As Good as Lorenzo Lamas, Better Than the Goo Goo Dolls

You’re on the wrong side of famous when a woman at Whole Foods recognizes you from VH1’s “I Love the 80s,” and you get so excited you start signing bananas in her basket against her will. Yet another, perhaps more obvious, sign of being on the wrong side of fame is when you appear on VH1’s “I Love the 80s.”

Endlessly desperate for approval from strangers, I decided to enter the world’s biggest popularity contest, the Q Scores. The Quotient ratings are a twice-annual poll of 1,750 celebrity names that ranks familiarity and likability in order to determine popularity, kind of like a high school yearbook for the world.

The information is gathered by a small company in Long Island that sells it to ad agencies offering endorsement deals, TV networks looking to cast, magazines looking for cover subjects and -- on several occasions -- Beverly Hills divorce lawyers looking to jack up alimony payments. I have Brad Pitt’s Q rating if anyone should need it.

So for $1,249.19, I had my name added to the list. Steven Levitt, president of Marketing Evaluations Inc., tried to dissuade me from giving him my money, which he thought would be wasted because, as he put it, no one knows who I am.

As if “Steven Levitt” will get you into Morton’s.

A few months later, I was given a thick package of results. After poring over a lot of really complicated graphs, I concluded that I had better call Levitt and have him explain them.

He said I received a 15% familiarity among adults, which was slightly below the average of 36%, and even less impressive once Levitt told me a control test of a guy at an ad agency -- albeit the cool sounding Josh McQueen -- garnered 10%.

My likability, however, was surprisingly high. And it was more than twice as high with women, which flies in the face of 32 years of my own detailed research.

I was also feeling very cool because black people liked me more than white people. Then Levitt informed me that black people tend to rate everybody higher. This explains the career of Cedric the Entertainer.

My likability, Levitt admitted, was surprisingly high. “Not too many people are in love with Joel Stein, but not too many people have a reason to be turned off. You’re not controversial,” he said. I was beginning to wonder if, in a fit of writerly jealousy, my editor, Bob Sipchen, wrote all those hate letters about me to The Times himself.

My actual Q rating is an 11. As best I can understand, it’s derived, in essence, by dividing the percentage of the population who rate me as one of their favorites (2%) by my familiarity (15%), thus determining how appealing I am among people who’ve heard of me.

That 11 puts me in a group with Portia de Rossi, Hank Azaria, Lorenzo Lamas, Elizabeth Hurley, Paris Hilton, Pam Anderson, Jake Gyllenhaal, former football player and occasional Sopranos actor Tony “The Goose” Siragusa and chef Rocco DiSpirito.

And because of some cruel rounding decisions, I’m on the high side of a rounded-down 11. This implies that dating Pam Anderson would help her career more than mine, which makes the fact that her publicist didn’t call me back very strange indeed.

I was a full point higher than Wayne Newton, my former boss Martha Stewart, golfer Sergio Garcia, Dabney Coleman, Mr. T, the Goo Goo Dolls and football player Jake “the Snake” Plummer. Admittedly Martha committed a federal crime, but still, there are three Goo Goo Dolls.

Levitt pointed out that I still had a way to go before I approached Tom Hanks, who has the highest Q rating every year and is hanging tight at 56.

To move myself closer to Hanks, Levitt said, “you’ve got to get a couple of blockbuster movies and a beautiful wife. Grab on to her arm and let her lead the way.”

My beautiful wife isn’t doing much for me, so I decided to team up with someone else’s beautiful famous wife. I’ve seen this done in US magazine to great results.

I called Amy Acker, a very attractive actress who played Fred on the WB’s “Angel” for three seasons, appears in a family baseball movie with Sean Astin this summer and, more important, has a familiarity four points lower than mine.

Acker needed me bad.

I offered to accompany Acker, who also is married, to awards shows and red-carpet parties, but unfortunately, she told me she doesn’t get invited to many of those. And she’s kind of busy since she had a son named Jack three weeks ago.

I kept pressing, and because of a combination of my 11 Q points of charm and the fact that she clearly needed to get off the phone to deal with a crying baby, she relented. She told me we could go to London, where “Angel” is big. There was also some talk of sci-fi conventions, but I scrapped that quickly.

When I mentioned the Grammy Awards, I could tell that she actually did want to get out of the house. “We just need a good baby-sitter. Maybe we can get someone with a really high rating to baby-sit so we can pass them,” she said.

I immediately suggested Heather Locklear. Acker objected. “Someone trustworthy,” she said.

So we agreed on Tom Hanks. Until we realized his baby-sitting rates would be $20 million an hour.