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I am taking the C train on Central Park West. It is around 11 a.m. The seats are roughly half-filled. I look across the way and see a man notable both for his substantial size and his very dark sunglasses. I immediately recognize him to be Alec Baldwin. I watch with fascination as, from behind the cover of his conspicuously unnecessary eyewear (attention-seeking accessory masquerading as attention-deflecting accessory) he surveys the car and notices--to what I surmise is his deep horror-- that no one is noticing him. Needless to say, he looks in the direction of the most attractive female passengers first. Then the less attractive female passengers. When he finally gets around to looking at me, I withhold any indication that I know who he is. Confounded by his failure to receive even minimal celebrity recognition in this most public of venues, the thwarted attention-seeker does something fascinating: He calmly and calculatedly removes his sunglasses. Clearly, he is wrestling with the deep philosophical question "If a celebrity falls in the subway and no one recognizes him, has he really fallen?" With feigned casualness, he looks around again, his ego trolling the bait of his famous and now fully revealed face in front of his fellow passengers. Nothing there. Nothing there. Nothing.. Aha! He finally feels a nibble on the line. A couple of people are whispering to each other and glancing repeatedly (and, they must think, discreetly) in his direction. Trying to build on this minor triumph and gain recognition by a wider audience, he looks back in the other direction. While he fails to garner any interest from the most attractive of the females (recognition perhaps, but not interest), he does end up getting recognized by a few more of the passengers. Finally, re-assured of his continued status as a publicly recognized figure, he smiles with false modesty at the most recent onlooker and puts his shades back on--as if public recognition were the last thing in the world he was seeking! I am fascinated by this duplicitous little game of hide and seek attention. This narcissistic pantomime. This exquisite micromanagement of the dialectic between recognition and anonymity. It is funny. And it is sad. And it is Alec Baldwin.
Of course, it’s possible that he was wearing the sunglasses merely to observe his fellow passengers for purposes of character study. And that, realizing no one had recognized him, he figured maybe it was safe to take them off and have better visibility. Then, discovering that he had in fact been recognized, he decided to retreat to his original disguise in order to continue his undercover thespian research without the distractions associated with fame. And that I’m merely a dark-hearted, celebrity-hating, thwarted megalomaniac projecting my own twisted narcissism onto a well-adjusted, emotionally balanced, deeply fulfilled professional who just happens to be in the public eye.
Nah. C’mon. It’s Alec Baldwin.
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Posted on 11/8/2005
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