Is it me...?

Or is it he?


I know it's been a week since I wrote you, my hundreds of thousands of adoring fans. Day after day e-mails fill my mailbox with your messages imploring me, "Please, El Postino, please come back to your blog. Enlighten us with your wisdom, guide us on our paths of intellectual curiosity, tell us in unsparing detail your fascinating outlook on life and describe to us everyone else's major character defects."

Of course, then I woke up and realized I'd been dreaming.

But this wasn't a dream, because apparently I do figure in other peoples' lives, in some strange way. A principal I've worked with for several years was talking to me recently. He mentioned that he found it enjoyable, "to talk to you and your wife in Las Vegas a couple of years ago."

I said, "I haven't been in Las Vegas since 1973."

He replied, "Oh, then it must've been Mesquite [Nevada]," to which I remarked, "I've never been to Mesquite."

He looked a little puzzled but continued on as if I hadn't just disrupted a memory. The thing is, and I've mentioned it in this blog before, people do think I'm other people. In the early '90s I was asked, "Are you the guy in the underwear ad?" Last year I was asked, "Aren't you the guy in the Auto Zone poster?" "No, I'm not."

Finally, I worked with a secretary for 15 years who was so sure it was me having dinner at the Macaroni Grill restaurant that she approached "me" and started talking. It wasn't until "I" said I wasn't "me" and didn't know "me" that she asked if perhaps "I" was my own twin brother. I can't vouch for the story because I wasn't the "I" talking to her.

So what makes people think they see me elsewhere? These aren't strangers, these are people who have worked with me every day for many years, and yet they think I'm someone else. Who the guy and his wife were that the principal thought were my wife and me I have no idea. I wonder if that couple thought my friend was some sort of crazy person.

It could be the white beard. Maybe that's what people are looking at, rather than my other features. What say you. I ask again, as I have asked before: Do you know me? Do you think you know me?

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A few days ago I went to YouTube and found a video of sexy pin-up Bettie Page dancing. Someone had put a song by '60s garage rock band, The Seeds, over the video. I put it on my blog. Today I went again to YouTube looking for songs by bandleader/entertainer Louis Prima, and found one of his songs over another stripper, also named Betty, Betty Blue. I give you Betty, I give you Louis: