I was growing into him, as if we were a pair of trees rooted too close together. The motherfucker looked more like me than he had when we were young. When I watched him as Barney Stinson, How I Met Your Mother’s cheerful lout, my surrender became total. His awards-show hosting gigs and role on CBS’s How I Met Your Mother seemed like faits accomplis. Just as I was finally staggering from the blast zone of his early fame, he was becoming more ubiquitous than ever. Then, much to my horror, Harris returned to the public eye: a self-lampooning cameo in Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, a role as Lee Harvey Oswald - helped by his studies at the Museum of Television and Radio –the in the Broadway hit Assassins, the cult Internet oddity Dr. Surrender, not escape, had become my only option. For my first-ever email address, I chose the username DHowser, and with the help of a lab coat, stethoscope, and a pair of white high-tops, I was Doogie for Halloween. was cancelled in 1993, I enjoyed a relative respite from comparisons to Harris, but I rarely went a couple of months without being asked, “Has anyone ever told you you look like…” In my freshman dorm at college, one friend - a bald-shaven, good-natured Staten Island hulk - would only call me “Doog,” as though I gave him no other choice. Somehow I made it back to my friend’s rental house with all my teeth intact. On a beach trip in eighth or ninth grade, trolling an amusement park for girls, my friends and I got into an altercation with some local kids, causing one to sneer, “What’re you gonna write about in your journal tonight, Doogie?” “That I met a bunch of assholes at Fantasy Island,” I replied, not missing a beat, as if I were already composing the entry.
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I’m not sure exactly when the comparisons began, but as a middle-schooler, I occasionally had the feeling that Doogie Howser - the teen-doctor TV character that made Harris famous in 1989 - was a vestigial part of me, as if Vinnie Delpino had climbed through my bedroom window to chat the night before. The likeness is so true that I can’t bother to deny it: we have the same short jawline, the same thin-lipped grin, the same skeptical eyes. Through some genetic coincidence, I look like the long-lost twin of Neil Patrick Harris. I responded with a shrug and told him not to worry: it happened all the time. “I thought you were Neil Patrick Harris.” He then told me, through his embarrassment, that Harris had recently frequented the museum to study footage for a part in a Broadway musical. Upon seeing me, the clerk’s face inexplicably lit up - but as I got closer, his features dropped, and the sudden shift was so obvious that he felt compelled to explain himself. Intrigued by the chance to see a once-televised relic - I’m not sure why, but I wound up watching a stunningly racist early-’60s Jell-O ad - I approached the library’s reference desk. But in addition to its regular exhibits, the museum housed a unique resource: a library of old shows and clips that could be ordered up and watched at a headphone-equipped viewing station. These were the pre-YouTube days when a TV episode or commercial would, for the most part, vanish after it aired. One afternoon in 2004, I visited New York’s Museum of Television and Radio.
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