Running off to an amusement park with my family this morning, I was told that my mug was on street corners throughout Santa Cruz—not wanted posters fortunately—but on the cover of our local weekly, The Good Times [link]. I knew this was in the works, even jumped a fence with the photographer into the old Santa Cruz mission to get the photo, but I was not quite prepared for the experience of seeing myself staring back at me. "It’s the Doug Times,” my seven-year-old daughter, who already has a wry sense of humor, announced seeing her father staring back at her, brandishing a sword.
The article announced, “We’ve all heard of the Spanish lover—the man no woman could resist. But how about Doug Abrams? Heard of him? Find him irresistible? Maybe you will after reading his sizzling new novel about the great Don Juan.” Oh, God! What is this, a personal ad? I don’t think I’ll ever get used to this "sell yourself" stuff—let alone the look at the camera stuff.
It kind of shocked me that the publisher wanted my picture on the back cover of the book, wanted to pay for a professional photo shoot—five hours of primping and posing—the gay London hairdresser had to do a lot of work to get me presentable. He pulled on my hair and mussed it up just right. (My wife, a doctor by training, lovingly cuts my hair, while wielding her scalpel sharp scissors.) But that kind of homespun hairdo would not do. Here a snip. There a snip. Everywhere a snip, snip. I was a bespectacled, clumsy kid who went through my awkward adolescence until about age 36—trust me we have pictures to prove it. So this whole poser thing doesn’t come naturally. One of my fiction writing teachers used to say character comes from the following equation: physiology + sociology = psychology. The body we have and the world we grow up in result in our psychology. The body I grew up in only hit its stride in my mid-thirties. Well, God has a sense of humor. As I was reviewing the copyedited manuscript, my hair started to spontaneously fall out—six hairs per page (300 page book—that’s a lot of hair). Hey it worked for Bruce Willis, Michael Jordan, and that all time sex symbol Winston Churchill.
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