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They walk among us.
Who?
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Us.
Us walks among us?
In a manner of speaking, yes. Our doppelg？ngers walk among us.
Last week I explored two cases of mistaken identity: how I have been confused with all manner of other people who share my rather common name and how a reader named Sherm Eagan was once confused with a putative Quebecois terrorist. I asked: And what about you?
I heard from readers who have been mistaken for everyone from Colin Powell to Jamie Lee Curtis, but I want to start with a less famous example. About 40 years ago, Bill McKay spent two days visiting friends at the California Institute of the Arts in Santa Clarita.
As Bill walked around the campus, weird stuff kept happening. People engaged him in confusing conversations and made inscrutable comments to him. Toward the end of the second day, someone asked, “Will you be at the party later?”
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“So I played along: ‘Oh sure, see you there,’” Bill wrote.
Later, he did go to a party.
“And it just happened to be the party that everyone had been asking me about,” wrote Bill, who lives in Reston, Va. “And everyone flipped out, realizing that I was a different person than the other guy that they all knew, who was at the party, too.”
A friend happened to snap a photo of Bill standing next to Not Bill. Wrote Bill: “That’s me, the slightly more handsome guy on the left.”
Sometimes, it isn’t the face that erroneously rings a bell. It’s the name. The District’s Dale S. Brown is the author of “Learning a Living: A Guide to Planning Your Career and Finding a Job for People with Learning Disabilities, Attention Deficit Disorder, and Dyslexia.”
Dale worked at the President’s Committee on Employment of People with Disabilities, and not long after her book was published in 2000, she went to the mailroom with one of her supervisors.
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Wrote Dale: “He introduced me to the mail clerk. The clerk’s eyes got big and he asked, ‘Are you Dale Brown, the famous author?’”
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Dale nodded her head, trying to look modest as she swelled with pride.
The clerk continued enthusiastically: “Well that part where you put the knife in the person’s stomach was the best thing I ever read.”
That’s when Dale S. Brown discovered there is a best-selling thriller writer named Dale Brown.
Robert Stonehill of Vienna, Va., managed to find himself mistaken for a fictitious person. In 2010, Robert began receiving a slew of emails from parents desperate for his help in treating a genetic disorder in their children called Pompe disease.
This was after a movie called “Extraordinary Measures” had come out. Harrison Ford played a character based on an amalgam of real medical researchers. The character’s name? Dr. Robert Stonehill.
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“That would also be me, though my doctorate is in educational, not biomedical, research,” Robert wrote. “In the movie — and in real life — the parents of children suffering from Pompe disease collaborate with ‘Dr. Stonehill’ and other research scientists to develop a drug that can cure, or at least alleviate, the disease.”
Robert responded to all the requests, pointing out that he wasn’t that guy and noting that the character was based on scientists William Canfield and Yuan-Tsong Chen.
Wrote Robert: “I wished everyone best of luck in following up with the real people who could help them and their children.”
In the early 1990s, Brian Knowlton’s father, James Knowlton, was a professor in the education department at Indiana University Bloomington.
“Knowlton is not a terribly common surname, but at some point, unbeknownst to us, another James Knowlton moved to Bloomington,” wrote Brian, who lives in Silver Spring, Md. “This younger James Knowlton, it turned out, had a PhD in particle physics, but came up with the rather improbable idea of producing a poster titled ‘Penises of the Animal Kingdom.’”
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This was a poster of … well, the title pretty much sums it up. The poster was later awarded the Ig Nobel Prize in art, a parody of the Nobel Prize.
Brian’s family was quite unaware of this parallel-universe James Knowlton until one day his mother answered the phone and heard the caller say he wanted to order a copy of “Penises of the Animal Kingdom.”
Wrote Brian: “A very long silence ensued on her end. It took a while to sort out — I’m sure there was a fairly interesting behind-closed-door conversation between my parents — but anyway, for a while, ‘Sorry, wrong number’ was heard a bit more often in our place.”
Tomorrow: More cases of mistaken identity.
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