Our Faces, Our Selves

Self portraits via the police Identi-Kit
| by Giles Revell, Matt Willey and Matthew McKinnon
Thomas King, Author/Politician:

I'm like anybody else. I look at myself and I hope I look good. But I think what we do is we look at ourselves, and we try to imagine somebody else that we've seen, maybe a movie star or someone else who looks a little bit like us. For whatever reason, the past three or four years, as I'm wandering the streets of Toronto, people want to know if I'm James Coburn. I don't see the resemblance at all. And James Coburn is dead.

I look more like my father, although I have some of my mother's features. I thought I had just one brother, and then I discovered, when I was about fifty, that my father had been a busy boy, and that I had seven other half-brothers and half-sisters. We didn't know about each other. When I was about two years old, my father took off.

My brother looks more like my mother. We say I got the native side of the gene bank and Christopher got the Greek side, because Christopher has hair all over his body and nothing on his head, and I have no hair on my body but I have all of my hair left on my head. He's younger than I am, so I say that's the benefit he gets out of this. He could grow a moustache when he was eighteen. I couldn't grow one until I was forty. I eventually got to the point where I could grow a decent moustache. Then I looked like a Mexican.

About two and a half years ago, I had some real health problems. I was overweight and eating badly. I discovered I had Type 2 diabetes. I didn't want to go on medication, so I went on a very strict diet and lost sixty pounds over the course of six or seven months. That changed the whole struc-ture of my face and body and put me over into a different age group.

1 comment(s)

Francesco SinibaldiSeptember 20, 2008 15:29 EST

An evidence for you.

When everything
shines in the
light of October
there's a beautiful
seaside, and a
careful watcher: the
sun fades away,
and even a
strange man
arrives near a
fountain.

Francesco Sinibaldi

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