How I Met Sacha Baron Cohen, Borat, on the Web

I learned in Sunday school to simply “ask and you shall receive”. But in my wildest dreams, I would never have guessed that Sacha Baron Cohen, filmstar of Borat, would contribute to my website www.funnyphotoscontest.com . Not only that, even though we were total strangers having, just met on www.myspace.com, he easily agreed to my requests without any reservation. Can you believe that??

“Come on now,” you’re thinking -- myspace.com where kids, imposters and predators lurk. Surely, Sacha Baron Cohen does not frequent that website. But, as a matter of fact, he does. And it is I, not Baron Cohen, who is the imposter.

It all began on Dec. 12, 2006, my Mother’s 89^th birthday. My sister and I treated Mom to lunch and a movie. Mom wanted to see “Happy Feet”, a movie about dancing penguins. But my sister suggested the new, widely talked about film, “Borat.” Although, it wasn’t really Mom’s kind-of-movie, she was a good sport and a few parts did make her laugh.

Late that evening, when I turned on my computer to work on my website, www.funnyphotoscontest.com, I took a short break to read the comments, on www.myspace.com about Borat. To my complete surprise and sheer delight Sacha Baron Cohen, himself, had only minutes earlier posted the following message.

“Hit or miss, you tell me......

all feed back is welcome here, i dont care if you didnt enjoy it, but tell me why???
Was is good ? what was your favourite bit in the film ????

Do you want to see BRUNO the movie, it's in the pipeline as we type !!!!
i will try and reply to all msg's - promise x Sbc x”

This was just too incredible!!! I was so excited that I just had to respond. After all, how often does one get to chat with a real live movie-star?

Now, I must first tell you about my experience, a few years ago, with myspace.com. I was curious about this website that attracted millions of kids, but allowed only members to view all its features. No problem I thought, I’ll simply pose as my grandson, Jacob. Thus, I registered and poked around a bit, but never returned -- until a few months ago. I heard I could generate traffic to my own website, by mingling with all the folks on myspace.com as many adults now surf the site. Sounded good to me. So I created a profile, placed a few funny photos on the page, invited other members to create a caption for the photos and promised to post the best ones.

But, back to Sacha. Assuming, he might sign out any minute, I quickly wrote him the following message, clicked the send button, and then thought to myself, “For heaven’s sake, what chutzpah (guts) you’ve got”. I couldn’t believe what I had done.

“Saw your film today....verrrrrry funny.

Would love to have you create captions for the photos on my page.

Thanks,

PS - Happy Hannuka with lots of latkes”

Of course, I felt embarrassed to sign my own name. After all, the myspace.com community saw me as Jacob. Thus, I ended my message with a simple thanks. What else could I do? How ironic! In the days that followed many people asked me, “How do you know it’s really him?” But, in all truth I was the one, not Sacha, posing as someone else, my grandson Jacob. And Sacha Baron Cohen, not suspecting any ruse, graciously replied.

“Happy Hanukkah to you too, glad you liked the movie, would be more than happy to make a comment for your captions, but cant until we become friends, so you know what to do !!!”

Although, I didn’t know what to do, I figured it out and Sacha created the caption, “Nose hair takes a turn for the worse.” Wow…this was so thrilling. I could hardly wait until morning to tell everyone I knew. And maybe, just maybe…Sacha Baron Cohen could help promote my website !!!