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Joice Heth |
Or Stephen Weinberg, who deserves some sort of award. He posed as the U.S. Consul Delegate to Morocco, as a Serbian militia attaché, an American navy lieutenant, the envoy of the Queen of Romania, an army air corps lieutenant, a doctor (on several occasions), as head of protocol for the U.S. State Department, and (after serving some time for these put-ons) as an expert on prisons.
Those feats were challenged by one Ferdinand Waldo Demara, Jr., whose life was the basis for the movie The Great Impostor. He was a few doctors as well, and the assistant warden of a prison, and a surgeon in the Royal Canadian Navy, a schoolteacher, a college dean, and who knows what else. He is legendary for his ability to perform admirably whatever he was doing with whatever credentials he had assimilated.
I wonder if anyone ever saw those two in the same place at the same time.
Ordinary schmoes get into the impostor act when it's convenient and easy. A web search gives me the case of Ron Weaver, who at age 30 was not qualified to play college football, but as the younger Ron McKelvey he was able to fulfill his pigskin dreams. And there's the impostor named Lewis Morgan who's been pretending for years to be Randy Meisner, the bass player for the Eagles, and has been using this ruse to scam folks along the way.
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Milli Vanilli |
With a little imagination and panache, you can be anyone you want. Or, you can not be someone you are. Or, with a little luck, someone else may decide to be you. Good heavens, the options are many! You could even be someone entirely new.