So you’re reading a profile of Chinese musician Yang Yang in The New Yorker (link leads to an extract only) and you come across a passage that goes
When he is handed flowers, the first thing he does after smiling and saying thanks, is look around, eyes darting, for somewhere to ditch the flowers. For nine days I felt like a maid of honor.
… and then you flip back a few pages to check that, yes, it was David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker himself, who wrote the piece, and who is now graciously subordinating himself to the subject of his profile.