the doppelganger festival

by Robert John Miller

For the Tri-County Region’s Doppelganger Festival, we all dressed up as someone else and then acted like the person they thought they might become when they were small. I always showed up as my friend Brian who worked at the Center for Diabetic Cats and then pretended like I was Brian as a blind jazz musician who had never lost a childhood pet. I had to learn the piano and even started releasing albums of Ray Charles cover songs, but I never actually went blind. I just used acting for that, because it helped me see all the things I wasn’t supposed to know were there.

Brian would usually dress as a coconut, which is what his favorite waitress at Rita’s Coconut Shack said she would be if she wasn’t running a restaurant.

Mom would show up as me as a professional baseball player and it was like looking in a mirror. Sometimes I would wonder if she really was me somehow. She made it all the way to Triple-A ball before she told her manager she was just doing it for verisimilitude, and he got so mad he tried to make her reimburse him for the cost of her Tommy John surgery, which was fine because by then I had plenty of money coming in from the royalties for my jazz records.

The three of us—me as a jazzy blind Brian and Mom as a sporty me and Brian as Rita as a tropical fruit—even collaborated on a special Jimmy Buffett tribute album titled Last Coconut in the Ballpark, which we would sometimes perform at Rita’s restaurant during the festival. All of the proceeds went toward people who couldn’t afford to pay full price for the album, so the more people who bought the album, the better off everybody was.

Photo of Robert John Miller

BIO: Robert John Miller's work has appeared in places like Bending Genres, HAD, Maudlin House, Scaffold and elsewhere, available at robertjohnmiller.com.