There’s A New Name In Town

I encountered someone with a really rather ridiculous name at an audition yesterday. And it made me think of other people that I knew in life who had peculiar names. In particular, people that had made-up names. Like this guy named Bill Stone in college. About a month into college for him, he decided he wanted to just go as “Stone”. You know, all Madonna and Prince and one-wordy. It wasn’t so much like he just wanted to go by his last name. He wanted to go by one name.

Only the thing is, you can’t decide that a month into college. It’s too late. Everybody knows your name by then. (Think about it, imagine if at Cheers(where everybody knows your name) Cliff Claven all of a sudden decided people should call him C.C. It would be difficult. Especially for Cliff. I doubt anyone would ever call Cliff what he wanted them to call him.) And the people that don’t will soon find out. Someone will whisper into their ear, “His real name is Bill”. The secret to these things, I’ve decided, is that you start with it from Day One. You move someplace and then tell people that your name is El Diablo. (You can explain, “I’m a child of Satan” or something if people give you guff about your new moniker.) That way, nobody knows any different.

Another difficult maneuver is trying to change the spelling of your name. One of our best friends was this guy Dan Bernath. In 9th grade, maybe it was 10th. He decided he hated how it looked as D-a-n. So he changed it to, D-h-a-n. Everything he wrote it was Dhan then. Papers. Permission slips. Sign-ups. I think he even spelled it Dhan on the PSATs. But it didn’t matter. The machine of the school crushed D-h-a-n. And by junior year, it was back to Dan.

Probably the secret is to not name your kids fanciful names nor name them with boring names. The fanciful kids are going to get beat up. The boring names are soon going to rebel with ridiculous variations like Dhan. Dhan breeds brothers and sisters like Aimee and Jenni and Tymothy.

And if you do end up with a crappy name, move to a new town and stick with that one. Like when Shane comes to town. Or MacGyver. Nobody knows their real names. Their first names. Which are probably hideous. But they’re safe. Because nobody knows their name.