Ever had anyone tell you that you look like someone else? People are constantly telling me that i
look like someone famous, a friend, a cousin, a sister, or some random person they saw on the
street yesterday. It gets kind of bewildering, especially if the person i'm being compared to is
some random girl on the street. I mean, I never see any of these supposed doppelgangers
wandering around looking like me, so it blows my mind that I remind so many people of someone
they've seen.
This phenomenon really didn't start till I entered college. The first person I supposedly looked
like was Tanya Donnelly (of Throwing Muses, the Breeders & Belly fame). I worked at KCOU, the
college radio station at University of Missouri, Columbia, around the time that Belly's
Star came out, and we received promotional posters. As soon as we received them, we
plastered them on top of the strata of other posters already wallpapering the studio. Within a
week, someone had written "IT'S LAURA!" in big black permanent marker above Tanya's head.
Meanwhile, here i was, being puzzled that all the boys at the radio station thought that Tanya
was way hot, but I couldn't get a date to save my life. Dave Robinson reminded me: 'It's the
guitar.' 'But I play guitar, ' I said. 'Not in Belly,' said Dave.
I'm still not sure if there's more than a passing resemblance between me and Tanya, but for a
while I was convinced she was hiring a private detective to watch me for my latest hairstyle
updates, because every time I'd change my hair, I'd see a new picture of Tanya in some music rag
with the same exact hairdo.
Ever since the Tanya incident, I've been compared to dozens of other people, rockstars or not.
I've been told I look like Clair Danes, Jodie Foster, Carol van Dijk of Bettie Serveert, some
girl who used to be on Saturday Night Live, a friend-of-a-friend's sister (we actually did look
and even act quite alike), and dozens of random girls walking around every town I've lived in. I
was once accosted by a crazy person at the train station who INSISTED that I was Monica Lewinsky.
I do have one favorite comparison, that also happened in college. while I was working at KCOU, we
pulled off a minor miracle in getting together a Big Star reunion show for our yearly Springfest
in 1993. Since then they've gone on to play several random shows once or twice a year at varying
venues, but ours was the first, and they recorded it and made it into an album called
href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ts/music-glance/B00000099B/qid=967706783/sr=1-2/104-0249675-3090362"
class="rightlinks">Columbia. While putting together the show we invited Jon Auer and
Ken Stringfellow of the
class="rightlinks">Posies to take the places of Chris Bell and Andy Hummel of the original
Big Star.
I had been into the Posies for a while at that point, but I don't think I had ever even seen
pictures of them, or had any idea what they looked like. When Ken and Jon walked into the bar, I
instantly knew who they were. They had beautiful glossy hair and they both seemed to glow in the
dim lighting of the Heidelburg. Ken looked very familiar to me, for no apparent reason. I was
scanning my mind for where I could have met him before, or someone I knew that he could have
resembled, when the guy I was sort of seeing at the time decided he wanted to leave, and so we
did.
I didn't think much about it till the following day, after the (wildly successfull and completely
brilliant) Big Star show. At the after party, a few of us on the Springfest staff were sitting
around discussing the events of the day, and we were talking about how well Jody Stephens of Big
Star had aged. Someone said 'He looks like Jeff Breeze(one of the guys whose idea was to make
this show happen)'s younger brother.' because he was remarkably well preserved. Someone
else chimed in with how Jon Auer bore a striking resemblance to one of the newer freshman DJs
that had come during the last training class, and someone else said that Alex Chilton looked like
he could be Mike Mulvihill(idea man number two)'s twin after 10 years on heroin. 'Well, who does
Ken look like, then?' I chimed in, still thinking about my experience the night before and how he
looked familiar to me. I was greeted with a couple of wry snickers, and then silence. 'Well, come
on, who? I know you've been thinking about it.' Finally, the guy I was sort of seeing spoke up:
'Well, don't be offended at this, Laura. but we discussed this earlier, and he really does look
just like you. He has the same nose, same coloring, and the same haircut.' Mentally, I slapped my
forehead. 'Of course he looks familiar, you dork, he could be your freaking brother!' I vaguely
remember after about 8 glasses of wine, and several shots, and a second wicked after-party,
someone dragging Ken over to me with a camera and snapping our picture together as a valiant
attempt at wry humor but I don't think I ever saw the results.
Recently I went to see Jon and Ken play an acoustic set in San Jose, and the resemblance is still
pretty eerie. In fact, with his new short haircut, he looks a lot like my uncle, and the
resemblance between my uncle and me is pretty strong.
That's the one and only time anyone's ever compared me to a boy, but I wasn't offended, because
Ken's such a pretty boy. I'm still wondering a) why the guy I was sorta seeing thought I'd
be offended and b) if he thought Ken was as attractive as he found me.
So anyway, my picture's over there to the left, if you think I look like someone you know,
why don't you tell me?