Friday Foto #66

Hendrix is alive people. I’ve seen him in person. And he’s entertaining a bizarre group of people in front of a convention center, playing through an amp the size of a lunchbox, sitting on a luggage cart. It’s quite the rig.

This week’s Friday Foto was taken at the 2011 Winter NAMM Show in Anaheim, CA last month, where I went to check out the McPherson Four Seasons guitars we did some work on (recently covered in a FF post), as well as geek out on new guitars and gear.

Well, I’ll be honest now. This is not really Jimi, but an impersonator. And impersonators in general have always made me sad. For them. I just think it is bizarre that a person becomes so attached to another person, in an idolatrous form, that they want to base their “career” and identity on the one they are impersonating, more than their own. I am not knocking someone’s need to earn a living, and the hard work and enormous amount of time they put into it. I just think it is a bizarre way to try to earn one. Last summer a group of us went to see not one, but two, Michael Jackson impersonators at a concert here in a local park, and although the band was good, I couldn’t help but be mystified by the two guys doing the MJ thing for a living.

It always makes me wonder if or when they take off the “gig” suit and put on their own suit, and be who they are—who God created them to be. I also wonder if at least one reason why people get into the impersonating business is because they want to hide who they really are and escape from it, due to their past, and maybe their present.

Fake Jimi here was drawing quite the crowd in the 10 minutes or so that I stood there and watched him. He was a welcome break from the wall of noize inside the halls of NAMM, and although I had to navigate various clouds of cigarette smoke to get to him, I was relieved to breathe a bit of “fresh” air, and to have my own little escape from the madness inside.

So, be who you are people—not someone else. Be who God lovingly, graciously, mercifully and creatively made you to be. Our identity is in Him, not in emulating and idolizing another person to the point of taking on their persona as a means to make a living or hide from who we really are.