An interesting (there’s that word again) follow-up to my previous post, which was a funny follow-up to its previous post: Way back when I was eighteen or nineteen, my friend Damion, who wrote and directed  Neverland, stood in front of the Tower Records on Sunset the day Fabio’s CD came out, with a cardboard sign which read, "I need twelve dollars to buy the Fabio CD." It took him about fifteen minutes to successfully panhandle his way into his own copy of Fabio After Dark.

A few years later, Damion was Garfield for Halloween, but not just any Garfield; the Garfield that was stuck into car windows all over Los Angeles in the early 1990s. He had the giant suction cups and everything, but what really made the costume was after a few drinks, when Damion told anyone who would listen, "Garfield has gingivitis!" It was a very surreal All Hallow’s Eve, to say the very least, and I haven’t even gotten to the part where the drag queen got into some sort of quasi-erotic (or disturbing, I suppose) dance off with a stripper that, strangely, had something to please almost everyone in the ad-hoc audience.

A funny follow-up to my previous post, that had completely washed out of my brains until moments ago, when for some inexplicable reason the theme to Get Smart made me remember:

About a year ago, Anne and I were driving home down Santa Monica near Highland in Hollywood. It was the beginning of afternoon rush hour traffic, so when I saw a person waiting to make a left from a side street, I stopped to let him go across in front of us. See, I try to do nice things like that, because I believe the world would be a much better place if everyone made an effort to do little things, like hold doors open, let people with fewer items cut in front in the checkout, say "thank you" . . . things like that.

Anyway, I stop to let this guy pull out across in front of us, and Anne says, "Dude! That’s totally Fabio!"

"What? Where?!" I said.

"Driving the car you just let in front of us!"

I laughed, because Anne and I occasionally play the celebrity look alike game, too.

We were silent for a second or two, and we both realized that that the car was a Bentley, and the driver was, indeed, Fabio.

"Oh my god!" I said. "It really is Fabio!"

Anne and I decided that this momentous occasion warranted an immediate and vigorous high-five.

Fabio waved his hand at me in the universal "thank you," gesture, turned West onto Santa Monica, and drove into the Sunset. We continued East into our mundane, non-Fabio lives.

When I was in my very early 20s, this girl who I dated and I played this celebrity lookalike game.

Whenever we saw someone who looked like a celebrity, one of us would say, "Hey, there’s Nell Carter" or "Don’t look now, but Kirk Cameron is shopping in Target."

One day, we were eating lunch at this Hamburger Hamlet in West Hollywood, on the extreme West end of the Sunset Strip. I looked up from my lunch to see this totally goofy looking guy, with a stupid mullet, parachute-y muscle pants, and a corduroy hat that had "Someone in Tennessee Loves Me" embroidered on the front.

"Hey," I said, "There’s Chuck Norris wearing a ‘Someone in Tennessee Loves Me’ cap."

We cracked up and complimented each other on our insightful wit.

A few minutes later, a manager walked over to that guy’s table holding a phone on a long cord, like you’d see in the old 1940s movies.

"Mr. Norris," he said, "Mr. Washington is calling from Knoxville."