Department of Mistaken Identity

Web Chronicles, which appears to be some sort of automated news websearch aggregator has a page devoted a page to photographs and gossip about far more famous fellow actor, Eric Thal.

A man of a thousand faces, but none of them are Eric Thal.

As near as I can tell, despite the shared surname, we are not even related: The Thals from whom I am descended are Lativian Jews from the region of Courland, while according to an interview I once read after somebody reasonably asked, Eric, if I may be so familiar, despite playing a Hassid in A Stranger Among Us (1992), is not of Jewish descent: his Thals are ethnic Germans.


Eric Thal is not to be confused with Il Capitano, a stock character of the commedia dell'arte

Photos are from a presentation for World Commedia dell'Arte Day as a guest of Orfeo Group, and from a performance at Behind the Mask Theatre.

See also: Ian Thal and the Doppelgängers

N.B. 5:24pm: Kevin Fitzgerald, who took the photograph of me wearing the Arlecchino mask, has suggested that:

"You should show up as [Eric Thal] sometime and play one of his roles.

To which I countered:

According to the web page, I should be showing up for his dates with Charlize Theron, though that might be awkward since I don't think I've seen any of her films.

"Oh Charlize, let's not talk about our film work. Let's talk about my passion for commedia dell'arte and mime!"

And:

I bet Charlize Theron eats at fancy restaurants where this poor zanni can't even afford the appetizers. This little confusion may work out nicely for me.

Ian Thal and the Doppelgängers

I used to look myself up on Google until I learned how to have Google do the work for me. This past May, I was surprised to find that the website ex.plode.us had created a profile based on my profile at tribe.net along with links to some of my friends there, and URLs for other pages I operate. I decided that the best thing to do would be to claim my profile and establish myself before somebody else did and caused mischief. Interestingly enough, I found multiple profiles for some of my friends, especially ones I know from LambdaMOO, who tend to be early adopters of internet techologies.

One nice thing about ex.plode.us is that it serves as a means for linking one's various networking sites and blogs onto a single page and since it crosses networks, one can have a flickr persona listed as a friend of a tribe.net persona. However, I have to confess that ex.plode as of this writing does not have a lot of utility yet and the documentation is so slim compared to that on tribe, Blogger, MySpace, or technorati that I had to largely rely on trial-and-error (I even had to debug one of their widgets with my limited html skills.)

This led me to wonder: How many Ian Thals are there on the internet that I do not know about, or have simply forgotten about? I found a few abandoned webpages with which I had once tried to promote my art but I also discovered a previously unknown "Elven lord Ianthal Serevemon" who is apparently a character in somebody's fantasy role-playing game, and while I first went by the nick-name of "Ianderthal" at the age of thirteen, and and even used it as an online handle for several years (though it only remains as the name of my yahoogroup) and while most Ianderthals I found were in fact, my own past selves dating from 1999 to 2001, I was to find "a 19 year-old guy from West Bloomfield, Michigan, USA" using the same moniker , another studying in Middletown, Connecticut, another who is the guitar player for a band called Too Hectic and yet another (perhaps the same) Ianderthal, who is a contributor to Urban Dictionary. There were yet other Ianderthals whose identity I could not even begin to fathom, I suspect that at least one was an anime character.

As my last name is so uncommon that anyone who posesses it is quite likely a relative, I had never before had the experience of discovering a doppelgänger in the same manner that a "John Smith" might. Curioser and curioser.