I always told creative teams that I wanted them to include a T-shirt idea in every new ad campaign they presented to me. Why? ”Because any great ad campaign should be simple enough to be summed up on a T-shirt.”

As I mentioned in Part One of this sordid tale, I was still very ill after we got home from Fiji. I had dropped nineteen pounds almost overnight and for a month or more I was as weak as a little girl. I missed ten days of work and was still wobbly when I finally began going back into the office for a few hours each day.

In those days we had a great client named Shimano. It’s one of the biggest names in the biking and fishing industries. You’d expect a company in those businesses to be fun, and Shimano did not disappoint. It was one of my favorite clients.

One afternoon my first week back at work, I got a phone call from Toyo Shimano. ”What time are you heading home tonight?” he asked.

”Well, I’m still pretty sick so I’ll probably leave around three o’clock. Why?”

“Can you stop by the office on your way home? Dave and I heard you weren’t feeling well so we got you a present.” 

Dave was Dave Pfeiffer, the guy who ran the fishing half of the company. He and Toyo were best friends and fanatical fishermen.

I really didn’t really want any delays on my way home, but Toyo and Dave were great guys, and since they’d gone to the trouble of buying me a gift, well, the least I could do was stop by their office to accept it.

“Just tell the receptionist to buzz us when you get here. We know you’re not feeling well so we’ll make it quick.”

I did, she did, and a few seconds later I heard my name being called from the top of the stairs. Toyo and Dave were both peering down at me with silly grins on their faces. They hurried down the stairs and handed me a beautifully-wrapped gift, one they were clearly eager for me to open right there and then.

I tore the wrapping off. Inside was the T-shirt shown above. It said, ”Spawn ‘til you die.”

”We heard about your ‘girlfriend’ and your ciguatera poisoning,” Dave laughed. ”When we saw this T-shirt we thought it was perfect for you.”

It really was perfect. I wore that T-shirt proudly for many years.

Like I said at the top of this story, it’s not a great ad campaign unless it can be communicated simply enough to work on a T-shirt. But who knew it wasn’t a great vacation unless it could be summed up on a T-shirt?

NOTE: This story has been pre-approved by my lovely wife. I was a little nervous about what her reaction might be, but she read it, laughed out loud, and said, ”Sure. Go ahead and run it.”

I cannot say I am proud of everything I’ve done in my life. I may have treated a woman or two more poorly than I would have wanted them to treat me. On the other hand, I think I deserve a big ol’ pile of gentleman points for obscuring the identity of the woman in this story.

I always say that 98% of what I write here at JimandJamie.com is 99% true. So in keeping with that philosophy I feel compelled to make some minor corrections:

In Part One of this story I said the owner of the ritzy Fijian resort told me I could bring along my girlfriend in order to fully experience the romance of the island. That is not exactly true.

Rather than telling me I could bring a companion, he told me I was required to bring one. In order to enhance its romantic reputation, this resort had a very strict ”couples only” policy. They didn’t want any lone wolves interfering with any of their romantic couples. Apparently this had been a problem before the rule was implemented.

I also referred to the woman I took to Fiji as ”my girlfriend,” but a professional fact checker might take issue with that description. Please allow me to explain.

I had broken up with my longtime girlfriend just before this Fijian project came along. We were still on good terms and I almost weakened and asked her to join me in Fiji, but I knew that probably wouldn’t be a good idea for either of us.

So I called another ex-girlfriend and asked if she’d like to accompany me. “Terrible timing,” she said. ”I’d love to go, but I just started a new job last week. I can’t ask for a week off my second week on the job.”

I began thumbing through my Rolodex in search of someone else I could take, someone I might actually want to spend a week with. I quickly flipped through all the cards from ”A” to ”F” without my interest being piqued. But I was stopped by one of the first names in the ”G” section. ”Hmmmm,” I said to myself. “She is a definite possibility.” I had never dated this woman but I recalled some heavy-duty flirting, a suggestively-raised eyebrow, and some clever but clearly-interpreted double entendres delivered while we were both dating other people.

I gave her a call and she seemed happy to hear from me. We went out that night but what she considered a date, I considered an audition. We spent a couple hours lingering over dinner at my favorite Thai restaurant. She was just as gorgeous as I remembered. She made me laugh. She had a great smile. She was blonde, which was out of my normal wheelhouse. ”Yeah,” I decided, “This could work.”

“Want to go to Fiji?” I asked over dessert.

“Yeah, right,” she said sarcastically.

“No, seriously.” I explained the situation.

“Duh,” she said. ”Of course I’d like to go.”

We spent the next week getting to know each other better. She may not have been the woman of my dreams, but she was certainly everything a man could hope for on a romantic week in Fiji. In the words of noted 20th century philosopher Stephen Stills, ”If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with.”

We had a great time at the resort. What was not to love? Beach front villa, private beach, romantic dinners catered for just the two of us, blah blah blah.

That being said, other than leaving our beachfront villa for meals, we spent an inordinate amount of time indoors. If you know what I mean.

Think of it as coitus non-interruptus. We banged. We boffed. We boinked. We shtupped. We shagged. We shredded the sheets and shattered the shutters and rattled the rafters. We introduced the monkey to the organ grinder. We baked the potato and churned the butter. We parallel parked. We did paradise push-ups. We did the no pants dance, the horizontal hula, and the pokie pokie polka. It sounded like an exorcism gone wrong, like the Bronx Zoo at feeding time. She may have screamed, “Wakka wakka,” and I may have answered, ”Boom chick a wow wow.”

We did some things I’d only read about and some other things I had previously believed to be anatomically impossible. There were moments when I thought she was trying to kill me. She was truly the perfect woman for a week in paradise.

And that was just the first four days. Then I got ciguatera poisoning and all that extracurricular activity came to a screeching halt. For all I know I may have been even more susceptible to the poison because I was so damn exhausted.

Let’s keep one thing in mind: I thought all the ground rules were clear upfront. This was just a fling. A little no-strings-attached fun. Nothing more. Of course, I realized that everything about this situation was unusual because instead of taking months to develop, our entire relationship had been compressed into seven days pre-Fiji followed by another seven days and nights together at the resort. But still, I thought the ground rules were clear.

And then…

One afternoon all the island’s male guests planted lawn chairs in a semi-circle on the beach, ankle deep in the incoming tide. One of the other guys reached out to shake my hand and said, ”Congratulations.”

I weakly extended my hand back in his direction. ”For what?” I asked.

“Your girlfriend told my wife that you’re getting engaged when you get home.”

I yanked my hand back so fast I almost dislocated my shoulder. I was already physically drained by the ciguatera and this unexpected piece of information damn near gave me a stroke. I wasn’t even thinking of her as a future girlfriend, yet she had already targeted me as her future husband.

There are those rare moments in each of our lives when we achieve clarity, when the sun and the moon and the planets align and when the answers to questions that were once beyond our comprehension suddenly pop into focus. That’s exactly what this moment was for me. It was 5:42 pm Fiji Standard Time and my feet were being gently caressed by a warm tropical tide when I learned a very important lesson in life, one that’s just as true where you live as it is on isolated, idyllic islands in the Pacific. It’s as universal as e equals mc squared. It’s cosmically ubiquitous and all-encompassing, an immutable law of nature.

So please hear my words and heed them. Write them down and commit them to memory. Let the following fifteen syllables be the golden rule that guides you through life:

Not all the dangerous barracudas live out on the reef.

COMING NEXT WEEK: PART THREE

As you will learn later in this story, “One man’s fish is another man’s poison” is not only an adage, it may be the most remarkably accurate headline I’ve ever written.

I was once hired to create an ad campaign for a very small, very exclusive luxury resort in Fiji. It sounded like the best gig ever.

The client thought it was important for me to experience the resort for myself before I attempted to create their ads — to spend a full week in one of their beachfront villas, to snorkel on their reef, to relax on the silver sands of their private beaches, to drink from their selection of fine wines, and key to this story, to dine on meals prepared by the finest chefs in the Pacific.

And just when you think it can’t get any better, he felt it was important for me to bring my girlfriend in order to fully understand the romance of his tropical island paradise.

Who was I to disagree? Sometimes one is just called upon to make sacrifices and I was prepared to do my duty.

They flew us first class to Fiji. The tropical resort was just as beautiful as advertised. Spectacular, in fact. We had our own private beachfront villa. On our own private beach. Gourmet meals were catered for just the two of us.

On night number four all the guests were invited to a special beachside barbecue. The main course was fresh barracuda, caught that afternoon on the reef that surrounded the island. It seemed a wonderful meal at the time.

Key words: “…at the time.”

One of the other guests on the island that night was Fiji’s Minister of Tourism. We got into a conversation at dinner, enjoyed each other’s company, made each other laugh, and agreed to go deep sea fishing with the owner of the resort early the next morning.

Unfortunately, I fell ill immediately after dinner. Deathly ill. It was god awful. I was up and down the rest of the night and got no sleep. None. Yet when the clock ticked over to seven o’clock in the morning, I crawled out of bed and began getting dressed.

My girlfriend looked at me through one barely open eye. She asked a reasonable question. ”What are you doing?”

“I gotta go fishing.”

“You’re too sick to go fishing. You’ve been throwing up all night and you haven’t had any sleep.”

“Doesn’t matter,” I insisted. ”This is my chance to spend time with the Minister of Tourism. Maybe I can land Fiji Tourism’s advertising account.”

”You’re a moron,” she said and then rolled over and went back to sleep.

I staggered down the beach to the dock where I was greeted by the owner of the resort. ”We’ll be leaving in about fifteen minutes,” he said. “Breakfast and coffee are ready below deck. Go down and make yourself comfortable.”

Food was the last thing I wanted, but when I went below deck I spied a cot. Well, I thought, he told me to make myself comfortable and that cot looks pretty damn comfy. So I curled up and immediately fell asleep. I was only vaguely aware a few minutes later when the boat’s dual engines roared to life and we headed out to sea.

I woke up groggy and blurry-eyed and slowly climbed the stairs back up to the deck. It felt like I was scaling Kilimanjaro. My stomach was churning and every muscle in my body ached and sweat was gushing out of every pore. I had never been this sick in my life.

The owner of the resort was standing at the aft of the boat. I did my best to pull myself together.

”Good morning, Jim,” he chirped. ”Looks like a perfect day for fishing.”

“Great,” I said, faking it. Then I looked around the empty boat and said, ”Where’s the Minister of Tourism?”

”Oh, he wasn’t feeling well this morning, so he decided to sleep in.”

Are you freakin’ kidding me? I don’t even like deep sea fishing. I was sick as the proverbial dog and I had come out here strictly to spend time with the Minister of Tourism, and now I learn the sissified son of a bitch had decided to sleep in because he wasn’t feeling well. I don’t care how sick he was, I was sicker. My girlfriend was right: I was a moron.

Well, I thought, I don’t really have much choice here. We’re out here in the middle of the ocean and I’m supposed to be experiencing the resort, and I’m with its owner, so I need to make the best of this. I can fake it for a couple hours.

The boat eventually slowed to a stop and we baited our hooks and tossed them into the water. Almost immediately, a huge albacore struck my hook. This, I thought when it made its first leap out of the water, is the biggest freakin’ fish I will ever see in my life. Sick as I was, I had to begin reeling in the monster.

If you’ve never been deep sea fishing, please believe me that catching the tuna is the easy part. Bringing it in, the duel between man and beast, is the hard part. First you need to pull the rod upward and back and then reel frantically to bring the fish closer. Then you let the fish tire itself out a bit more (and get yourself a little well-deserved rest) before you repeat the process. Over and over and over again. It’s exhausting under the best of circumstances. Every muscle in your shoulders and arms and legs eventually begins screaming in unison.

I didn’t want to show any weakness, but I thought I was going to pass out every time I had to exert myself.

The battle seemed to go on forever. In reality, it probably lasted no more than thirty minutes or so. Maybe not even that long.

With each cycle of the battle, the tuna weakened a bit more but so did I. Which one of us would outlast the other in this mano a pescado contest was definitely in question. I was slowly able to gain the upper hand, working the giant fish closer to the boat. It drew nearer and nearer, and then, just as the battle appeared won and a member of the crew was standing at the ready, about to gaffe the giant fish and hoist it aboard the boat, a huge shark came out of nowhere and, BANG!, it hit my tuna.

The line suddenly went slack and I staggered backward, almost falling to the deck.

I continued frantically reeling but there was no resistance left on the other end of the line. When my monster fish finally popped up out of the water, the crew began laughing. In the battle between me and the tuna, the only winner was the shark. There was nothing left on my hook but the head of the tuna. The shark had taken the rest in one giant gulp. As big as the tuna was, the shark must have been immense to take it all in one bite.

I held myself together long enough for a crew member to take the photo at the top of this post, then I turned to the owner of the resort and said, ”Screw this. I’m sick. I’m going below deck to get some sleep.”

He laughed. The crew laughed. They all thought it was hilarious.

I slept until we got back to the resort and tied up to the dock. ”You don’t look so good,” the owner of the resort said as he awakened me. “Maybe you should go back to your villa and get some sleep.”

I slept for twenty-four hours. When I finally woke up and joined my girlfriend and the other guests for lunch, I learned that the Minister of Tourism and I were not the only ones who had fallen ill. Half the guests had been incapacitated to one degree or another.

For the next few days I was so sick that I literally thought I might be dying. And as if this illness wasn’t bad enough, I was simultaneously experiencing another problem — all my teeth had suddenly come loose. When I ran my tongue around inside my mouth, I could feel them fluttering around like sheets on a clothesline.

“If I survive this,” I told my girlfriend, “I’ll need to see an orthodontist.”

And to top it all off, I began suffering hallucinations. Hot food and beverages seemed cold and cold food and beverages seemed hot. It was a very strange sensation. I thought I was going crazy.

I spent most of the next three days in bed, but there was no island romance involved. I was too sick to do more than sleep and occasionally stagger out for a bit of food.

A group of Australians arrived at the resort just in time for dinner on our last night on the island. When told about the symptoms running rampant through the guests, one of them said, ”Sounds like ciguatera poisoning. Did you eat any reef fish?” He seemed to know what he was talking about. ”You get ciguatera from eating certain kinds of fish, especially barracuda, in the wrong season. You have to make sure you don’t eat any meat from near the head of the fish because that’s where the poison builds up.”

I thought back to the beachside barbecue from our fourth night on the island and remembered that my girlfriend had been in front of me as we moved down the dinner buffet line. She had been served the last piece of meat from one barracuda so I had to wait briefly until they rushed out another one fresh off the grill. They sliced a thick slab of meat from right behind the head and put it on my plate.

It was delicious and I thought nothing of it at the time, but it all made sense now that the Aussies had explained the source of ciguatera. Guests who were served meat from near the tail were fine, those who were served from the middle had mild symptoms, and those unlucky few who were served from near the head — like me, for example — became very ill.

I was still so sick the next day that I slept all the way across the Pacific on the flight home. As soon as we landed I went directly from the airport to my doctor’s office. I described my symptoms — itching, tingling, numbness of my lips and tongue, stomach cramps, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, chills, muscle weakness, muscle pain, dizziness, blurred vision, and achy joints — and mentioned the word ”ciguatera.”

He had never heard of it so he left me in the examination room while he went off to look it up. He returned a few minutes later with a medical dictionary in hand.

”I think the Aussies were right,” he said. ”Sounds like you have ciguatera poisoning.”

Here’s what he found:

Ciguatera fish poisoning is a rare disorder that occurs because of the ingestion of certain contaminated tropical and subtropical fish. When ingested, the toxin (ciguatoxin), which is present at high levels in these contaminated fish, may affect the digestive, muscular, and/or neurological systems. 

“It also calls out two more very strange symptoms you didn’t mention,” he noted. ”Hot and cold temperature reversal.”

“Exactly,” I said. ”Hot water seems cold, cold water seems hot. I thought I was going crazy.”

”There’s one more very odd symptom,” he said. ”The illusion that all your teeth are loose.”

What a great doctor.

He confirmed what was wrong with me, and saved me a trip to the orthodontist at the same time.

However, I lost nineteen pounds and didn’t fully completely recuperate for several months.

Here’s the kicker: I had agreed to create the resort’s advertising in exchange for three future weeks at the resort. The resort got its ad campaign and I received certificates for future stays, but I’ve never used them. Somehow getting poisoned because the chef served out of season fish had soured me on the island paradise.

I still have those certificates tucked away in a drawer.

What are the odds they’ll still honor them thirty years later?

COMING NEXT WEEK: PART TWO

An alternate title for this post might be ”Why Jim is no longer allowed to speak to high school students.”

My business partner Dan was asked to speak at Career Day at a local high school. Something came up at the last minute and he couldn’t make it so he asked me to fill in for him. A week later he received a student evaluation form from the teacher who had invited him to speak. He immediately scurried down to the copy room where he made a copy for each of our employees and distributed them — cackling all the way — with this yellow stick-em attached.

This was no ordinary high school. No, no, no, no, no. It wasn’t as much a school as a warehouse where these kids were stored until their pull dates expired. You couldn’t get on campus without passing through a metal detector.

This was the school of last resort for cold-blooded killers who hadn’t been prosecuted because they were minors when they committed their horrific crimes. For wannabe pimps looking to conscript their first drug-addled teenage girls. For local gang wannabes hoping to work their way up into membership in a Mexican cartel. For drug dealers who had been booted from their neighborhood high schools after blowing their second, third, fourth and fifth chances. For the psychotic and the neurotic, the overdosed underachievers who had been banned from ”regular” schools. For neer-do-wells of every stripe and every color.

Most of these kids had no interest in school and even less interest in the advertising yahoo standing before them. I’m going to guess that their average reading comprehension scores fell far below their grade levels, and that their IQs hovered somewhere near their body temperatures. They were like a pig in a python — they were being pushed through a system they didn’t really want to be part of.

I remembered how boring Career Day was back when I was in school. So I was working my ass off to be funny and interesting, to keep their attention, and if miracles were possible, to find the single lump of coal that could be transformed into a diamond in the middle of this open pit disaster.

Apparently, I impressed one kid, but not in a good way. The students were asked to evaluate each speaker. This is the form the kid did about me, the one Dan distributed to all our employees.

I do not dispute the kid’s evaluation. It is generally accurate. It’s true that I told him to fuck off, but a little context is necessary. This kid had been a problem since the moment he entered the classroom. He interrupted other students, made inappropriate comments, disrupted the session as much as he possibly could. He was a loud, abrasive troublemaker who sat in the back of the room making rude comments throughout my little talk.

Despite his annoying behavior, things were going better than I expected and I was pleased that a few students actually seemed interested. I completed my prepared comments and announced that we would use the rest of my allotted time to address any students’ questions. I saw the troublemaker waving his raised hand, but intentionally ignored him, hoping I could run out the clock without calling on him. Finally, though, his hand was the only one still dangling in the air, and I had no choice but to call on him. As I recall, my interaction with the problem child went something like this:

Jim: Any more questions? Anyone? You in the back. You have a question?

Kid: Yeah, I have a question about marketing.

Jim: (Relieved, thinking that something I said may have actually penetrated this loser’s thick skull) Go ahead.

Kid: How do they get the cream inside the Twinkies?

Jim: (Pissed off at myself for giving this kid the benefit of the doubt) They hire a dickhead like you to blow it in. Now fuck off.

Yeah, I know. I probably shouldn’t have said it. I may have expressed myself inelegantly. I may have crossed a line. I may have expected too much of this callow youth. Jamie, the family child psychology expert, would undoubtedly have handled it better than I did. I know Dan would have.

Needless to say, I have never been invited back to Career Day in that school district. Nor has Dan. I suspect that this was a case of guilt by association and that he was also issued a districtwide super secret lifetime ban just for knowing me and asking me to substitute for him.

That being said, I’m willing to bet that this kid is now serving twenty to life in San Quentin.

If so, it ain’t Twinkies he’s now blowing.

%$&*!

One additional comment: I have no idea what ”He made me want to go to Switzerland and get pregnant” means. My presentation had included no comments about Switzerland nor pregnancy, so your guess is as good as mine. I would not be surprised if some highly-illegal yet readily-available hallucinogenic substances were involved. The really odd thing about this evaluation is that it sounds like he was actually paying attention and heard what I had to say despite his disruptive behavior.

Advertising people often ask what happened to me? Why, they wonder, did I suddenly stop winning advertising awards a couple decades ago? I had been prominent in the advertising industry for a number of years, and had won truckloads of awards, and then I seemingly disappeared overnight.

The answer is really very simple: You cannot win if you do not enter. And I have not entered any competition since way back in the mid ‘90s. Here’s why:

Fact is, most advertising people will do anything to get their hands on awards. Even if they are not actually deserving of those awards. Adweek (above) and the New York Post (below) explain the most egregious example:

On June 13, 1991, the prestigious Clio Awards for excellence in the advertising industry was a night to remember – for all the wrong reasons.

Unlike the dignified affairs of previous years, the banquet at New York’s Manhattan Center studios descended into what journalist Trip Gabriel called a “crush of muscle and tuxedos” when a mob of guests stormed the stage.

Most of the insurgents — the type of creatives who brought you the Energizer Bunny, the singing raisins and the Pillsbury Doughboy — grabbed coveted statuettes they hadn’t won.

Although I did not attend the Clio Awards that year, it was the event that began my evolution from seeker of the spotlight to professional recluse. But it was a different event the following year that completed that transformation.

Advertising is like show biz for ugly people, and advertising award shows are our version of the Oscars, a night when minor league celebrities get to dress up in rented tuxedos and borrowed dresses and pat themselves on the back for crafting an amusing headline or a dramatic TV commercial.

Despite my current low opinion of advertising awards shows, there was a time in my career when nothing was more important to me than winning awards. The thought of winning even a single certificate, being recognized by my peers and basking even momentarily in the warm glow of public adulation, was absolutely intoxicating. I wanted to shoot that metaphoric morphine directly into my veins.

The first ad agency in which I was a partner did very well in awards shows, but my second agency became an incredible awards machine. We won awards from all the top regional, national and international shows — the New York Art Directors Club, the One Show, the Print Annual, Best in the West, and we dominated the local shows. Year after year we kicked butt.

One fateful year we won so many awards that it actually became embarrassing. Our art directors and copywriters, the ones who would normally rush up on stage to accept an award and the plaudits of their peers, heard their names called time after time after time that evening. So many times that we all began to feel the icy glares of those in the audience who would have given anything just to win one of the awards we carted off so cavalierly. As our awards piled up, we could feel the audience’s early admiration gradually turning to animosity. Late in the evening, it finally reached the point that when the master of ceremonies once again called out, “And the winner of the gold is dGWB,” but no one from our agency wanted to go up on stage to accept the award.

“You go up,” the art director sitting on my right said to the copywriter on my left. “No, I went up last time,” the copywriter whispered back. “You go up this time.”

Consider it an embarrassment of riches. It was the opposite of the humiliating Clio Awards Show described at the top of this story. Far from stealing awards they hadn’t earned, our people refused to go up on stage to accept awards to which they were entitled.

These two events — one occurring on the east coast and the other on the west coast; one at which I was absent and the other at which I was present; one at which losers exhibited their worst instincts and the other at which winners demonstrated their best; one at which losers were shameless in their failure and the other at which winners were shamed by their success — came together to change the way I approach advertising and life.

I had an epiphany. I realized that the whole advertising awards process was, in the words of radio comedian Fred Allen, one of my heroes, nothing but a treadmill to oblivion. What was once so important to me became meaningless almost overnight.

Enough was enough. I went cold turkey. Not only did I stop entering awards shows, I went home and filled my trash can with almost all the awards I had piled up in the past.

I used the caveat “almost” because I kept only a few that were particularly meaningful to me — the first major award I ever won for a TV commercial (ironically, a Clio Award), the first Best of Show award I ever won, and in order to remind myself of how unimportant awards really are, I also saved one on which my last name was misspelled. They are all gathering dust somewhere in my attic.

I now have just one award displayed in my office. I find it particularly significant because rather than being an award for creativity, rather than being something given by an international judging committee, it is an award created by and given to me by a client to commemorate the remarkable effectiveness of the ad campaign we created for them.

And that’s what advertising awards should really be all about — the clients’ success.

As a result of my self-imposed anonymity, I have a dear friend who jokingly refers to me as “Advertising’s answer to J.D. Salinger.” He says it not because my talents compare in any way to Salinger’s — it would be a joke to say they do — but because like Salinger I walked away from a world of relative well-knownedness and embraced a world of relative obscurity.

Here’s how The American Conservative describes Salinger’s retreat from public life. I can relate:

… Salinger, a tortured minor genius, who, having carried off the highest honors available to a newspaperman, turned from the admiration that haunted his steps and sought for a better and quieter satisfaction in secluded work around the Cleveland suburbs.”

Again, I in no way attempt to compare myself to Salinger, except for where our thoughts intersect on this particular issue.

“It is my rather subversive opinion,” Salinger wrote, “that a writer’s feelings of anonymity-obscurity are the second most valuable property on loan to him during his working years.”

To which I respond, “Ditto.” (Proving once again that I do not compare to Salinger.)

Some other advertising professionals have taken me to task and said things like, “Sure, you can walk away. You don’t need to win any more awards because everyone already knows who you are.” I cannot deny that there is an element of truth to that statement.

Clients I don’t know continue calling. Interesting work keeps coming through the door. If a project sounds interesting, I might take it. It it doesn’t, I won’t. I am fully aware that this is a luxury most advertising, marketing and digital publishing professionals dream of, but never achieve. And I am grateful.

Another very good friend, one of the most talented advertising art directors with whom I ever had the pleasure of working, created the ad shown (above). He was also a winner of many awards, yet he brazenly poked his peers in the eye by paying a pretty penny to run this full page ad in one advertising competition’s awards annual.

I thought it was a brilliant way to point out the hypocrisy of it all, the silliness of it all, the unimportance of it all.

I don’t know if he ever won any awards for this ad, but I do know that when God is your client and Isaiah is your copywriter, the odds are in your favor

Everyone thinks Jamie is so damn sweet. Well, I am here to tell you that she has a mean streak lurking just barely beneath the very thinnest of saccharine veneers.

She read the last blog post about doppelgängers and said, ”You left out a few.”

”What do you mean?” I asked.

“You know exactly who I’m talking about.”

Damn it. I do know. The woman has access to the cardboard boxes and plastic crates in the shed and knows that I have a few additional show biz doppelgängers. Ones I’m not as eager to speak about as I was with Peter Fonda and John Lithgow.

First, here’s baby Jimmy and his doppelganger.

That is one happy baby. That being said, I did have a big ol’ Charlie Brown head when I was born. In fact, the first time my dad saw me in the hospital he said words no loving father should ever have uttered. ”God damn it, Helen, I think the kid’s a mongoloid.” Nice.

Oddly enough, I do not believe my head has grown a whit since the day it grossly distorted my mother’s birth canal. Although I had a big ol’ bulbous Charlie Brown head until my teenage years, my body slowly overtook my pate and I now look more like Schlitzie The Pinhead.

And now here’s second grade Jimmy and his doppelganger.

That is one butt ugly kid.

Jamie said, ”You should get a childhood photo of Peter Fonda and see if you looked alike as kids.” No such luck. I did. He was a particularly good-looking lad and I’m willing to bet that no one ever compared him to Charlie Brown, Schlitzie the Pinhead, nor Howdy Doody.

Let’s do an informal poll: Which set of doppelgangers looks the most alike: Jim and Peter Fonda, Jim and John Lithgow, baby Jimmy and Charlie Brown or second-grade Jimmy and Howdy Doody? Leave your answers in the comments or email them to me.

More memories plucked from the plastic crates and cardboard boxes stored out in the shed:

Easy Rider, starring Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper and Jack Nicholson, premiered about the same time I got my first job in advertising. Apparently I looked a bit like Fonda, which was not always a good thing.

He played a drugged-out hippy biker in the film and quickly became a symbol of the seventies counterculture. I worked on Wilshire Boulevard, where most of Los Angeles’ ad agencies were gathered, and when I walked down the street at lunch, construction workers looked down at me from their work stations several stories above the street, and hurled obscenities in my direction.

”Fuck you, Fonda,” was one of their favorites.

Not particularly creative, but to the point. My creative director probably would have praised it for economy of expression.

It’s not like we were twins, but I can understand how people may have confused one of us for the other from their distant perches a couple stories above the boulevard. We had similarities — long reddish brown hair, coloring, short trimmed beards, facial shapes, and lanky frames.

Fonda’s hair was better than mine, but c’mon, I clearly have a far stronger, more masculine nose. When he’s clean shaven, his lips definitely appear to be the result of some deYong-ish DNA. There are other deYongs, the ones armed with those lips, who probably look a lot more Fonda-ish than I.

That being said, I seriously doubt if anyone ever walked up to him and said, ”Hey, aren’t you that ad guy?”

My girlfriend thought it was hilarious when strangers asked me for my autograph. She loved the look of disappointment on their faces when I told them I was not who they thought I was. When we went to see Fonda’s follow-up films, we had to see them at drive-ins because she could not contain herself. ”Ooh, ooh, ooh,” she’d squeal. “You look just like him at that angle,” and at other times, ”Nah, I don’t think you two look anything alike.”

But time is a cruel mistress. Fonda’s career foundered. Hollywood stopped calling him and construction workers stopped calling out to me.

Twenty-five years rolled by with no one saying I looked like anyone except, well, me. Truth be told, I kind of missed being mistaken for a movie star.

Then NBC began promoting a new television show named Third Rock from the Sun. It starred John Lithgow, who’d had a long, successful career as a dramatic actor but finally achieved real fame in this over-the-top comedy by playing a dim-witted alien who was baffled by human behavior and American culture.

But now instead of hearing that I looked like a handsome young movie star, people began saying I looked like this balding, middle-aged, ruddy-faced TV star. Strangers on the street once again began asking for autographs. Restaurant hostesses gave me conspiratorial winks and led us to better tables than we would have otherwise been given. I once again became aware of whispering and pointing in my direction.

The craziest incident happened in the airport in St Louis where a blizzard had grounded my connecting flight. When I went to the counter to find an alternate flight, the ticket agents refused to believe I was not John Lithgow traveling under a false ID (obviously this occurred prior to to heightened TSA security checks). They were not convinced even after I showed them my drivers license to prove my real identity. The agent upgraded me to first class on the new flight, handed me a boarding pass and said, ”Here you go, Jim,” emphasizing my first name as if the two of us were in on a grand joke that no one else understood.

One of our clients was very involved in a Los Angeles children’s charity. She invited me, my business partner and our wives to its big annual fundraiser at Merv Griffin’s Beverly Hills Hotel. It was a Hollywood-ish kind of event and a number of celebrities were in attendance. We had attended the previous year and knew that Merv, one of the charity’s biggest supporters, would once again regale the crowd with hilarious show biz stories, and that Carl Reiner, another major supporter, would also get up again and tell his own hilarious stories.

There was no way Jamie and I were going to miss the event, especially after it was announced that John Lithgow was going to receive an award and be named Man of the Year.

The event was preceded by a cocktail hour at which all the celebrities mingled and exchanged small talk with the little people (“Small talk with the little people.” Hah! What other kind of talk would you exchange with little people?) Jamie and I spotted Lithgow but stood off to one side while he spoke to a number of other people. We waited until he was alone for a moment, when all the well wishers and groupies had briefly drifted away, and then we made our move.

”Excuse me, John,” I said. ”Would you mind if my wife took a photo of us together?”

Lithgow looked at me. He started to speak, but stopped. He looked at me again. His face lit up. And then, with that distinctive John Lithgow delivery, he said, ”Well, yes, I can certainly see why.” Jamie took a couple shots of us looking directly into the camera, and then John said, ”Let’s do one where we’re looking at each other.”

And that, my friends, explains the photo above.

Somewhere up near the top of this story I said that time is a cruel mistress. Fame must be an equally cruel master. I just cannot imagine being so famous that complete strangers feel free to intrude on your privacy, demanding that you be included in their selfies, interrupting your dinner, or even worse, staring and pointing like you’re a monkey in a cage.

Toward the end of my first advertising career, I was the public face of our ad agency, the guy the reporters called when they wanted a pithy quote. My job was to make sure the agency got lots of publicity and that our name graced the pages of all the right publications. On the continuum between anonymity and fame, I fell somewhere in the Zone of Well-Knownedness.

My new girlfriend joked that she had always wanted to go out with someone famous, and that I had fulfilled her fantasy by being a big fish in a small pond. Big enough and small enough that other advertising people often approached us in public just to ask if I was who they thought I was. It was low-level attention, nothing too annoying, but she quickly grew tired of it. ”We can’t go anywhere without someone recognizing you,” she said. ”I’ve changed my mind. I don’t want you to be famous anymore.”

She was right.

If my fleeting brush with fame taught me anything, it would be this:

It’s probably much better to look like someone famous than to actually be someone famous.

%$&*!

Years later, just a few months ago, Jamie and I had dinner in Santa Monica with god daughter Stella and her parents Dan and Caren. Caren got up to use the ladies room and when she came back to the table she said, ”Hey, Jim, your doppleganger just walked into the restaurant.” Sure enough, John Lithgow had been seated not too far away from us.

I stopped at his table on our way out of the restaurant. I repeated the line from the charity dinner of twenty years earlier.

”Excuse me, John,” I said. ”Would you mind if my wife took a photo of us together?”

He went blank for a moment. You could see the cogs turning as he accessed his memory banks to figure out how we knew each other. Then, BINGO, there was an obvious flash of recognition. He leaned in so that we were face to face, looked directly into my eyes, and uttered three words that made it clear he knew exactly who I was.

”Fuck you, Fonda.”

%$&*!

Only the first paragraph of that last story is true. The rest of it is a complete fabrication. We did dine in the same restaurant in Santa Monica, but I didn’t stop at Lithgow’s table and he did not say what I said he said.

But it would have been freakin’ hilarious if he had.

%$&*!

I just read an article in which former child actor Cole Sprouse said, ”When we talk about child stars going nuts, what we’re not actually talking about is how fame is trauma.” I think fame is like cocaine in the 80s. They might tell you it’s harmless, but in truth it’s horribly addictive and destroys everything it touches.

A few mornings back Jamie said, ”Today is our anniversary.” I guess a look of horror must have crossed my face because she started laughing and said, ”Not our wedding anniversary. The anniversary of the day we moved to Texas. Our wedding anniversary’s not for a couple more weeks.”

Those couple of weeks have now passed and I have now been married to this sweet, beautiful, wonderful woman for twenty-two years. She had to drag me kicking and screaming to the altar, but marrying her is clearly the best thing I ever did. But what the hell was she thinking?

Here are twenty-two years worth of photos. But first a story about our wedding day.

%$&*!

If you were a Friends fan, you may well remember the episode where the friends discuss their freebie lists — pre-approved lists of celebrities each character could sleep with without upsetting their significant others.

Here is some of the dialogue from Season 3, Episode 5 (“The One with Frank, Jr.”) that helps explain the concept:

Chandler: Well, we (he and girlfriend Janice) have a deal where we each get to pick five different celebrities that we can sleep with, and the other one can’t get mad.
Ross: Ah, the heart of every healthy relationship: Honesty, respect, and sex with celebrities.
Monica: So, Chandler… who’s on your list?
Chandler: Uh, Kim Basinger, Cindy Crawford, Halle Berry, Yasmine Bleeth, and, ah, Jessica Rabbit.
Rachel: Now, you do realize that she’s a cartoon… and way out of your league?
Chandler: I know, I know, I just always wondered if I could get her eyes to pop out of her head.

You get the idea.

Jamie and I thought this was a funny concept so we each made up our own freebie lists. I do not recall who filled out slots number two thorough five on my list, but perched securely at the top was nubile blonde starlet Heather Locklear.

Hubba freakin’ hubba.

The morning of our wedding, just hours before my womanizing ways were scheduled to come to an abrupt end, Jamie walked through the front door and said, ”You are never going to guess who I just ran into at Starbucks. I was standing in line behind a young couple and they had the most beautiful little girl. I kept staring at the mom standing right in front of me and thought, ‘I hate her. She has an absolutely perfect ass.’”

She caught my attention with that line.

”Go ahead. Guess who it was.”

As I said, It was the day of our wedding. I was stressed beyond belief, and didn’t feel like playing a guessing game. ”Just tell me,” I snapped.

”Heather Locklear and Richie Sambora.”

I could not believe my good luck. A once in a lifetime opportunity had dropped right square in my lucky lap. Here it was the morning of my wedding day and my soon-to-be wife, a team player if there ever was one, was surely about to reveal that she had told Heather Locklear about her fiance’s freebie list, and that Heather, intrigued and surely more than just a bit titillated by the opportunity, was at that moment upstairs in our master bedroom.

Quivering with excitement.

Eagerly awaiting the sound of my footsteps on the stairs.

She may have even started without me.

My eyes glazed over, and Jamie noticed a goofy grin on my face.

”Oh, my god. I am so sorry,” she apologized. ”I was distracted by her perfect ass and forgot all about your freebie list.”

”And by the way,” she continued, ”Richie is so handsome in person that I’m moving him up to the top of my list.”

OK, so maybe Jamie disappointed me on my final day as a single man, but she’s made up for it by making every single day of the last twenty-two years an absolute delight. I can’t wait to wake up every morning just to spend another day with her. And I cannot imagine my life without her.

Happy anniversary, Poochie Baby.

A little trivia: We’ve been married for twenty-two years and were together five years before that. I just realized that means she has been with me exactly half her life.

 

Now here are those photos.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is our cat Ozzie. He’s about eighteen years old now but doing very well for his advanced age. The thing about Ozzie is that he’s always been a bit of a pain in the ass and has always required his own bedroom because he insists on pestering any other pet or human who attempts to sleep while he is awake.

He’s been getting louder and louder since our old female cat Sydney died about a year ago. We decided Ozzie might be lonely, missing Sydney, so we put a spare TV on the floor in his bedroom. He liked it. We turned it to Animal Planet and he liked it even more. Then we turned the sound waaaaay up so the deaf old duffer could hear the sounds all the TV animals make and he loved it even more.

So Ozzie now watches Animal Planet all day and all night. He loves to sit about six inches from the screen (as in the photo above). Sometimes he lies on the floor directly in front of the TV with his head turned upward so he doesn’t miss a moment of the action. Other times he curls up in his bed across the room. But no matter where he positions himself, his eyes remain glued to the TV.

I’ve tried to get him interested in Judge Judy, but she’s too harsh for his refined tastes. Jamie’s tried to interest him in The Real Housewives of Wherever, but he couldn’t care less. I thought he might like to watch a Spring Training game, but he is apparently not a sports fan.

If you’re reading this, Animal Planet, Ozzie is now available for endorsements.

UPDATE: Ozzie has one of those new smart TVs that shuts off if the remote control hasn’t been used for more than four hours. We always know when four hours have elapsed because that’s Ozzie’s cue to walk downstairs, stand at the entrance to the living room, and screech at the top of his lungs. One of us has to pick him up, take him back upstairs, and turn his TV back on again. That keeps the old boy happy for four more hours.

I told the story of my one degree of separation from Bill Gates a few months ago. Now here’s my other one degree of separation from the world’s third richest man story.

I had an early advertising hero. His name was Paul Keye. As the headline above says, his last name rhymed with high. He was the creative director and a partner at a great little L.A. ad agency named Keye Donna Pearlstein.

Paul was a copywriter, an absolutely terrific copywriter. He had immense talent and an ego to match. He was legendary for lording that talent over lesser copywriters. And in Paul’s world, all of us were categorized as lesser. Apparently the Wall Street Journal agreed, because it featured Paul in one of its award-winning ads (above).

KDP’s offices were just a couple blocks down Wilshire Boulevard from DJMC, where I was working at my first job in advertising. I finally got up enough nerve to make an appointment to show my portfolio to Paul.

Earlier in the same week in which my appointment was scheduled, KDP had run an eight page, full-color self-promotion ad in MAC, the weekly Los Angeles advertising trade publication. It had very, very long copy but I read every word of that ad over and over again and marveled at Keye’s mastery of the language.

I arrived a few minutes early and was ushered into the Master’s office. He was, I quickly learned, a tall, disheveled, shuffling, abrupt man. He motioned me over to two facing chairs and gruffly told me to sit down in one of them. He then sat in the other one, laid my portfolio down on the floor between us, and opened it up. He hunched over and began slowly thumbing his way from one of my ads to the next. After he’d looked wordlessly at the first few selections, he peered up over the top of his eyeglasses and barked, “You’re looking at me.” It wasn’t a simple declaration. It was an accusation.

“Well,” I squeaked, “I thought maybe you might have some questions.”

“I don’t like people looking at me while I’m looking at their work.” He reached into his desk and pulled out a copy of that eight page Keye Donna Pearlstein ad I had already read and re-read so many times that week.

”Here,” he said as he thrust it toward me. “While I’m reading your stuff, why don’t you read something that’s really well written.”

It was devastating but 100% accurate. So I read those eight pages one more time and reminded myself that I was a complete copywriting amateur compared to this genius, and that I had no business showing him my meager wares.

”You’re not ready to work here yet,” he grumbled as he finished reviewing my work, ”but you might be someday. Keep working at it. Come back and see me again in another year or two.”

I closed my portfolio, picked it up off the floor, and left, completely unworried about the way he had unfavorably contrasted our talent levels, thrilled that he hadn’t thrown me out of his office, and completely inspired that he thought I might sometime in the future be worthy of merely showing him my work again.

Let’s jump ahead nearly twenty-five years. Through a strange series of events my longtime business partner and I became partners in a new ad agency. Our third partner was Leonard Pearlstein, Paul’s former partner at Keye Donna Pearlstein. I told him Paul was my writing hero, someone I worshipped as a god who walked the earth.

”What was it like to work with him every day,” I asked.

”What was it like? Oh, I’ll tell you what it was like,” Leonard responded. “We were Microsoft’s first ad agency and Bill Gates was our client before he was Bill Gates, if you know what I mean. We created Microsoft‘s very first ad and sent it up to Gates for approval, and then Paul and I flew to Seattle the next day to review the ad and take care of some other business. When we walked into Gates’ office and sat down across his desk, we could see that he had used a red marker to completely re-do the ad. There were red marks everywhere. Nothing was left untouched. Bill pushed the comp slowly across his desk toward us and said, ‘I hope you don’t mind. I’m a frustrated copywriter.’”

”No, I’m a frustrated copywriter,” Keye responded. “You’re a fucking asshole.”

”And that,” Leonard said, “was the end of our relationship with Microsoft. We could have had the biggest client in the world, but your hero called Bill Gates a fucking asshole just because the guy edited his copy. That’s what it was like to work with Paul Keye.”

I understand Leonard’s point, but subsequent events seem to have proven that Keye’s opinion of Gates was not inaccurate.

NOTE: Do yourself a favor and blow up the size of the Wall Street Journal ad at the top of this story. It is just such a pleasure to read the way Paul Keye used words and expressed his thoughts.

ANOTHER NOTE: Our agency’s Wall Street Journal rep nabbed me several poster-sized reprints of the ad at the top of this story. Years later I asked Leonard if he could get Paul to autograph one of them for me. Leonard refused. ”Don’t embarrass yourself,” he snapped. ”You’re his equal now.” Leonard was wrong. Paul was the sun and I was Pluto. I regret that I never got that autograph.