My Prosopagnosia-like Tendencies

I mentioned in a previous post that I have never been great at facial recognition when I recounted that I had once seen Clint Howard at breakfast at Mayberry Days and did not connect who he was until I saw him in the parade.

The most extreme form of this trait is called prosopagnosia or more commonly “face blindness.” People with this neurological disorder literally can’t recognize facial features even of those they have met many times. At its most extreme, they cannot even recognize their own reflection.

I certainly am not that bad. Had someone said, “Really look at that guy and tell me if you know who that is,” I would have realized it was Clint. But I don’t always pay enough attention. Maybe that is called just being a typical male instead of a mild case of prosopagnosia…

This was far from the first time I have done this. When we were first married in the 1980s, my wife worked in local television news in Cincinnati. As a thank you, the station gave her a certificate for both of us to go to dinner at the famed though now defunct Cincinnati restaurant called The Maisonette.

The Maisonette closed in 2005 but at the time was the most highly rated restaurant in the country. The luxury French restaurant earned Mobil Travel Guide’s five-star-rating for 41 years in a row, the longest streak in history. The streak only ended when they closed. When we went there for dinner, we passed a booth of other diners whom we nodded to politely as we walked by. After we were seated, my wife informed me that one of the people we had seen was Boomer Esiason, the quarterback for the Cincinnati Bengals at the time and now an NFL color commentator. I, of course, was oblivious.

Fast forward to when we had children and went on a trip to DisneyWorld with another family of dear friends. While we were in Cinderella’s castle, my wife saw what looked like any other teenager to me. The next thing I knew, my daughters were getting the autograph of national and Olympic ice skating champion Tara Lipinski.

Fast forward to when both of my daughters were grown and living on both coasts. My oldest daughter lives in New York City. While visiting a few years ago, my wife and I were in Manhattan and we saw a balding man who did not seem particularly notable to me getting into a car. My wife then told me it was the well-known television journalist Harry Smith who I had seen on television hundreds of times. A few years later we were visiting my younger daughter who lived in San Francisco at the time. My wife and I were walking alongside the busy Ferry Building Marketplace on the waterfront and I nearly bumped into someone who did at least look kind of familiar to me but who I obviously didn’t really recognize. My wife then told to me it was Richard Kind, an actor whom I enjoy a lot.

A final example is from just last year. My oldest daughter was giving a recital in Manhattan and we decided to make it more of an extended trip and went through New England, spending most of the time in Maine before heading into the city. On the way to New York, we spent a night in Connecticut so my wife could visit a store she had wanted to see. That night, we ate at a popular pizza joint we had found on Yelp. The place was packed and the tables were all close, so much so that the guy sitting to my left was literally maybe a foot away from me. I had politely said “Hi” to him as I sat down and thought nothing else about it. My wife picked up her phone and began texting, something she normally doesn’t do during dinner. My phone then buzzed and I realized she was texting me. The message read, “Don’t look now, but you are sitting next to John McEnroe.” And indeed I was.

I later told the story to a friend of ours who lives in Maine. When he said that was cool, I said I guessed so, but it would have been a lot cooler if McEnroe had lost his temper with one of the servers and then jumped to his feet and thrown his silverware to the ground while screaming insults. But in fact, he was nothing but polite and seemed a gentleman the entire meal.