Saturday, March 19, 2011

Doppelganger

Do you know someone who has a double? Often these doubles are simply just products of perception based on a simple trait or two. Other times the resemblance is quite uncanny. Several times I have run across someone in a restaurant or bar and someone approached me thinking they hadn't seen me for a while when indeed they had never seen me before. I am pretty sure I have never used the names they called me (the profane names I have generally answered to).

I ran across a waitress in a local bar/grill who looked very familiar. She was virtually a dead ringer for Kelly, a young lady I worked with perhaps 15 years ago. At another hangout, some years ago, there was a waitress who bore a strong resemblance to Gweneth Paltrow, though not as tall nor nearly as slim, and another who reminded me of Andrea Parker (Miss Parker to the Pretender fans out there).

There are a couple of doppelgangers of which I wish I had pictures. The reason is that they are damned funny. A few years ago I worked with a little guy from Ethiopia. He was a little guy with a big head and Southpark was in its prime. When I saw the Thanksgiving episode where the boys got a mailorder kid from Ethiopia I couldn't stop laughing because the resemblance was so clear, oddly enough.

Now I have one for the Simpson's fans out there. One of the minor characters of the show is a bit of a hillbilly named Cletus Delroy Spuckler. I know a guy that looks remarkably like Cletus. One day at work he took off his sweatshirt and was wearing a wifebeater. Had I been drinking anything it would have been a spit-take. That was a Kodak moment if there were one to be had for the purpose of this blog.

I also work with a woman who, though not purple, looks like Grimace from the old McDonald's commercials. Poor girl.

I once knew a girl who looked a lot like Rozanda 'Chili' Thomas and another who was said to resemble Rihanna, though I think that was due largely to her hairstyle. Certainly her forehead was not nearly so prominent.

Off on a tangent...there was a guy named Michael Jackson working for one of my previous employers and at another job I worked with a Tom Petty. It seemed to annoy him when we asked him when his next album was due out. In reality, those are really pretty normal names that happen to have famous namesakes. It does make me wonder if there is a guy out there somewhere cursed with the name Pink Floyd. Considering the post-hippie era of the band's popularity and the culture of drugs around them (they were considered acid rock) it is possible.