on lookalikes

Whenever some new celebrity appears, a number of lookalikes of that celebrity are easily found. Genetic diversity on the level of appearance is not as great as the mathematics of DNA combinations would suggest. And just as (thanks to the internet) I’ve found 3 or 4 other people in the world sharing my exact name with the same spelling (and the “Harman” spelling is much rarer than “Harmon”) we surely all have a few near-exact physical lookalikes in the world.

Not once, but twice, I have seen exact lookalikes of myself. In both cases there were witnesses present who agreed with me, and were even astonished at the resemblance, so it was no misjudgment on my part.

One was in a catalog. A friend of mine brought it to me in college, her mouth wide open in astonishment, and said this guy looked exactly like me. She was right. It was weird. Why I didn’t keep the image permanently is a mystery. Though names are no longer beyond the reach of Google and other technology, faces still are, if unattached to names.

The other was in 1993 in the Twin Cities. I was riding in a car with my brother and two friends. We passed an old Volkswagen beetle going uphill, and I saw that the driver (who was alone in the VW) looked exactly like me. To this day, I regret not somehow getting the driver to stop and asking to meet him, though it would be difficult to do that in our era without provoking carjacking suspicions of some sort. One friend and my brother laughed in shock when I pointed out that this man was my exact double. My brother also noted how strange it was that I could recognize such a thing; in principle it should be difficult to recognize someone who resembles us, he claimed. In any case, unless the guy in the Twin Cities was the same person seen in the catalog, which is unlikely, then I have at least two Doppelgänger on this planet.

And so do you, reader. I am sure of it. Unless you have an extremely common name, it’s already weird enough to find people on Google with the same name as yours. But it’s far weirder to run across your exact physical double somewhere.

On another occasion, at a rest stop west of Chicago, my brother Seth and I stopped for a mediocre dinner on our way to Iowa. We were quite surprised that the grandmother at the table next to us kept calling her grandsons Graham and Seth, not such a typical combination of brothers’ names in the U.S. (Seth is a rare name in Christian families. Graham is rare outside the British Commonwealth. I never met another Graham while growing up. Dang hippie parents.)

[ADDENDUM: In college I did finally have a classmate named Graham. He had English parents but grew up in the States, and like me he heard the “Graham Cracker” taunt ad nauseam; it’s probably inevitable. I ended up deciding I had to change my name in order to avoid those taunts. This was at age 8 or so. My first weird idea was to go by “Dave,” which actually had a good reason since that was the name of my two favorite athletes at the time– Dave Concepcion of the Cincinnati Reds and Dave Cowens of the Boston Celtics. But I finally ended up borrowing my father’s name instead, and kept using it through the end of high school. It was the psychoanalytic inversion of Levi Bryant’s story: if memory serves from his blog post on the topic, Levi first used his father’s name and then dropped it in favor of his real name.]