Door County Doppelgangers

So I’m having a drink with my pal pat mAcdonald. I’ve been staying at his Holiday Music Motel in beautiful downtown Sturgeon Bay since taking the job as editor of this fine independent publication. He rang my room on this particular night and we stepped out for a drink, walking a couple blocks to the Red Room.

pat ordered a ham sandwich and a root beer – he’s NA until after Steel Bridge SongFest. I ordered a Shiner Bock.

We were chatting about a new JFK assassination theory book (spoiler alert: his Secret Service driver did it in this one), which naturally turned to the subject of Marina Oswald, the beautiful Russian wife of Lee Harvey Oswald, aka The Patsy, and her second daughter, Rachel, who pat came to know while living in Austin, Texas, in the late 1980s.

Suddenly a woman appears next to our stools and extends her hand to me. I take it as she says, “You look just like Kenny Rogers.”

She could tell by the look on my face that she had just insulted me because she quickly added, “That’s a good thing!”

When the woman left, pat said, “I always get Ozzie.”

I’ve gotten a lot of things, but Kenny Rogers was the worst, and the most painful. Have you seen him lately, his face stretched like a tight canvas on his aged skull?

Over the years I’ve gotten Jerry Garcia, a lot. Einstein. Doc. Beetlejuice, even!

I once had a dork following me around a beer fest in Two Rivers, saying, “Hey, Bill Murray’s here.” My own father was the first person to accuse me of resembling Bill Murray. He should talk, since he looked like Popeye’s pappy.

When my hair was darker, I got a couple of doozies. “Hey, Abe Lincoln!” a kid called out to me once as I rode past on my bike. Lincoln?

But my favorite took place in the 1990s when I was entering a free outdoor music festival in downtown Oshkosh. I had a full beard and very long hair at the time. As I walked down a grassy knoll into the festival area, possibly with a beatific smile on my face, a woman and a young boy were walking up the hill toward me when the boy stopped and pointed at me and said, “Mommy, is that Jesus?”

I often wonder what happened to that demented little boy.

But this is really just a long-winded way of asking, who do you look like?

Have you ever been told you look just like Jodie Foster or Millard Fillmore? Do you know someone who could pass for Shemp Howard or Sarah Palin? Are you Lady Gaga’s doppelganger? We want to know.