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There's huge cachet to be mined in the netting of a high-profile celebrity to speak at your institution of higher learning, and so the DaVinci Academy in Ogden, Utah could hardly have been blamed for shooting high: Comedy Central golden boy Jon Stewart, still shimmering from glittery Oscar-hosting residue. What they can be blamed for, however, is booking the wrong guy.

Instead, they actually booked Jon A. Stewart, a 39-year-old former motivational speaker, businessmen and part-time professional wrestler from Deerfield. [...]

He even wrote the school back, asking if they were sure they had the right Jon Stewart. When the DaVinci Academy teacher corresponding with him told him he was indeed their man, the married father of three agreed to speak for free and booked an airline ticket and rental car for $421.

"I thought it was a little elaborate for me," a chuckling Jon A. Stewart said Wednesday. "I'm a personality here in Chicago, but I'm not Hulk Hogan or George Bush."

DaVinci Academy sold over 700 tickets at $50 apiece since advertising the attendance of the Comedy Central star, said Nancy Jones, the school's director of development.

Having learned their lesson the hard way, the school accepted that they'd have to set their sights much lower and take painstaking precautions in their scramble to book a replacement. Happily, the Tara Reid advertising her speaking services on a MySpace account turned out to be the actual Tara Reid, and the audience of 700-strong hung on every word of her mostly slurred lecture topic, "Hell Yeah, I Want Salt With That!: My Life on the Margarita's Edge."