There’s a guy at one of my gyms. Typically big and beefy he is, but he’s also atypically sweet and quiet and bashful. He’s about my age, maybe a little older. If you’re over 35 you’d recognize him, he’d look familiar but you just wouldn’t know why. He says of himself that he works "in the industry.”
It’s a local phenomenon. All those people who ever handed a cup of coffee onscreen, all those background thugs who said no more than “Stick’em up!” all those faces you saw over and over again during those decades in front of the TV, whose names never made it either into the credits or into the National Enquirer, they’re still alive and well and wandering around.
You see them, you know them, and you can’t ask them why. Don’t ask me why you can’t ask them, you just can’t. We were watching our well-worn discs of “Ellery Queen” when we recognized a lovely old man who hangs out at our local Italian deli. He played a cop in nearly all the episodes. It’s so rare that you figure it out, it’s like winning a tiny lottery when you do.
But the bashful guy, I know I saw him in something sometime. And I know I’ll win the lottery before I remember what it was. It’s almost enough to get me to buy a lottery ticket, just to make the metaphor real.
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2 comments:
Last time (way too long ago) that I was in Vegas, I got on the plane back and sat right behind one of those guys. It was killing me. I couldn't place where I knew him from, but I was pretty sure he'd been on Scrubs. A few months later I saw Star Trek in the theaters and when young J.T. Kirk hops off his space-cycle a worker says "whoa, nice bike". Kirk throws him the keys and says "It's yours". THAT was my guy!! He's also the creepy neighbor "Tom" on Cougartown. So now I see him everywhere.
Oh, that was the same flight that Billy Idol was on...but he was a little easier to place! :)
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