Tall Tale

All you need are three matching traits before you start to look like somebody famous.  If you’re thin, blonde and your face is stretched tighter than bongos, you look like Joan Rivers.  If you’re skinny, wrinkled, and you’ve got an enormous mouth, you look like Mick Jagger. 

Me, I’m tall, bearded, and have a big nose.  We’ve got a few people to choose from, ranging from merely ugly to stop-the-clock horror.

Back when I had long hair the comparisons hovered toward the high end.  “You look like that guy from the Who” was something I heard a lot.  I wasn’t a big fan of the group, but it wasn’t hard to guess who they meant.  Not Roger Daltrey, the athletic lead singer.  Not John Entwhistle, the band’s Darren Stevens.  And certainly not Keith Moon, the cute, spunky sparkplug.  No, I looked like Pete Townshend, the stoop-shouldered, hook-nosed guitarist.

This comparison took me by surprise.  I pictured the two of us hanging out together, like twins, perching atop cactus, and occasionally circling the desert in search of roadkill.

A few years later another big-nosed tall guy made the charts, so naturally the comparisons changed too.  Now when I wandered down the street everybody screamed “Hey, look, it’s Fleetwood Mac!”  This puzzled me, as frankly it raised more questions than it answered.  I certainly didn’t look like the entire group, having hardly enough tulle for one.  And no part of me whatsoever resembled Stevie Nicks.  I didn’t twirl, read Tarot, or snort cocaine off pale, hairless stomachs.  My suspicions raised, I popped into a record store to confirm my suspicions.  Yes, there was a tall guy with a beard and a big nose in the group.

Perhaps the word “ugly” should be thrown in there as well.  Before “tall,” in fact.  And maybe we should circle it, in sparkle marker.

Eventually the eighties ended, and I decided to change with the times.  As the barber snipped off my long, luxurious locks, though, I wasn’t just losing a resemblance to faded rock stars, or a rat’s nest that sucked up eight ounces of Dippity Doo a day.  I was gaining a horrifying new resemblance.

I didn’t get five feet from the salon before it smacked me in the face.  “You know who you look like?” some white-bread dad asked me.  He wore pleated khaki shorts, and had a cellphone the size of an ironing board strapped to his belt. “Abraham Lincoln,” he declared.

Now, I guess I should have been pleased.  After all, the man had a brilliant political mind, and was one of the major statesmen of the nineteenth century.  And he freed the slaves, and was supposedly a pretty good speaker.

But -- here’s the important part, casually tacked on -- the guy was not attractive. He was thin and gawky, always wore a stovepipe hat, and toward the tail end of his life didn’t even have the back half of his head.  And sure, maybe I don’t have the best complexion in the world, but that’s still a good-sized leap to a faceful of warts.

Plus, he was more than a little strange.  Supposedly he stored stuff in his hat, he had a voice like Meg Tilly, and once when he bought a bed, he brought the salesman home too.  Who spent the next seven years sleeping next to him, totally platonic.

One place where I totally identified with Abe, though, was with the stupid questions.  I get thirty or forty of them every day:  when did you start getting tall?  Did you parents feed you tall pills?  What’s the weather like up there?  And Lincoln got one of the worst.

One day after making a speech a female fan approached him.  She took one look at his long, lanky limbs, and asked, “Mr. Lincoln, exactly how long should a man’s legs be?”

He thought for a second before answering.  “Just long enough to reach the ground,” he said.

Now, let’s set the stage here.  It’s a pivotal time in American history.  The Civil War is raging, with almost two-thirds of a million people killed, we’re at war with Mexico.  But the thing this chick thinks is most important is how long this guy’s legs are.

This doesn’t reflect too well on women.  You start to wonder if maybe this Garden of Eden thing wasn’t such an isolated incident after all.  I mean, what was this woman thinking?  How do you get to a question like this?  She spots the president in public and she thinks, “Gosh, I’ll bet I can get away with one quick question.  What should it be?  Let’s see -- something about chickens?  No.  Game shows?  Nope.  I’ve got it!  I’ll ask him about legs.  Girth?  Hairiness?  Nah.  I’ll make it length.”

I can’t imagine anybody asking a president something so personal -- or so weird.  Picture this:  you’re seated in the third row of the Presidential Press Corps.  All the other reporters are asking questions about Iraq and the economy and employment, and you’ve been dying to get your two cents in.  Finally the press chief points to you, and you’re on.

“Mr. President,” you bark, “can you show me some more of them sweet, juicy feet?”

I guess times haven’t changed much in a hundred-something years.  Folks still ask ridiculously personal questions without even a thought to foreplay.  Where Abe got incomprehensible weirdness, though, I get an idiot’s guide to porno science.

“Is everything in proportion?” everybody asks me.  “You know, big hands, big feet . . . ?”

I’m no world class orator, so I tell them what they want to hear.  “Are you kidding?” I say.  “You can see mine from space.”

Okay, it isn't “four score and seven years ago,” but at least I don’t need to buy a mattress to find myself a man.