Americans

How do you know people?   And what makes a person real? 
Before I begin this bizarre line of thought, a little story. 
Working in the Emergency Room of The New York Hospital, thirty odd years ago, I stepped into a patient cubicle to see a woman with a cough and a child. The patient was a seventeen years old,  from Spanish Harlem. She  had gathered up her 5 year old daughter, taken a bus the thirty blocks to the hospital at midnight, because she was coughing and had a fever.  After I finished examining her, I wrote  her a prescription, and her daughter grinned up at me brightly and said, "I know you."
"I don't believe we've met before," I told the urchin.
"Yes, I've seen you on TV."
"Yes," agreed the mother, "General Hospital. We watch it. We've seen you on T.V."

Apparently, in my hospital "whites"  I looked like someone on General Hospital on T.V.  A soap opera doctor. 
In the case of the child, okay, how would she know?  But what stunned me was the mother, who, granted, had dropped out of school at twelve to have a baby, but you would think she would understand those people on the soap opera were actors, and the stories were not really happening.  But no, for her, it was The Truman Show. She was watching "real" people living their adventures out in front of her on T.V.

Pictured above are three people, who are in some sense real people.  One is Bubbles, a man I feel I know very intimately, having watched him for 5 seasons, as he developed in front of me, as he grew, as he suffered, as he offered me and others his philosophy. But he is not "real."  His lines were written for him. A wonderful actor, Andre Royo, breathed life into him, but he is not "real."  

On the other hand, while Royo was standing around a Baltimore street, watching the film crew shoot a scene he was not in, a passing dope fiend looked him over and handed him a vial of heroin, saying,  "You look like you need it more than me, brother."
Royo calls that vial his "street Oscar."  He had passed for a real dope fiend.  He is a real dope fiend in the minds of millions. When they think of dope fiends, they think of the one dope fiend they know best, Bubbles, who does not really exist, except in the mind of Andre Royo and millions of Wire fans.

Then there is Andrew Hacker, professor of government at Cornell and Queens College, a graduate of Amherst College, his PhD from Princeton.  I have never met the man, in the flesh. We have exchanged emails off and on. He has written about the folly of our current university system and the class system which supports it. I feel as if I know the man, but I've never met him, in the flesh. He is a name in a book, an electronic image.  And yet we've communed through the cyberspace  and we've exchanged important thoughts.  He has spoken of experiences I've had without knowing the details of how I had them. He has clarified things in my life for me. Never met the man.

The last image is Cheryl Tiegs, who I really do not know. I have met her, in the flesh, however. She was visiting a friend at the hospital. I had admitted her friend and ushered her down the hall to her friend's room. We chatted along the way, and I never saw her again. I've read about her now and then in magazines. Of the three, she ought to be the most real to me, in that I can verify she really exists, or existed once. I actually  met her and talked with her. But I know next to nothing about her. She is, in a very real sense, less real to me, and surely I know her less well than either of the other two.

So what constitutes a real person? What is it to know someone else?

I would submit I know the fictional character who is Bubbles better than either Hacker or Tiegs. I know Hacker, whom I've never met, better than Tiegs, because we have exchanged ideas, shared thoughts.  Tiegs, whom I may have actually touched, is unreal, in that she is only a memory imprinted on some neuron somewhere, and in any case I never knew enough about her to really know her.

She is cuter than the other two, though.