quare id faciam?

Superstars

Can't resist posting this pic sent me by great friend David Johnson, showing him as he appeared, pressed into service last week to MC an event for office morale where he works, in character as Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson with a plastic championship belt from WalMart. There's little comparison between them in life, of course. The Rock is a star of 'World Wrestling' and Hollywood, while Dave's nearest claim to star status is in his church, where he's a well-loved 15-year-veteran teacher of three- and four-year-olds in the sunday school program. But here's something about David Johnson & Dwayne Johnson that a photo might reveal, though this one doesn't: he isn't as The Rock is imposing for sheer size (and can't twist his face into that leering grin either), but I see Dave at my folks' place every week when he's over using the garage to work out (joined, less often than I'd wish these days, by me), and I can tell you The Rock's enormous arms and shoulders have nothing on Dave's – which given good genes and twenty-five years of body-building are almost astonishing in the impression of power they make, bared, especially on his wiry frame – just about perfect (to this eye trained in youth by images of Arnold, Bruce Lee, Stallone, & so on) in proportion, mass, & line, and absolutely cut (as the bodybuilders like to say) as if from marble. — Funny in a way, too, incidentally, to observe that the one man's public reputation is built on putting his physique on display, developing it, as image, to establish the 'The Rock' brand; and the other's, in a sense, on keeping his hidden, most of the time, as fitting the idea of self-discipline & sense of propriety.

posted by paul bowman @ 3:50 PM