Impostors

Why not just be somebody else for a while? Well, it's often illegal, and it's not always easy, but there is a certain quality of person who remains undaunted in the face of these problems.

Joice Heth
Folks like Joice Heth, who made a career, under the direction of P.T. Barnum, out of impersonating George Washington's childhood nurse. Or George DuPre, who got his amazing story of being an intrepid World War II spy published by Readers Digest and by Random House books before he was discovered to be a phony.

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.

Milli Vanilli
While we're on the theme of Musical Mayhem, we can mention the fantastic case of Milli Vanilli, a musical act in which two dancers lip-synched to pre-recorded vocals by more talented singers, while maintaining the conceit of a live vocal performance. They won a Grammy award for their highly successful act, but people jumped on the bandwagon once the first few rats stopped consenting to the shared illusion, and they were exposed to enormous public ridicule.

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.