Resemblances

The young woman walking towards me on the downtown sidewalk was tall, pretty ('the kind of girl I'd like to meet', as the song says), attractively dressed.   Our eyes met when we were still a dozen yards from each other, and I thought I noticed a sign of recognition in hers.  Strange,  I don't know her. She stopped when we got close, I stopped too, what else could I do,  she pulled out a notebook, a pen, and asked if she could have my autograph.

Caught off guard I stammered "Who am I, what name should I sign?"  I have been told before more than once or twice that I look like this or that or another famous person, none of them looking like any one of the others, these resemblances residing in the minds of the beholders more than in one's own appearance,  so who does she think I look like, and whose name should I sign, Bruce Welch's?  I doubt she's heard of Bruce Welch, I doubt many people today have heard of him.

I remembered the time when I was sitting at the bar in the same neighbourhood where we were now, the place was busy, when two men walked in, sat down at a table near the door, the only one available, and one of them, I thought, looked like one of the Righteous Brothers, the tall one,  his brother the short one had just died.  He and his companion were definitely outoftowners, dressed casually like everyone else around, but unlike the rest of the clientele of workers, bums and students, expensively, Hollywood style.  I shared my observation with Bob the bartender, and he immediately ran upstairs to the office to check the Righteous Brothers picture (this was before the iPhone and the iPad were invented for such emergencies), came back after a minute without a solid verdict.  "Maybe," he said.  An hour or so later, someone, maybe it was Bob,  built up the courage to approach the man and ask.  "No, I'm not," the Righteous Brother replied and  the questioner reported, "But I've been told I look like him."

A defense mechanism used by celebrities to protect their privacy. Maybe that's what I should tell her, I thought.  She wasn't much help though.  She answered, "Your own, you're the artist!"  I signed my own name in her notebook, not any more legibly than I sign it on credit card receipts rushing to leave a grocery store, and I noticed on the page of it handwritten questions about ancient Rome, which just happened to  have been the subject of my studies.

"So you are studying Rome?" I asked.  She was, and I informed her as humbly as I could that this was my area of expertise.  

You meet a girl and before you part, you dare to ask for her telephone number. That's how it usually works, doesn't it.   This time, I met a girl, or rather she met me,  and before we said 'Goodbye', she asked my telephone number.  It's not a fantasy, it happened.