachments are not opened.