FROM STERN TO STEM

Blog number sixty-eight                                    11 Jan. 2006

I was waiting to get blood drawn at my local HMO and sitting two seats down, waiting to get blood drawn also, was a guy that looked EXACTLY like Howard Stern.  I pointed him out to the guy sitting next to me, but he seemed like he didn't want to embarrass the Howard Stern look-alike, but I figured that it was either Howard Stern or a guy that wanted to look like him, so what's the problem?

When my seat neighbor left, I turned to the guy and told him that he looked exactly like Howard Stern.  He said, "Who's he?"

Now what the hell.  If he WAS Howard Stern - which I sincerely doubted, because for one, he was in Sacramento and for two, he was too short.  Howard Stern is a tall lanky guy.  I saw his movie.  If he was Howard Stern, what's with the "who's he?"  If he wasn't Howard Stern, which I was pretty sure he wasn't, why try to look like him and then pretend you don't know who Howard Stern is?  And he DID look exactly like Mr. Stern.  Bushy curly hair, hook nose, the whole shtick.  The hair was the right length, the nose was humped correctly.  I mean, he had to work on his hair to get it to look like that.  Could it be a coincidence that it happened to turn out to look like a famous person's hairdo?  I don't think so.

We talked a bit after that, me telling him he was Howard's mirror image, things like that - me pretending I believed he didn't know who Howard was, although it seems as I remember it that he did let it slip that he knew who Howard was, but then I already knew that.

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When I was about seven years old, my friend Bud Cathewood showed me a condom and told me that men put them on when they went to bed so that if they peed during the night they wouldn't get the bed all wet.  He said his dad wore one every night.  Flash forward a few weeks. 

My mother and I were sitting on the porch on a warm summer twilight and walking down the middle of the street came this boy blowing a big balloon with a condom.  My mother turned to me and asked me if I knew what that was that the kid was blowing up and I said, "Yes."

In later years I understood that my mother thought I knew what condoms were used for at age seven, but she was mistaken.