Celebridentified, again.

It is not a bad thing to have people regularly say that you look like a celebrity. But it can catch you off guard if it is a celebrity you have never heard of. After all these years it should be easier to deal with. but it is always strange. The reason I bring this up is that I was told on Friday that I looked like Jack Nance who was the title character in the movie Eraserhead. I have heard a lot of different names, but that was the first time for Nance. On the surface I was nonchalant, but I was sort of tense inside, waiting for another name to come up. It never did, and I was relieved.

The first time I was "celeb-dentified" was in 7th grade. It was my first year in public school. For all the parents reading this, if you want to mess up your kids, please home school them! For me the experience of school was scary and awkward. It seems like I always felt that I did not belong. Because of this I think I made a lot less friends than I would have if I operated with the understanding that nobody in 7th grade feels like they belong. But I was shy for the most part, and very awkward with girls. It must have been during the second half of the year when some of the girls started talking to me. "Hey Thomas J." I was a little surprised, but I asked what that was about they told me there was a character in some show who looked like me. His name was Thomas Jay. That should probably have been seen as a compliment, but it only made me more uncomfortable. This could have been because I was trying to establish my own identity, or it could have been that the girls made me nervous. Either way, I did not like being called Thomas J. To this day I have no idea which show it was. I am sure that the girls thought it was good that we looked alike. I bet we did. Still I was glad when the show was canceled. It would be ten years before I was in the look-alike business again.

This time I was in school at Central Washington University. I was hanging out with some friends. A couple of girls came over, which was very nice. As tech ed majors, we had no women in our major. The only woman in a class with us was an engineer and very annoying. During the course of the evening, the girls mentioned that I looked like John Mayer. Even though it had been so long, I still remembered how I felt in 7th grade. This time I was able to deal with it. Except for the fact that John Mayer has such a bad reputation among the musicians I hang with. He is popular with girls, but really most men don't like him. Since I had my musical identity already I was not worried, but to be honest, I probably should have asked the girls on a date! Instead I spent the next 7 years playing music and making sure I did not sound like John Mayer!

Obviously, I am telling these stories and avoiding the elephant in the room. The Twilight guy. Edward. Sparkles. R-Patz. Robert Pattinson. So there you have it. People say we look alike as well. but the funny thing is all the other celebs I have been celeb-dentified with along the way: Vince Vaughn, Willem Dafoe, Hugh Grant, one of the two main guys from Avatar, Aiden Quinn, and I must be forgetting some. It happens often, but without enough regularity that I can expect it. Thus I am always looking around a bit suspiciously, and I have taken to wearing hoods. I was doing just such last Wednesday, when my old pal coach Les (the one who gave me the name "Buzzsaw) said "You look like Obi Wan Kenobi"!  So that is the life of the celeb-dentified. And just so you know, it does not pay that well!