This might sound incredibly stupid, but did you ever do a guest appearance on the 80s TV show Knight Rider? I'm watching the second season episode Ring of Fire (Available from NetFlix) and there is a fiddle player that looks just like you. He has the beard, the glasses, even that stupid fedora that you're so fond of wearing. The resemblance is uncanny. Was this you?
Well, it does sound incredibly stupid to me, because I know that
- I lived on the east coast in the 80's, and Knight Rider was filmed on the opposite side of the country;
- I've done radio but never television or film;
- I've played characters in role playing games beginning in the 80's, but never in other media;
- I did not have a fedora until the late nineties;
- and I often see people who look like me--in fact, Ed Jones looks enough like me that strangers have asked whether we are brothers.
Besides, I was skinny as a rail still in the 80's--running between 135 and 185--so I did not look at all like I do now, a hundred pounds heavier.
--M. J. Young
The Boss must be a much more generic look than we realized. There's a guy who lives in my town - the guy I keep seeing in Starbucks - who looks uncannily like him (Fedora and all!) too.
I didn't really think it was you, but it was your twin. They say everybody has a twin, I'd like to find mine and beat him senseless. "How dare you look like me????" The other thing was that, as I said, the show was made in the 80s. That would have made MJ 20 something to 30 something. This fiddle player looked like the 50 something MJ that I met some years ago. Minus the gray hair, that is.
Oh yeah MJ, I know I called it a "stupid fedora". I'm of the philosophy that if you cannot insult your friends, who CAN you insult? So, nothing personal.
Speaking of Knight Rider. I went to school with a kid who claimed that his father was the special effects operator for that show. Being in elementary school, you believe anything you hear without question. So, we all believed him.
Then I broke my leg and had to go to the hospital to put the cast on. The guy who put the cast on my leg was making conversation, and asked me "Where do you go to school?" I said "Kae Avenue Elementary." He said "Really? My son goes there....." Take a wild guess who his son was. I never said anything to the kid, although I'm sure he knew when he saw the cast on my leg.
So the kid's father was a boring osteopath, and the kid thought it would be more impressive for him to be a special effects coordinator.
And John, with your luck, your twin is a third degree blackbelt in five martial arts styles and a crack shot with the Dessert Eagle he keeps holstered under his jacket....
--M. J. Young
So the kid's father was a boring osteopath, and the kid thought it would be more impressive for him to be a special effects coordinator.
The thing is though, that the hospital I went to was called Children's Hospital. It's a hospital specifically for people under 18. That kid should have anticipated that eventually, someone would meet his father. (Broken bones are a fairly common occurrence of youth, after all) I would have said that my father was a specialist doctor at Children's Hospital. It would be more stretching the truth than lying outright.
I would assume that if you knew this kid in elementary school, he was also in elementary school--and that suggests he was either rather young or very stupid, and I will generously assume the former. It probably did not occur to him that if his father was a doctor at a children's hospital in the area, the other children in the area would probably encounter him at some point--and it certainly did not have to occur to him that any of his classmates would recognize his father even if they did meet him.
Besides, kids want to be proud of their fathers, and that sometimes means they have to understand what it is that their father does. The kid could understand special effects guy for a popular television show; doctor who fixes people's bones at a children's hospital probably doesn't sound as impressive to him.
And anyway, you shouldn't talk about how dumb he was--it did not occur to you that if his father worked on a Hollywood television show, he worked and thus lived in California. Or was Knight Rider filmed somewhere in Ohio?
--M. J. Young
Point made MJ. I was in either the second or third grade (I had the same teacher both years, so I don't remember) and he was in my class. That would have made us at most 7 or 8 years old. It was just meant as an amusing anecdote, that's all.