Andrew Cuomo, a Man Alone

ALBANY, N.Y.-The Dunkin' Donuts on Madison Avenue and Lark Street here is a neighborhood hub for hungover college students, grizzled upstaters and those with nowhere else to escape bitter Albany winters. So when a man walked in on Christmas Eve wearing a sweatshirt and introduced himself as the governor of New York, the shift leader working that day didn't believe him. "I'm thinking, 'Yeah, he's cuckoo,'" she told me. "We get people all the time who say, 'I'm the president of the United States.'"

Her co-worker whispered to her that it was, in fact, New York's three-term governor, Andrew Cuomo. By the time she ran out to snap a photo, he was gone.

It wasn't an anomaly. A few months before that, Cuomo had been photographed in the parking lot of the same Dunkin' Donuts, driving his vintage Pontiac GTO-license plate number "1"-and flashing a thumbs-up alone behind the wheel, in just one in a series of recent local sightings.