Sean Astin is famous

The city of Lubeck, Germany, is notable for a great many things. First off, it's on an island, which may not seem all that significant or interesting, but it's the kind of island where if you stand at the top of the cathedral at its center, you can see the water on all sides, something that you can't say for Manhattan, where if you stand on the top of any cathedral you will likely be arrested. Secondly, if you stand on top of the cathedral in the center you can also get away from the smell of marzipan, which is no mean feat. Lubeck smells perpetually of marzipan. The overpowering smell was the main reason I was spending most of this leg of the family vacation either at the top of the cathedral, Dom zu Lubeck, or sitting in the hotel just off the island with my sisters, watching surreally dubbed episodes of "The Simpsons" and wishing I was drunk.

The first leg of our trip, which my father had been planning for eight months, took us to Copenhagen, Denmark, where we took in an IMAX documentary about Vikings that put my sisters to sleep but provided me with a new set of Tycho Brahe Planetarium headphones. My luck with headphones is terrible; I somehow had broken the right ear piece off the new ones and had to carry it in my shirt pocket. This wasn't necessarily a bad development; when we got to Germany I could tell myself that I looked not like a rich American tourist, but a poor Danish one. We travel to assume new identities, or at least to discover the details of our old ones, and I was at one of those crossroads of life where everything seems possible, but nothing seems very likely. "Who am I?" I thought, and then a guy behind me guessed, "Sean Astin?"

Due to a genetic irregularity that causes stocky people of equal Slovak and French/German blood to look like squat Irish actors, I bear a slight resemblance to Sean Astin, the American B-list actor best known for the roles of Sam in "The Lord of the Rings" and Rudy in "Rudy." We share the same basic facial structure, which my rather devastatingly honest friend Mary once called the "Close-But-No-Cigar" look, the "cigar" in this case presumably being "handsome."

I turned around and smiled, fully expecting the guy to realize his mistake, but instead he squealed and put both his hands ecstatically up to his mouth.

"Ja!" he screamed. "Ich weiss sie!" He pointed at me. "Sean Astin!"

I shrugged.

"Sean Astin is a big-time movie star!" he insisted in sublimely accented English, pumping my hand up and down. "Yes! Frodo's friend! Football loser! Only he wins!" He laughed gleefully. "He wins in the end!"

"He sure does," I told him, and he laughed.

"Rudy!" he yelled, and the two old ladies who had been attempting to pretend this conversation wasn't happening edged nervously toward the elevator.

"Hey," I told him. "It's, uh, always nice to meet a fan."

The man, middle aged and on the short side, beamed. "We are great fans of you, Sean Astin! Can I have your autograph?"

I felt sort of bad lying to the guy, but it had already gone too far, and if I told him I wasn't Sean Astin at this point, he might have gotten angry. "What's your name?" I asked.

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"Dieter Engels!" he exclaimed, pumping my hand again. For a German, the man was remarkably unreserved. "I've seen all of your movies!" Dieter continued, "even your first, 'Please Don't Hit Me Mom,' the special-after-school!" I had no idea what he was talking about, and since he knew more about my career than I did, I thought it might be smart to change the subject.

"Do you live in Lubeck?" I asked him.

He seemed suddenly struck by inspiration. "You will come to my house!" he said. "You will meet my family, and we will treat you to a big German dinner! What will you say?" The admiration in his voice was unmistakable. Wherever Sean Astin actually was, he was definitely missing out.

And, just like that, an amazing possibility suddenly and shiningly entered my mind. Would it be too much to ask to take Dieter up on his offer, to while away the afternoon with him, sharing tales of Hollywood intrigue and Middle Earth adventure, while he listened, rapt and eager? To return to his home, where his undoubtedly blonde and buxom daughter awaited? In Denmark, we had visited the castle of Elsinore, walked the halls where Hamlet famously summarized the central question of human existence: "To be, or not to be?" But what if he had left out an option? "To be, or not to be, or to be Sean Astin" ... that is the real question.

No matter who you look like, however, you can't escape who you are. If your achievements are not really your own, then you have no achievements, just their shadows, and nothing to look forward to but a future of uncertainty, wondering what you could have been with an utterly un-famous face, with the expectations of no expectations.

Also, I spoke almost no German. That was bound to be a problem at some point.

So instead, I apologized, I smiled and I signed the German gentleman's book with a name that was not my own. And then, with one final handshake farewell, I descended into the beautiful city below, the smell of marzipan in my nose, the sounds of Lynyrd Skynyrd in one ear and a middle-aged man with a great new story to tell in my wake.