My Prosopagnosia* Kicks My Ass Again

So I'm in the elevator today, and I'm thinking, gee, I wish I knew what Annie Leibovitz looked like.

Let me backtrack. I have a real problem remembering faces. It's even worse than my problem with names. I only remember the names of really important people--usually the people who fix my problems. Still, as bad as my memory for names is, it is nothing compared to the utter black hole that is my fusiform gyrus. (Oh, look, that part of the brain does number recognition, too--I suck at that. I'm amazed this enormous hole in my head didn't show up when they were scanning for brain tumors.**) I can remember a voice instantly and recognize it effortlessly years later. You have no idea how often this ruins movies for me. But I need multiple exposures to someone's face before it gets remembered, and sometimes I don't even get it down then.

Which is why I found myself staring at this woman in the elevator and thinking, I just wish I knew if this were Annie Leibovitz. The rest of the elevator was crammed full of guys with camera equipment, one of whom was discussing the difficulties of cobbling together a custom tripod. So, like lightning, I figured it must be her. But never had it occurred to me that I would be anywhere near Annie Leibovitz. The sheer improbability combined with my total inability to summon up even a hair color made it impossible for me to decide. So I probably acted like a jerk, standing there and staring at her with utter lack of recognition and showing more interest in my tuna melt than in her fame and talent. As insults to celebrities go, lack of recognition isn't the worst you can do, but I probably stared at her for far too long while my brain ticked over, frantically hunting through boxes buried somewhere under all the SAP fastpath codes and Monty Python skits and scraps of movie dialogue in search of the half-assed scribbly index card that is my equivalent of a Wikipedia entry.

Whoopsie-daisy.

* No, not really.
** Yes, really.