I reckon I achieved my 15 minutes of fame - admittedly more like Walter Mitty's fantasy than anything Andy Warhol had in mind - on a sun holiday more than 20 years ago in Spain. As it happened, my time in the limelight actually lasted for several days.
The exact locale was Nerja, a small Andalusian coastal village about an hour east by coach from Malaga. I had gone there with my wife-to-be and a gaggle of her schoolday pals, the same formidable friends our children years later would christen "the Dublin Mafia".
It was a lovely week, during which we visited the nearby caves inhabited by thousands of bats, and strolled each evening along the Balcón de Europa, a cliffside promenade with stunning views of the sea below. But best of all were the long, sunny days on the beach, where we also took either our lunch or supper at a small restaurant owned by two brothers, with tables that sat on the sand itself.
Our waiter was a lively local named Pepe, rigged out like a latter-day pirate in cranberry-coloured pantaloons, gold earring, and a billowing white linen shirt.
I had learned Spanish some years before as a US Peace Corps volunteer in Central America, and so struck up a kind of bantering relationship with Pepe, both encouraging and hectoring him as he darted among the tables, balancing plates of Espaguetis Bolognesaor Pescado Fritofor the mostly English-speaking clientele. And it was Pepe who, in turn, started the ball rolling one evening, as he set down my platter of Calamares à la Romano. " Mis jefes creen que tu eres Carlos Santana!" he told me - "My bosses think you are Carlos Santana", the legendary Mexican rock guitarist to whom, at the time, I happened to bear more than a passing resemblance. Then, in the same breath, Pepe suggested, "I'll tell them you are?", just as I declared: "Let's tell them I am!"
And so Pepe went back to confirm my identity with the two brothers behind the counter, while I stood up, waving my hands and making as if to leave the table, play-acting a rock star on holiday who is suddenly dismayed to have had his cover blown. I'm no more an actor than I am a guitarist, but it must have looked half-ways convincing, because Pepe returned with my Ensalada Mixta to report that his bosses were nearly persuaded.
"They want you to play a song, however," he added.
"Yeah, right!" I said with mock disdain. "Tell them I'll do Si, Si, Je Suis Un Rock Star", which just so happened - ever so serendipitously - to have been a smash single that summer from Rolling Stones bass player Bill Wyman.
That rejoinder clearly clinched it, for one of the brothers immediately pulled rank on Pepe to personally deliver my Flan de Caramelo, and shortly after both owners leaned out over the kitchen counter to wave goodbye to our party as we departed the beach.
Both Pepe and I were delighted with the ruse, and I simply took care not to speak English within earshot of the bosses in the following days. However, having been informed some years before by an El Salvadorean student of mine back in Boston that I spoke Spanish " como un borracho Mexicano" - "like a drunken Mexican" - I did chance my arm by approaching the restaurant counter once or twice to ask for: " Dos cervezas, por favor, bien helado" - two beers, well chilled, which one or the other of Pepe's bosses was only too happy to fetch for their very own seaside celebrity.
The charade finally ended a couple of days later when an acquaintance of the owners dropped by to see them at their beachside restaurant one afternoon. " Mira! Mira!" Pepe told me later they had exclaimed to their friend. "Look, look!" they shouted, pointing down to where Carlos Santana lay sunning himself on the sand below. Looking in my direction, their friend, who had met our party in a bar the previous night, just laughed aloud and told them that their "Carlos" was just some chancer from "Dooblin".
The wife-to-be and I married two months later, and went back over to Massachusetts for a spell. Later that same spring, Carlos Santana played the Boston Garden, and the Boston Globe ran a large photograph of him standing at the mike in a John Coltrane T-shirt, guitar in hand. This time the resemblance was uncanny enough to have us cut out the picture, minus the caption, and tape it to the refrigerator door in the kitchen of our flat.
There, over the course of that summer, more than one acquaintance of ours would help themselves to a beer, well-chilled, only to wander back into our sitting-room and address me with a puzzled look: "I never knew you played the guitar." To which I would simply nod and modestly reply, " Si, si, je suis un rock star."