Lee Aaron is a Canadian musician who was quite popular in the 1980s and into the early 1990s. If you are of a certain age you might remember her – she was a female entry in the hair metal genre and did sexually charged songs like this:

While I have friends who followed her avidly, she was never on any of my cassette playlists. Back in the day I was more into singers like Jane Siberry, Holly Cole, and k. d. lang. Ms. Aaron really catered to some other type of guy. My kids suggest that when I was young I was some sort of proto-hipster, and most of Lee Aaron’s music is the antithesis of what would appeal to hipsters, proto- or otherwise. I’ll grant you that she was very successful, and very good at what she did, it just wasn’t my kind of music.

So why do I bring her up? What possible connection could she have with me?

Well, as it turns out, she and I were born on exactly the same day, July 21, 1962! We are exactly the same age, probably just a few hours apart, or maybe even just a few minutes. I am not aware of anyone else who was also born on this day, and so for that reason I feel I share some kind of special connection with her. Friday, July 21st, 2017 is our mutual 55th birthday.

Not that she has ever acknowledged or reciprocated the bond. She lives just over in the Lower Mainland, and I am on Vancouver Island, and I once tried to contact her and suggest that we should have coffee and compare life notes, but I never heard back. *sigh* Of course she has no obligation to reply. I suspect that over the years she’s been stalked by any number of creepy middle-aged men, and my communication to her might come across as just one more. She does have her own life. Last I heard she’s happily married to a drummer, has a daughter, and is doing as much jazz music as her old hits. She still tours and makes recordings.

But our common birthday does raise for me a question. If someone were to cast our horoscopes would they be the same? Because of our common day of birth, are we essentially the same person?

At first glance, maybe not. Lee Aaron has had, to say the least, a different career path from me. She’s been a rock music performer since her teens; I have been ordained since I was 25 and sing plainsong. She goes on tours across North America and Europe; I go to Britain to work on a PhD. Her biggest-selling album was called “Bodyrock”; I wrote a master’s thesis on the debate over the blessing of same-sex unions in the Anglican Diocese of New Westminster.  When she was younger she used her physicality and sexuality in her performances; I preside at worship under several layers of fabric. In recent videos she looks much younger than a woman in her mid-fifties; today I was offered the seniors’ discount.

An astrology site that claims to unlock these type of things suggests that people born on July 21 “cannot stay out of trouble for very long. Somehow a storm is usually brewing around them, often one with tragicomic overtones.” Is this me? Is this her? I don’t think of myself as very tragic or comic, and I don’t know if those terms apply to Ms. Aaron either. According to the website traits of us July 21 babies include being:

DARING
EXCITING
PHYSICAL
OBSESSIVE
SELF‑DESTRUCTIVE
ARGUMENTATIVE

Is this me? I don’t think so. Not too many people would describe me as “daring, exciting, physical, or obsessive.” After all, I was a rather dull ecclesiastical bureaucrat for nine years. The latter two traits did apply when I was younger, but that’s a average of .333 for the website, which is great for baseball but not so good for personality predictions. Between me and Lee Aaron maybe we raise the percentage, but I don’t know; maybe she gets the first three, but probably not the rest. Between the two of us maybe a majority  of the traits apply, but that may be true of any two random people, too. You don’t need to be born on the same day to have common traits.

There’s a whole bunch of famous people born on July 21st in other years including Ernest Hemingway, Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam, Robin Williams, and Ken Starr. Frankly, I don’t see a lot of commonality amongst us, any more than any chance grouping of people. This just confirms my skeptical bias around horoscopes and astrology. Yes, some of the longer description in the website does apply, but a lot of it doesn’t, and the whole thing is hedged with weasel words like “often”, “usually”, “may be”, and “many”.

Of course, if I did have coffee with Lee Aaron I’d probably discover that she does believe in the predictive power of astrology, and undoubtedly state the case in a daring and exciting way. We would then get obsessive and argumentative about our entrenched positions, and the disagreement would escalate into something self-destructive and physical. So maybe its just as well she never replied to my communications, eh?