Do You Look Like Anyone Famous?

What a question Long And Short Reviews is asking this week. Do you look like a "celebrity"?

Well...not to the extent that a cousin whose actual name was Cherie used to look like the actress known as Cher. Sometimes as a joke someone would say her name in a public place just to see if people would come up, gushing or stammering, and beg for autographs. Usually they would--when Cherie was thirty or thereabouts, and Cher was overexposed.

Not to the extent that the cousin to whom I gave the screen name Oogesti used to look like Donald Trump. Now that he's gone, one thing I have to dislike about Trump is that he looks like Oogesti but he's not. I don't believe Trump ever in his life took a dumpster dog home and trained it to be a real working dog. 

Nor do I resemble any celebrities even to the extent that my mother resembled Elizabeth Taylor. She was shorter, and had brown eyes instead of "violet" blue, but at either the glamour-queen or the fat frump stages of their lives, the easiest way to direct someone to Mother in a crowd was to say she looked like Elizabeth Taylor. 

There are, however, three movie stars to whom I've been compared:

1. Yvonne DeCarlo...in her last really famous acting job, she played a vampire, and my front teeth were such a mess they suggested fangs, so I've never taken being compared to DeCarlo as a compliment. Nobody my age remembered her human characters. 

2. Jodie Foster. That one I didn't see at all until I read her brother's memoir, Foster Child. Had people ever wondered why such a pale blonde wanted to play black-haired characters? It seems one of their stepsisters wanted to work as a stunt double, and Jodie Foster had enough name recognition to get stepsister employed as her double. They weren't related and didn't look alike. Jodie Foster looked a little more believable in a black wig than stepsister did in a blonde wig. In Foster Child there's a photograph of the stepsister, whom audiences never saw standing still in a movie. She did look a bit like me, though less top-heavy and with better teeth.

3. Penelope Cruz...after she came along. That is a compliment, her being so much younger. I'm not a great fan of her work, but people can say the shape of my face and neck is like hers if they want to.

Locally I've been surprised by the people I've been mistaken for. Not only my sister, who was the pretty one, even in our family. Not only my mother and various other relatives who were even older, either, though that's happened. Apparently this summer's gossip credits me with having given birth to two children who are younger than The Nephews--actually a friend's grandchildren. The mother of those children was the Beauty of the County recently. The children's day is not far ahead. But that family came in from another town, in the 1960s, and are not related to me.