My 'Mr. Sparkle' Moment

There's resemblance, and then there's a photo of you that you never posed for

Last year, my mom was in her school library and a book fell off the shelf onto her foot. When she picked it up, she looked at the cover and gasped.

On the cover was a drawing of me. Not that it looked a little bit like me. It was me. 

Don’t believe me? Here’s the book and here’s me:

The problem was that it looked exactly like adult me, but was released in 1995, when I was three years old.

She took the book home. I guess if you find a book whose cover features your adult son, seemingly drawn only a couple of years after (or even before) his birth, you have the right to take it. She sent it to me, and it’s sitting on the windowsill by my desk right now.

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There’s an episode of The Simpsons where Homer, Bart and Lisa find a box of Japanese detergent whose mascot looks exactly like Homer. It’s called Mr. Sparkle. Freaked out, Homer reaches out to the company to find out why his face is the mascot of the company. It turns out it’s just an amalgamation of two existing companies’ logos: a fish and a lightbulb. The whole thing is purely coincidental.

I’m pretty sure the artist behind the cover art for “The King’s Shadow” didn’t combine a fish and a lightbulb, or any other corporate imagery, to create a person who looks exactly like me.

Oh, get this, too: The main character depicted on the front wants to be a writer.

It was all too much. I had to get to the bottom of it. So, I reached out to the author.

Here’s the email I sent her last year:

Hello Ms. Alder, my name is Brendan Menapace. I'm a writer living in Philadelphia. This is a little odd, but I felt like I needed to contact you about this. Long story short, whoever the cover artist is who did the drawing for "The King's Shadow” … well, they drew me.

To backtrack, my mother is a 6th grade teacher. As she was in her school's library, the book fell off the shelf onto her foot, and she gasped. She sent me a picture of it, with no explanation. I'm sure you've had people in the past say, "Oh, that looks just like you," and you scoff. This was ... different. It was like the episode of The Simpsons where Homer finds the "Mr. Sparkle" box and he's on the cover.

The hair is the same. The way I scowl when I'm thinking or focusing on something? The same. The nose, eyes, mouth, chin. It's all perfect. I even made it my Instagram profile picture and I don't think anyone's noticed that it's not actually me yet.

She actually took the book from her school and mailed it to me. And, once I saw that the main character was a "storyteller," it became even more bizarre, as I'm a working journalist.

I couldn't think about anything else for days. I showed every friend I could, and they all were as freaked out as I was.

I guess what I wanted to do through this email, more than just ... I don't know, needing to draw attention to it, is finding out exactly if there was any basis for the cover art, and there's some real-life doppelganger of mine out there in the world.

The other is that, if there was ever a chance you option the book for a TV show or movie, you have a ringer in your pal Brendan here. 

Thank you for reading.

Best,

Brendan

Alder never answered me. Based on her website, it looks like “The King’s Shadow” was her last publication, and she has been working as a teacher for most of her life. That means she probably isn’t checking the email from her life as a historical fiction writer too often.

So, where does that get me? Well, it’s frustrating, because it doesn’t get me anywhere near closure.

Someone drew this. They saw this character either in their head or in real life. Both scenarios are equally dizzying to me.

If they thought it up, how did they just imagine a fully formed adult Brendan Menapace?

If they based it on a real person, it means that there was someone out there while I was a baby or toddler who looked exactly like 30-year-old me. What does that person look like now? If I met that person, would it be a good indicator of what I would look like in my 50s? By that logic, do I even want to see that person now?

Michele hates that it’s in the house. She thinks it’s cursed. It might be. The concept of the Doppelgängers is similar to the concept of an “evil twin.”

Here’s an excerpt from the Wikipedia entry on Doppelgangers:

In fiction and mythology, a doppelgänger is often portrayed as a ghostly or paranormal phenomenon and usually seen as a harbinger of bad luck. Other traditions and stories equate a doppelgänger with an evil twin. In modern times, the term twin stranger is occasionally used. The word "doppelgänger" is often used in a more general and neutral sense, and in slang, to describe any person who physically resembles another person.

If the drawing isn’t based on anyone, and the artist just doodled and that’s what showed up on the page, the book itself would be my doppelgänger and, therefore, the harbinger of bad luck. I got that book in the mail last April. A few months later I got diagnosed with cancer.

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There isn’t anything in the book about who drew the artwork, so unless Alder gets back to me, I’m at a loss, forced to know that somewhere out there exists either a doppelganger 20-some years my senior, or that my appearance as an adult was prophecized by an artist. I don’t know how much time I should commit to something like this. I don’t want to obsess over it, but I meant it when I said it consumed my thoughts for days.

In the meantime, I have to keep staring at this book that has my face, my thoughtful scowl, my hair and my nose while I do my job – the job that the character with my face, my thoughtful scowl, my hair and my nose wanted in the book written when I was a tiny child who did not look like that yet and did not have any aspirations to be a professional writer.

So, my next move is to crowdsource: If anyone somewhere reading this has any connection to Elizabeth Alder, author of the 1995 young adult historical fiction novel “The King’s Shadow,” please let me know.

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UPDATE: I got a reply from the illustrator, Alexa Rutherford.

The main character is based on a friend of my son who might have been 17
at the time but it was not his hair- I made that up to go with the
description of the character. But it is very like your hair.  I remember
the author had stipulated that King Harold should look like the actor
Anthony Andrews from the film of the time Brideshead Revisited. That
didn't usually happen as I was normally  left to come up with my own
interpretations of the characters in a story.

So, there you have it. I guess?

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Also, someone should probably tell David Hornsby, most notable for playing Rickety Cricket on Always Sunny, that he’s on the book cover, too.

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Today’s Snakes and Sparklers musical guest is Cheekface.