I was chatting with my livespace friend, Jill, about some of the photos that I recently posted and a question came up about my dad.  Is he Italian?  He looks like Pavarotti… The answer is "Oh, I know!  But, no."  He’s Spanish, Mexican, Yaci Indian, but to my knowledge, not Italian.  It’s funny how many times in my life that people have asked me that, though.  If I didn’t know him, I might think he’s Italian, too.  But this did get me to thinking of a funny occasion of confused identity that I remember when I was a kid.  Jill said that I should blog it, so I will...

As a family, we had gone to town to see the new Robin Williams movie “Popeye”.  I think that was in 1980.  We were enjoying the movie and then Bluto made his appearance.  We kids immediately started giggling because we thought that Bluto looked exactly like Dad.  Even Dad had to laugh.  Then we started laughing even more when the kids in the rows in front of us started turning around in their seats, staring and pointing at my dad.  They looked half excited and half scared of him.  They must have really thought that Bluto was in the audience that day because once they decided that they didn't have to be afraid of him, they wanted his autograph when the movie was over.

For all of these years, we just thought that that story was a silly piece of family trivia to giggle at when the memory resurfaced until just this past fall when my mom and dad had gone to the city to participate in a walk to benefit cancer research.  Mom was off on her walk and Dad was “people watching”, when a man walked up to him and asked him if he was the man who played Bluto in the Popeye movie.  Dad laughed and told him that he was not the first person to ask him that.  He told the man about the movie theater incident and the stranger laughed as well and told Dad that he really needed to meet his friend.  He motioned to his friend and introduced him as “Paul Smith, the real Bluto”!  After all of these years, to stand face to face with the man who seemed like his mirror image must have been quite a shock!  Even Paul Smith had to admit that the resemblance was uncanny.

It’s too bad that Mom wasn’t there at the time.  It would have been one of those Kodak moments and Dad was too flabbergasted to do anything at the time.  So, it’s still just a piece of weird family trivia, but it has survived over the decades.  Take a look at Bluto below and that’s exactly what my dad looked like when I was a kid.  Big.  Black hair and beard.  Menacing to look at.  But nothing more than a giant teddy bear!