Celebrity Lookalikes in Lectures and Tutorials

I have recently returned to university. I have returned to the familiar recurring pedagogical experience for the third time, next year being my fourth, and this year I am mixed with first year students who look like celebrities. Really popular ones, too.

Eva Mendes sat in my Reading Contemporary Fiction class, beside the person directly in front of me, to the left. Her long, dark brown hair rested to the left, then to the right, then to the left, then along her back, depending on the way her slender body moved throughout the tutorial. All I could imagine was Will Smith sitting next to her, quoting some lines from the movie Hitch - the lines which I cannot recall, for I have not seen the entirety of that movie, rather I have seen a glimpse of some scenes, and I did not happen to remember any memorable lines, memorable enough involving these two celebrities, though I did happen to see them together in one scene and that is the very scene that my mind had pictured throughout the entire class, when my gaze met hers. She has a Spanish heritage too, I can tell by the placement and shape of her nose, her skin colour, and her lips.

Beside her, Taissa Farmiga from American Horror Story: Coven, with similar long locks of blonde hair, though the way she plaited them had veered me off track when considering her lookalike for a while. Her constant look of concern, her quiet and shy demeanour, her slyness when she spoke, and the way she observed, and hardly did any movement. The way she just sat there warned me that she could indeed be a witch, and that at any given time she could raise herself from her chair, her feet lifted off the ground, waving her hands about in a frenzy, chanting spells so fast that a train-wreck would happen beside her in slow motion at a normal speed. I snapped out of my imagination, and regained focus on her, seated right in front of me, and chuckled nervously when she looked up at me as if she knew what I just conjured up in my mind, as if she was telepathically signalling to me that she indeed was part of a coven, and that what I saw was her reality, and if I dare spread the word she would burn me at the stake, even though I am not a witch. So I kept quiet.

Kirsten Stewart watched from the back corner, her vision lurking whilst her body remained immobile, her eyelids half closed as though she has lost sleep over the thought of Edward Cullen. Pale skin, a stare as though she has not drunken any blood beside that of a deer, she hid behind the young man in front of her whenever she caught me catching her staring at me as though my neck was her next victim. Her answer to my tutor's question, "any particular fiction books?" was as even as the part in her hair, one tone barely uttering the words "no, just fiction." I knew that she kept staring at me for the rest of the class without having to ever look back at her, in the event of her vampiric teeth surfacing from her gums as she smiled at me.

Last but not least, Sandra Bullock. She sat in my tutorial after Peter Griffin's lecture, and I kept looking around for Melissa McCarthy so that they could reenact a couple of scenes for me from The Heat. Melissa McCarthy was nowhere to be found, though, so when I asked Sandra Bullock to instead reenact a scene from Miss Congeniality, she threw her beauty pageant crown at my head and crossed her arms, frowning at me for the rest of the class. The side of her face, her jawline, her nose, her hair, her laugh that erupted from nowhere and bounced off the walls for minutes. The resemblance was simply astounding.

While I certainly enjoyed watching these celebrity lookalikes and conjured up hypothetical situations in my mind, I lost a great deal of attention that I could have paid my tutors and lecturers. Instead I invested my time in laughing at, while observing, celebrity lookalikes. I have you to blame, Hollywood, if my scores this semester take a plunge downhill.