Meredith English Perrone & Meredith English | Mistaken Identities

Photo by Marni Rothschild Durlach

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In 1989, Meredith (on the right) was signing up for a summer camp at USC when she got the first inkling of a duplicate doppelganger. “One of the counselors that was registering the students thought that I was another Meredith English that she knew. She told me how funny it was that we were both blonde and blue-eyed!” Years later, the other Meredith (left) was having spam issues at the College of Charleston, where she is a marketing director, when an email popped up with the subject line Hello from Meredith English. “I thought for sure it was spam too, but it was the other Meredith who works at Trident Technical Institute.” The two compared stories and found that beyond the initial camp mishap, their lives had overlapped with missed e-messages from old friends, voicemails from the other’s mother (blame it on 411), mixed-up files at a doctor’s office and, since they both work at colleges, even a home-addresses swap in the state’s personnel database.