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A Wider Net
Billionaires they're not, but Gates impersonators are cashing in.
It not only pays to be Bill Gates.it also pays to look like him. Just ask John Ranlett and Steve Sires, two Gates impersonators who don't have to dress up to look like the software maven,and in a truth-is-stranger-than-fiction twist live within 10 miles of each other and not far from the Microsoft campus.
"I tell people it's the water," says Sires, who recalls a man who walked up to him in a grocery store,stared into his face and said,"same father, different mother" before walking away without another word.
Sires, who is three inches shorter and two years younger than the 5-foot-11-inch, 48-year-old Gates, charges a minimum of $2,500 per appearance but makes more for film work and commercials. Nevertheless, he has no plans to end his career as a civil design engineer.
Ranlett, a bus driver, often navigates a route that slices through the Microsoft campus in Redmond,Wash. His personnel file includes a letter that prevents him from identifying himself as Gates lest passengers get confused, excited or hostile.
But away from the bus Ranlett over the past seven years has used his likeness to Gates to land parts in a TV commercial with Donald Trump and a music video for the song "Pentium" by Weird Al Yankovic. His financial gains have picked up in the past three to four years, he says, but not enough to make it a full-time gig.
Ironically...