Me and My Doppelgänger

This is a little random, but I felt like sharing.

Back in elementary school, around 3rd or 4th grade, my friend Mark started calling me "Mahoney." He said I looked like Officer Mahoney from the Police Academy movies, played by Steve Guttenberg.

Guttenberg was seemingly everywhere in the mid-to-late 80s, starring in two Cocoons, 3 Men and a Baby, four Police Academies, and a stint with Johnny 5. I never thought I looked like him myself. And apparently no one else thought too much of the comparison (or no one else thought too much of the Police Academy movies), since the nickname never caught on. Soon enough, it was forgotten.

Fast forward to my mid-20s. I'm out at a bar with two friends, sitting at a table on the patio. A guy at the next table knocks into my arm, and when he turns to apologize I recognize him. Nick. We'd been classmates from about 5th grade on--friends for a year or two, then acquaintances the rest of the way.

Also, he's plastered.

He tells his friends I'm the smartest guy he's ever known, then starts rambling on about how he's really good at Jeopardy. How he can get many of the answers--only in the first round, though, not in Double Jeopardy, those are way too hard--when he stops mid-sentence, points at me, and yells.

"Steve Guttenberg! You're Steve Guttenberg!"

Yes, he was drunk. But two people picking the same doppelgänger for me fifteen years apart can't just be a coincidence, can it? Nick wasn't there for the nickname conversations. And I looked a bit different at 24 than I did at 9. For one thing, I had a goatee. At that point, to my knowledge, Guttenberg had never sported one.

Fast forward to today. A quick Google image search turns up just such a photograph. And yeah, now I see the resemblance. Hot damn, I am Steve Guttenberg.

There but for a full head of hair go I.