I feel that I must have told you at some point, in one of the thousands of posts I have written across 15 years of blogging, about being bad at face recognition. But neither Google nor Typepad is turning up anything along those lines, at least not with a quick search, so I am just going to tell you again: I am bad at face recognition. There are online quizzes you can take to assess your face recognition ability, if you suspect that you are also bad at faces. I have failed on multiple occasions to recognize Tom Cruise and Oprah Winfrey in these quizzes, which continues to surprise me. I function reasonably well in everyday life despite my subpar face recognition skills -- I rely a lot on cues like hair / glasses / gait. Gait is huge, actually. But every now and again it trips me up, and tonight was one of those nights.
I have a friend I don't see very often, and her daughter takes ballet at the same studio where my daughter takes ballet. This friend has appeared in these pages before as Good Cop Jill, and that early running group experience left me with warm fuzzy feelings toward her that persist lo these many years later. Now. The thing about being bad at faces is not just that you fail to recognize people who expect to be recognized; it is also that you think you recognize people you've actually never seen before. My brain has a tendency to latch onto a single feature and attempt to rely on it for identification. Unfortunately, this trick only works some of the time.
One day in the early part of this year I was stopped at a traffic light near the ballet studio. I thought I saw Good Cop Jill on the other side of the intersection, and I waved enthusiastically at her. When I parked and went inside, I realized that I had erred. The woman in the other car bears a resemblance to Good Cop Jill, but she...is not Good Cop Jill. I could see the confusion on her face there in the waiting room. "Why did this woman just wave at me like I was her long-lost pal?" she was clearly thinking.
Ah, well, I thought to myself. We all make mistakes. I will offer a friendly nod from here on out, and perhaps she will think that we met at some point and she forgot about it.
This week, though, our three daughters are getting ready for the big December ballet performance -- mine, Good Cop Jill's, and Mystery Lookalike Woman’s. I keep seeing this Mystery Lookalike Woman in the dressing room, and she keeps looking enough like Good Cop Jill to confuse me. "That is not Good Cop Jill," I tell myself. "Friendly nod." But then I turn around and Good Cop Jill is there, I think, only I have to ponder it to be sure and it would help to get a good long look to be certain but I don't want to make it even weirder. So! I'll just be the one in the corner of the dressing room whose face is busy flexing from enthusiastic smile to friendly nod and back again, hoping she aims it at the right person at the right time.
I think I'm at about the 15th percentile for face recognition, based on results from the quizzes I've taken. Oliver Sacks wrote a fascinating New Yorker article about serious face-blindness, and it reminds me to count my blessings. My struggles are not disabling. But occasionally (today) they are annoying.
Have you ever taken a face recognition quiz? Have you ever failed to recognize Tom Cruise and/or Oprah Winfrey? Have you ever waved enthusiastically at someone you didn't actually know? Tell me I'm not the only one making things weird.
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