Hey, everybody, it's me, Marco.
I admit it. I sometimes use another name. It's a trick I learned from my mother. She never liked her name - Beulah.
Some churchy people will recognize the name from the Bible as meaning "bride." And some will tell you it means "the promised land." So I think of that bride as the woman who promised children a relevant life. That was my mother and she was my promised land.
My mother viewed the name Beulah as the outdated name she had been stuck with. By the time she was in grade school she was getting teased over that name. Most students are teased over the outdated names chosen for them by parents from a previous generation.
For some reason, my mother, ordinarily a kind and thoughtful person, faltered on the day my name was chosen. She, a woman who knew how it feels to be named Beulah, was so pleased with my father for helping create me that she went momentarily wacko and named me for my father.
For him, that was such a sweet moment in his life that he had a brain freeze and forgot to remember how much he had minded his name (and now mine) - Wilbert! How could a thing like that happen?
To a kid, that was a double disaster. He gave me a name he regretted. And he didn't even use the name himself. When asked, he would tell people his name was W.P. Hall.
That's not fair. His whole name was Wilbert Peter, a compound name even worse than mine, Wilbert Duane.
What were they thinking? Especially my mother, Beulah. She should have understood my embarrassment.
But she soldiered on, enduring a name she didn't like. To tell the truth, I think the worst part for her was not that Beulah wasn't a popular name when she was a child. It was that a movie made the name famous in a silly way when the comic actress Mae West told her maid in the movie, "Beulah, peel me a grape."
Thereafter, the Beulahs of our land could hardly go anywhere without some joker demanding a peeled grape. It was one of those irritating moments from a silly movie when everybody is suddenly chuckling over your unusual and therefore hilarious name. Unfortunately, it could happen to anyone, including you.
However, there is a remedy. Sometimes an unpopular name is removed in a simple way that had never occurred to me. One day a young woman my mother had only recently met threw the Beulah word out of my mother's life. That shrewd young woman told my mother, "I don't think a name like Beulah fits you. I'm going to call you Bea."
And so she did. Soon everybody else stopped calling Mom anything but Bea and it made her happy. She had lived a Beulah life for six decades and then she became a Bea, a real honey of a Bea.
In subsequent years, I would sometimes find ways to avoid telling people my real name of Wilbert. I would even abandon my nickname Bill. Just for the fun of it, I would encounter strangers who asked me my name and I would lie to them. I would pose under a name of the moment that could replace Wilbert - strong names like Bruno or Barack or George Clooney.
For instance, when I go into some espresso joint, they ask my name, write it on the side of the paper cup and then call me by that name when the drink is ready. So when a barista asks me for my name, I tell a big, fat fib.
"Marco," I answer.
After all, Marco is an Italian name and espresso is a famous product of Italy.
I sit there with my Marco cup full of hot latte wondering if I don't look a little more handsome and sophisticated and possibly Italian. Glancing sideways, I thought maybe that attractive 76-year-old was peeking at me from behind a 16-inch mocha (topped with a wild and crazy puff of whipped cream).
I routinely take on other names in other situations. I hide from the Wilbert in me.
Yes, it's all a charade, but I recommend it. If you have an odd name, it's time you start deciding whether to Bea or not to Bea.
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Hall is editor emeritus of the Tribune's Opinion page. His email address is wilberth@cableone.net.
