Identity crisis

I attended a party on Saturday where a woman informed me that I looked strikingly similar to Eddie Izzard. My first thought was, "Heck, I'll take that."

My enthusiasm for being compared to a man who once spent much of his public life in drag (and maybe still does) comes from the fact that I like Eddie Izzard. His stand-up is fantastic, he's the best thing about Ocean's 12, and I don't care that the stranger at the party was comparing our fleshy faces rather than our comedic skills. I'll take Eddie, because the last time someone said I looked like a celebrity, it was Chris O'Donnell.

With half-hearted apologies to Batman's Robin, I don't want my name and Chris O'Donnell’s to appear in the same sentence. The man is the acting equivalent of a one-hit wonder, and it's the kind of hit that makes people say, "Hmmm, can you hum it again? It's not ringing any bells." Sure, stalk him on IMDB and it looks like he's been "working", but if anyone knows him (and by anyone, I mean me), it's from those dreadful Batman movies of the 1990s. He's an example of Hollywood's genetic recycling process, where a man with enough acting talent to pass high school drama and with eyes as blue as Newman's can be heralded as the next Paul Newman, at least until he stinks up the screen so much that everyone decides that Leo Dicaprio or Emile Hirsch is a better next Paul Newman. (Wait, or is Emile Hirsch the next Leo Dicaprio?)

I once met an older woman who looked stunningly similar to Lauren Bacall, and I said so, and she smiled back, "Lauren Bacall is much older than me." I immediately scrambled to explain that she didn't look like Lauren Bacall today, she looked like the iconic Lauren Bacall---the essence, not the particulars. I'm sure she got that a lot, but I wonder if she felt about Lauren Bacall the way I do about Chris O'Donnell, and had to go through her life wincing as strangers made a pointless comparison to a movie star. (She really DID look like Lauren Bacall, much more than I look like Chris O'Donnell.)

Personally, I don't think I look like either of these guys, but at least with Eddie, I can see the eyebrows are similar and his face could use a diet, so there's that, though it's hardly enough to warrant a call-out. (He actually looks more like my brother Tim.) But if I have to be compared to a celebrity, I'm happy to have it be a foul-mouthed drag queen. To paraphrase Little Nicky, I'm no George Clooney, but I’ll take Eddie Izzard over Clint Howard any day.