I worked hard to dredge some thoughts about Crime and Punishment out of my students today. I threw some Bakhtin at them, I showed them how the voice of the narrator changes notably when we get to the funeral meal for poor, poor, Marmeladov, and tried to get a talk going about the multiple voices in the text.
But the reading, she wasn’t done. I didn’t do a pop quiz, but I stared into their eyes and saw few looks of recognition. When I pointed out that some guy threw a bottle and hit the landlady by mistake I saw surprise. I hope they’ll go back over those pages after hearing that.
Instead, I got what I’ve gotten about a thousand times now. Except this time they didn’t just not know Dostoevsky, they didn’t know Kevin Bacon. We were walking down the stairs and one guy asked if I watched college sports.
“Yes,” I said.
“You know the coach of the Florida Gators? What’s his name?”
“Billy Donovan.”
“Yeah. You look like him.”
No, I don’t, and I told him so. I especially don’t want to look like him because he beat my UCLA Bruins twice in the Final Four.
Then another student said: “No, he looks like that movie star.” She turned to me and said. “You know, that movie star. Who do you look like?”
Like I said … I’ve heard this a thousand times. I’ve given up the fight. So I said: “Kevin Bacon, apparently.”
“Yeah!” she said, to the guy who thought I was a Billy Donovan lookalike. They all agreed among themselves, and just walked away without even thanking me for steering them clear to my separated-at-birth twin, he of the six degrees of separation. (Now that I’ve been compared to him 1,000 times (at least), I think I get to win that game if it ever comes around again. I used to argue that I was just one degree away, since I went to high school with Sarah Jessica Parker, and she was in Footloose with Kevin Bacon. Now I think I just get to be the default winner.)
A professor of mine once compared me to Guy Pearce, and I think that’s a closer lookalike. Not in Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. I couldn’t pull off drag like that. More like in L.A. Confidential, where he’s an asshole cop, or The King’s Speech, where he’s unfit to rule England and has to let Colin Firth take over. But, whatever. I just want those students to read their Dostoevsky for next class.
Parkinson's Disease Diary 
I definitely get the Guy Pearce lookalike thing. And by the way, you’re not the only one. I’ve been told I look exactly like Joan Cusack. Even random strangers have said that *shrug.*
I think we all have lookalikes out there somewhere. My face in photos is different from what it is in action, and I think the Kevin Bacon thing has to do with similar mannerisms. We both smirk a lot. Joan Cusack is cool. One of my favorites.
You’ve got a good point about differences between what one looks like in ‘photos and one’s mannerisms. And I think Guy Pearce is great. He makes a terrific Jack Irish.