Cindy Michaels looks like she used to look, but that look is getting more attention since Alaska Governor Sarah Palin jumped onto the national stage as the GOP vice presidential candidate. The WVII/WFVX Bangor, ME anchor has even gotten vicious messages left on her newsroom voicemail.
“I don’t think I look like her. I look like me,” Michaels said. But some people have told her she looks like Palin – and intended it as a compliment. Others have had less kind intentions.
One of the voicemails left at the station said: “What is this is K-mart version of Sarah Palin…what did you do, lose your little cheapo glasses?”
It seems a bit strange to Michaels that people would strike out at her. “I’m not Sarah Palin. They know I’m not Sarah Palin. So to say cutting things to me just because I’m wearing my hair up, and a pair of glasses, there’s just something a little strange about that,” she said in a story posted on the station website titled “Sarah Palin Lookalike.”
Michaels has been a news anchor for years at Rockfleet Broadcasting’s WVII-TV (ABC) and WFVX-LP (Fox). But it seems some viewers are seeing her in a whole new way now that Sarah Palin is on the national political scene.
RBR/TVBR observation: Not a dead-ringer, but Michaels certainly looks as much or more like Palin than the actress the New York Daily News sent into the street this week with a couple of other actors as bodyguards trying to look like Secret Service agents. (Hint: Real agents don’t wear telephone receptionist headsets.) As you would expect, she encountered both people who wanted her autograph and people who wanted to curse her.
