People would come up to me and ask, "Are you Brad Pitt?" Sometimes I would sign an autograph for them: "The first rule of Namibia is that there is no Namibia. - Brad." But, usually, I would just flash my ­shy-yet-­spellbinding Brad Pitt-ian smile and say, "You've got the wrong guy. Brad is my brother, the ugly one." (Ha-ha.)

But now I don't have to worry about that pestering. I can go to the grocery store in peace. My wife is no longer portrayed tearfully or dumbstruck on the cover of supermarket tabloids with a headline that reads something along the lines of, "Is Jim Two-timing Jessica with Charlize?"

Actually, the illustration goes beyond deconstructing my celebrity, which is a post-modern-pre-retro thing to do. It is part of the joke.

See, to run an illustration of a chunky, bearded guy who in reality is a dead ringer for Brad Pitt - well, that is funny. So, the whole thing has this synergistic holisticality to it. Know what I mean?

Okay, I don't either. I lost myself at deconstructing.

Whether clever or straightforward, the art accompanying this column through the years has served as a road map of where we have been as a magazine. Indeed, you might say, where we have been as a people.

When this column debuted nearly 14 years ago, its "art," as they call "pictures" in magazine parlance, was designed to look like

a refrigerator door with typical family doodads on it, most prominently an arcade-type photo strip of me with my wife and ­then-­toddler son. Family values were front and center in those days, and the design reflected the cornerstone of those values, which was the togetherness that comes from putting stuff on your refrigerator. We were younger then, but I still looked uncommonly like Brad.