Wish You Were Her

In her work for n+1, Mina Tavakoli has already written wildly entertaining dispatches from a ventriloquist convention and a dog show. Now she sets her sights on both grandparents of subculture/participatory journalism: a group of celebrity impersonators on a a cruise ship. It’s everything you hoped it would be, and possibly more—as long as “more” includes an Ozzy and a Sharon, a Jeff Bezos (?!), and a manmade island in the Bahamas.

Every impersonator made for a convincing person. But as the gathering of celebrity doubles milled about the room, it was growing obvious just how broad the spectrum of fidelity within impersonation could get. Some were just blessed with a genuinely miraculous assembly of genetic glitches. Dangerfield, for instance, with big red eyes hot enough to boil water, and now miming his golf swing for Greg, was an amazing, near-perfect dupe, clearly put on this planet as proof of a lazy and hilarious God. (Ditto Boy George, with his stubble, his exemplary androgynous smolder — and same for Walter White of Breaking Bad, who kept pulling out a small bag of laundry beads from his shirt pocket as his prop ounce of crystal meth.)