Shea Seger in “We Bought a Zoo” (Sort Of)

Cameron Crowe’s comedy We Bought a Zoo is out on DVD this week, and even though I didn’t care for the movie when it hit theaters last December, I was intrigued by a minor mystery about it involving Fort Worth singer-songwriter and recent Weekly cover subject Shea Seger. This week, with the help of the Weekly‘s Twitter maven Anthony Mariani, the mystery was solved.

Here’s the movie’s trailer. Take a look at the woman who hits on Matt Damon between :10 and :20 of the clip:

That, of course, is not Shea Seger, but rather an actress named Desi Lydic. This character is never named in the film (and indeed never appears on screen again), but in the closing credits, she’s identified as “Shea Seger (Lasagna Mom)”. Given how knowledgeable Cameron Crowe is about music, it seemed inconceivable that this could have been a coincidence. I sent inquiries about this to 20th Century Fox last winter, but nobody there seemed to know why Crowe named this character after Shea Seger.

This week, we got an answer from the filmmaker himself. When Anthony forwarded my question to Cameron Crowe on his Twitter feed, the writer-director of Say Anything… and Almost Famous tweeted back: “may street project… truly great album. there was an outtake from our elton john doc where he was raving about her too.” So he’s a fan of hers. As if any further proof of his excellent musical taste were needed.

By the way, the Elton John doc that Crowe is referring to is The Union, a film made for HBO about Sir Elton’s collaboration with Leon Russell. No word yet from Shea Seger herself about Crowe associating her with sex-hungry moms, crushes on Matt Damon, or lasagna, but if she gets back to me, I’ll let you all know.