Their minds are filled with big ideas, images and distorted facts

Forty years later, in a 2004 interview, Dylan talked about the kind of interaction that keeps him from going out in public if he can avoid it. "People will say, 'Are you who I think you are?'" Dylan said. "And you'll say, Ahh, I don't know. And they'll say, 'You're, you're him,' and you'll say, 'Okay, yes?' And then the next thing is, 'Oh, no. Are you really him? I don't think you're him.' And that can go on and on."

Susan Strasberg used to tell a story about walking around New York with an incognito-in-plain-sight Marilyn Monroe. "Do you want to see me be her?" Monroe would say, and Strasberg describes the star turning on some imperceptible inner switch, then beginning to glow. Within moments the people who had been passing right by were stopping in their tracks, scrambling for pen and paper.

From an essay by Michelle Orange on mistaken identity in The Rumpus.