Wednesday, April 12, 2017

Me on the Tonight Show?

That's right!  A few days ago, people started telling me that I was mentioned by Jimmy Fallon on "The Tonight Show".  What???  Then while I was in France, everyone seemed to know about my appearance on that show, so when I returned, I decided to Google it to see what really happened.

So apparently they had a segment called "Kid Art" where some kids made drawings of members of Donald Trump's cabinet and Vice-President Pence, and Jimmy Fallon said that the drawing of Pence looked like it was made by Bill Plympton - then a whole on-camera debate started over who Bill Plympton is.  So right there on national TV, they Googled me to determine that I was Bill Plympton, the cartoonist, and not "Bill Plimpton the author".  I'm pretty sure Jimmy's sidekick confused me with journalist & author George Plimpton (different spelling, but it's happened before...) because he mentioned "Paper Lion", a book that George Plimpton wrote.

Then someone in the band (Questlove?) seemed to recognize my name, but he said I was the animator who worked with Frank Zappa - unfortunately, that wasn't me either, that was Bruce Bickford - but it was fun being the topic of conversation on a late-night talk show!

Here's the clip, if you want to see Fallon talking about me and looking me up:


In fact, I'm going to try to contact their guest department, and demand to have equal time to clear up who I am.  Maybe I could draw a caricature of Fallon, Pence or even Trump - then America will finally discover me and my work.  Hey, I've got to start promoting "Revengeance" somewhere, why not an appearance on Jimmy Fallon's show?

The weird thing is, I knew George Plimpton, we didn't really run in the same social circles but we did both live in New York in the 1970's, and we figured we were probably distantly related, though we weren't exactly sure how.  He wrote an introduction for one of my caricature books, and in return I drew this caricature of him: 


So that's a PLYMPTON caricature of a PLIMPTON - and maybe in that drawing, he's making a drawing of me?  Who knows... 

--Bill Plympton

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