Public

Forgive the seriously meta nature of this post, but these two notes struck me as too ridiculous to not share.

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I’m laying in a hospital bed on Monday night, desperately trying to not pay attention to the flickering image of Dateline NBC above me, dedicated as it was to a maudlin, 90-minute special on a woman’s watery demise. My nurse, a male Polynesian with seemingly no “indoor voice,” marched in around midnight for his rounds, loudly announcing “I knew you looked like somebody when I saw you before.”

I braced myself for the inevitable punchline.

“You’ve got that Jack Osbourne thing going on!”

Of course. Of course I do.

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Everyone in St. Louis was watching Channel 9 on Sunday evening, after midnight, though some of them didn’t know they were watching Channel 9, thinking, instead, that they were watching the Food Network. I base on this on three people at the UEFA Champion’s League match at Barrister’s today stopping me to say that they’d seen me on “Sandwiches That You Will Like,” a PBS special that seems to have an unlimited lifespan. (Misidentifed by a couple as “some Food Network thing from a couple years ago.”)

Already this week, other people had said the same thing,* a weird pace for a late-night PBS showing. But to have another trio chime in today was almost too much. The kicker was a guy who had me sign the back of his business card – I’m not making this up, really – with an inscription to his girlfriend, who is, apparently, now obsessed with eating a St. Paul sandwich. As goofy as I felt, I obliged and suggested that she’d become hooked with her first bite.

Either that, or she’ll suffer from wrenching, day-long stomach cramps, a fact that I didn’t scribble on the card.

* Number now at 15. Need to contact producer Rick Sebak to tell him how popular his work is in St. Louis.