In college, I was friends with a girl named Meg Ryan. She went by Megan most of the time but people still called her Meg Ryan. She was fine with it, and she got the customary double looks or dumb questions when it came up in conversation, but for the most part it didn’t seem like anything that deeply effected her life in a negative way.
This was before the internet really became the internet. This was before social media. This was before everyone becomes uber obsessed with celebrity.
I can’t imagine what life is like for people named after the super famous. Take, for example, this poor guy with the same name as the biggest music star on the planet. Meet Mr. Taylor Swift.
When Taylor Adam Swift was born 30 years ago, the phenomenon that would be Taylor Alison Swift was little more than a glint in her parents’ eyes. Unfortunately for the blond (and male) photographer from Seattle, however, the other Taylor Swift across the country eventually grew up to be a chart-topping pop star who hijacked his name during her meteoric rise to fame.
“After the [2009] MTV Video Music Awards — that’s when she really started to get quite famous,” Swift, the man, told Newsweek in 2014. “It became obvious for me in how it affected my day-to-day life. I still have a little box of fan letters.”
So you’re probably thinking “well the guy is a photographer, he probably gets a ton of work just by people Googling Taylor Swift and finding his website by accident.” Nope. His website is buried under pages and pages of Swift news and Swiftie fan websites.
The guy can’t even go to a bar without having annoying shit like this happen.
Any time someone asks to see my ID—whether at the airport, at the bank, getting a drink—any time someone IDs me, I get the “Oh my god, no way!” One night I was out at a bar and the bartender was freaking out. He was like, “No way, man. I gotta show my manager!” And I was like, “Well, you can show your manager if you give me a free drink.” And I got a free drink out of it.
Or crazy stuff like this…
I kept getting a FaceTime request and I kept ignoring it. Finally I answered it, and it was this guy laying on his bed with his shirt off. I looked at him and [he] was like, “What’s up, man?” and I was like “You called me” and then he hung up.
Overall, the male Taylor seems to be ok with being dealt a pretty insane card in life. If he wanted, he could always change his name to Todd or Tyler or go by his middle name Adam. But that might piss off a ton of Swifties and we certainly don’t want to see that again.
[via GQ]