Beauty and the Beast

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

This is just my very personal reaction to the controversy over the chimp cartoon in the Daily News:

Barack Obama looks about as much like a chimpanzee as George Clooney looks like me. Actually, the chimp looks like my uncle Clarence, but my uncle is too dead to care.

Though suddenly all this mistaken identity makes me think of that late afternoon in college when that cute Sharon -- a kind of a kewpie doll; a kind of a Bernadette Peters -- came running up to me from behind and, having gotten my attention, stepped back in astonishment, saying, "You look just like Jack Kascur from a distance."

And so, for a very long time, I lived in the shadows, always walking away, like a retreating god.