What's in a Name Redux

“You people have funny little nicknames for everybody.”

Thus, in the final episode of “Seinfeld,” did lawyer Jackie Chiles reference one of the on-going comedic conceits of this ever-popular sitcom – if you were a friend, lover or just a mere acquaintance of Jerry, George, Elaine or Kramer’s, chances are you’d get tagged with a name that described your profession (The Soup Nazi), social status (The O. Henry Candy Bar Heiress) or a pseudo-female body part (Mulva).

One storyline revolved around George’s efforts to take back his unique baby name (Seven), stolen by his fiancée’s expecting cousins, in exchange for another (Soda). Sounds crazy, doesn’t it, until you stop and consider what people are naming their kids nowadays.

The obvious perpetrators to drag through the mud are celebrities because, as we all know, it’s not hard enough to be the offspring of a beautiful, rich, narcissistic, paparazzi-hounded star, but you also need to lug around a name like Fifi Trixabelle Geldof (charity for millions, but not one drop for your own daughter, eh Bob?), Rumer, Scout and Tallulah Willis (what “Moore” could you expect from a mother named “Demi”) and, of course, Apple Rossdale (I always suspected Gwyneth Paltrow wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I never thought of her as cruel).

That, however, would be like shooting fish in a barrel. Nope, I’m gunning for less publicized, if not equally egregious, monikers in part two of “What’s in a Name.”

Antiques Belong on “The Roadshow”

Look in the back pages of my family history and you’ll turn up such names as Cecil, Aubrey, Myrtle, Olive, Harold and Sophia. Since these ancestors either were born in the 19^th or the dawn of the 20^th century, that’s to be expected. What’s disturbing is how these curios have become all the rage in the new millennium. In the past few months alone, I’ve heard of the birth of an Annabelle, an Isabella and a Ramona. I put it down to a current fascination with such authoresses as Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters. Thankfully, this trend seems to have bypassed boys. I haven’t run into any Heathcliffs or Darcys lately, but have heard of newly-minted Josephs and Andrews. What I take away from this is that parents want their boys to be doctors, lawyers or corporate chiefs, but prefer their daughters to be recluses, spinsters or residents of a god-forsaken English backwater.

It’s an Atlas, Not a Naming Book

Back when “The Sopranos” was all the rage, there was much speculation as to why Tony and Carmela’s oldest child, Meadow, was given such a non-Italiano name. One theory floated was that she was conceived at New Jersey’s Meadowlands, rumored burying ground of still MIA union leader Jimmy Hoffa. This would sound like a real stretch if I didn’t know people who began as zygotes in “Vienna” and “Paris.” It’s bad enough I have to know where their parents “did it,” but this kind of intimate information is why some kids spend years on a psychiatrist’s couch. Which brings me to a more expansive point: China is a nation. Brittany is a province in France. Dakota is the name of two of these United States. They’re destinations found on a map, not designations that should be found on a birth certificate.

“Uneek” is Just Plain Wrong

When they don’t have the nerve to go whole hog in the creative name game, some parents ensure their little ones will still stand out in the crowd by screwing around with spelling. Thus, we have Kloeys, Aimees, Justyns, Robyns, Danis, etc. As a writer, this cock-eyed practice makes me see red, not the least because my Mac’s spell check goes underline crazy. Another grammatical gaffe is dropping in improper punctuation like apostrophes and accent marks. Honestly, if you think other people are going to bother with an umlaut throughout your child’s long life, I got news for you -- it ain’t making it past kindergarten.

To end this two-part screed on a more positive note, the sanest approach to picking a baby name came my way from a former colleague, who was expecting his first child, a daughter. He and his wife picked three names they both liked. Once the bambina made her appearance, they waited and watched until the little Miss revealed the appropriate name to them. Remember, if you act in haste or bad taste, it’s your kid who will repent at leisure.

See that woman on the left? That’s a Gloria.

Or, more specifically, Gloria Swanson, silver screen star and immortalizer of the famous line from Sunset Boulevard, “I am big! It’s the pictures that got small!”

My Mother was named after Gloria Swanson and I, in turn, am named after her. Mom, like the siren Swanson, looks like a Gloria. So do Gloria Estefan, Gloria Gaynor, Gloria Steinem and Gloria Vanderbilt.

Me, I’ve never looked like a Gloria a day in my life. Or felt like one, for that matter. In fact, I’d like to quote the great Bob Marley and state, “I don’t even know my name yet.”

Naming a child is a monumental responsibility. Screw it up, and your foolish adherence to family tradition, wrong-headed creativity, “unique” spelling or simple bad taste will become your offspring’s burden to bear for the rest of their natural born yet unnaturally monikered days.

The trouble will start in grade school, where the playground taunts and teases will be made worse as one teacher after another mispronounces your little darling’s designation. By the time they hit high school, they’ll try to convince everyone to call them by some shortening of their surname, but no one will buy it. If they’re smart, they’ll go to an out-of-state college where, unlike “Cheers,” nobody knows their name and they’ll either resort to their middle name (if you didn’t screw that up, too), their first and middle initials (if, again, you showed no foresight and it’s something like “B.O.”) or just throw up their hands in despair and dream up their own suitable tag, which they’ll legalize as soon as they have that law degree in hand.

If you’re expecting a blessed event in your life, please, I’m begging you -- stop fretting over layettes, diaper bags, strollers and such, and start sweating over what the hell you’re going to call the kid. For those of you looking for guidance, here are a couple of tips for the appellative-challenged:

Some Traditions Deserve To Die

You’ve already read how well being a namesake suits me, but here’s another example. I know a guy from a very large family who’s a better-looking version of Matt Damon. In fact, “Matt” would have been a good name for him. Instead, it’s “Dudley.” Need I tell you it’s his father’s name? They should have done the Dudley “Do Right” thing and let it wither on the family tree. Which brings me to my next rule of thumb: Never run out of steam. Invest as much time getting your second (or third, or fourth) kids’ names right as the first. Don’t throw in the towel and name them “Blanche” after their maternal grandmother or “Floyd” after a rich uncle. If Mother Nature is kind, you’ll be dead but they’ll still have to live with your lazy-assed legacy for many years to come.

Lay Off the Alliteration

This starts when the parents have the same first initial and think it would be cute as hell if their kids’ names also started with that initial. For some odd reason, this seems to be more prevalent with those who have alliterative “K” and “J” names. You may think “Kathy, Kurt, Kevin, Kristen and Kimberley” looks cozily Rockwellesque on your annual Christmas card, but it shows a total lack of imagination to those who slogged through all twenty-six letters of the alphabet in their quest for the perfect name. (And don’t even think of including a photo of the family sporting identical red sweaters embroidered with “your” letter. People will think you’re not only simple-minded but demented.) A load of alliteration is a-okay in an arena like advertising, but with names it’s nattering nonsense.

I could go on and on. And I will in next week’s part two of “What’s in a Name.”

Brittanys, Britneys and Britneés beware!

The Devil is in The Details

He was vilified in the popular press as “the wickedest man in the world.”

He was also a writer, occultist, mountaineer, yogi, social critic, drug addict, sexual hedonist and possibly even a spy. His own mother referred to him as “The Beast.” If that weren’t enough, he was the subject of the first solo single by Ozzy Osbourne, who’s no slouch in the depravity department, either.

Yep, I’m referring to everyone’s favorite Satanist, Aleister Crowley! Funny thing, though. It was this proverbial swine that showed me where the esoteric truffles are buried.

Sometime in the mid-90’s, I was out in Denver visiting an old friend when I made a pilgrimage to The Tattered Cover, an enormous independent bookstore that, for a writer/reader like me, is the equivalent of finding the Holy Grail. As I ambled wide-eyed through floor after tome-stacked floor, I found myself in the “Esoteric” section, confronted by a shelf of tarot cards.

I’ve always been drawn to things of a mystical nature (blame my Sagittarius moon) but, as a former Catholic, I’d been adamantly warned off any and all forms of divination, even that miraculous modern-day oracle, the Magic Eight Ball. I’ve always flouted authority, too, (that damned Sadge moon again), so, with the naiveté of the novice, I chose what I thought was an interesting looking deck and made my purchase.

Thanks to the emerging Internet and its message boards, I soon found a tarot group that pointed out the error of my uninformed ways and turned me in the direction of the classic Rider-Waite deck. A scholar, mystic and one-time member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, A.E Waite toned down the Christian imagery of older decks and directed the illustrating of the whole 78-card deck with simple, almost fairytale images.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but leave it to a scourge like Crowley to put the truth to that lie. Although his “Thoth” deck is awash in almost impenetrable symbolism, ranging from Egyptian mythology to Chinese philosophy and the Hebrew Qabalah, the cantankerous Mr. C went Waite one better by adding an invaluable key to this pictorial cacophony – each of his minor arcana, or trump cards, is also represented by a one-word mnemonic. So while a card like the four of swords shows a quartet of these weapons pointed inwards towards a square (huh?), the title “Truce“ suggests an uneasy peace (ah!).

Accounts differ wildly about Crowley’s death in 1947. Lady Freida Harris, the artist who illustrated the “Thoth“ deck under Crowley’s supervision, claims that the notorious old bastard’s last words were “I am perplexed.“ Because of his crafty inclusion of forty simple words, I am less so.

Sing It Again, Jimi

One recent night, I pulled into the parking lot of a local bar/restaurant, looking forward to a gig by two old friends. I’ve been surrounded by musicians all my life and, when time and the wallet permit, I like to show my support while also having some laughs, and a few cocktails, with the rest of my motley crew.

This particular evening, I hopped out of my car just in time to help one of the players and his wife carry in his gear. I grabbed some equipment and was making my way through the back door when he exclaimed, “Hey Gloria, you look good carrying a guitar!” I just laughed and mentioned the name of another pal who gives guitar lessons to make ends meet. “Maybe he’ll take me on as a student. I promise I’ll be his worst one ever.”

It’s always been one of the minor regrets in my life that I have an ear for appreciating music, but not an ear for making it. Somewhere down the line, music was codified into a virtually limitless series of scales including diatonic, chromatic, pentatonic, whole tone and whatever the hell it is Philip Glass uses for his compositions.

Thanks but no thanks. Writing has always been my métier and I guess I’m stuck with it. But my friend’s remark revived a question that’s been rolling around in the back of my brain for some time: Why do demon guitar players make only serviceable lyricists and brilliant lyricists make only serviceable players?

For instance:

Way before he became “The Boss” (and picked up an incongruous Oakie accent), Jersey boy Bruce Springsteen felt he had to make a choice between developing his writing or guitar playing skills and chose the former. Elvis Costello started his creative life as a writer at the tender age of seven and freely admits that his fretwork is “primitive.” Bob Dylan’s playing has never come close to his lyrical pyrotechnics, although he may have been inspired to write the line, “everybody must get stoned,” when he “went electric” and drove the mob into a murderous frenzy at the 1965 Newport Jazz and Folk Festival.

On the other side of the guitar pick, Eric Clapton can come up with a “Layla” once in a blue moon, but the bulk of his hits were either cover versions (“Cocaine,” “Crossroads”) or two of the most mawkish ballads ever unleashed on the listening public (“Wonderful Tonight,” “Tears in Heaven”). Jimi Hendrix’s self-penned tunes were fine for the Psychedelic Sixties but, through the decades, have taken on a frozen-in-amber, “acid washed” quality. As for Jimmy Page, I think the line “If there’s a bustle in your hedgerow, don’t be alarmed now” sings for itself.

Of course, there are exceptions to every rule. Prince comes immediately to mind as a short, sharp rebuke to this theory, but I secretly believe “The Artist…” is not of this world and place him on a purple pedestal all his own.

To see if I could find a musical, scientific or cultural explanation for my half-assed hypothesis, I turned to today’s equivalent of the Three Wise Men: Goggle, Bing and Answer.com. I put the query every which way and couldn’t turn up as much as a crackpot blog post(!) to back me up.

What I did turn up, though, were lists – “The Ten Greatest Guitar Players,” “The 100 Greatest Guitar Players,” “Rock ‘n Roll’s Greatest Guitar Players,” “God’s Picks for Guitar Gods,” etc. But when I plugged in “greatest rock lyrics,” the search gurus spit back nothing, nada, zero. Could it be that listeners (or list makers) just don’t care as much about the words as they do the music?

Giving this question a little think, I came to a sad but true, “Uh, yeah.” Blow the guitar part in “Purple Haze” and you’ll get the same crowd response as Dylan at Newport, but lots of folks heard (and sang) the line, “S’cuse me while I kiss the sky” as “S’cuse me while I kiss this guy.”

At least my research turned up one interesting nugget: The mishearing of a lyric is called a “mondegreen.”

But that’s fodder for another column.

The Filth, The Fury and The "F" Word

“You made me look like a fool. A ‘GD’ fool!”

I was watching “Driving Miss Daisy” when that “GD” turned up my dim bulb of recognition to 100 watts. Hey, that’s not Jessica Tandy bawling out driver Morgan Freeman for putting on airs – it’s my Grandma!

Geographically and theologically, Daisy Werthan and Marguerite Murphy couldn’t have been further apart. The former is a Jewish Georgia Peach while the latter was a dyed-in-the-wool Yankee WASP. But socially, they were both on the same old school page. They were ladies and there were some things that ladies simply did not do – wear pants, cross their legs or swear. Well, hardly ever. If my Grandma said the word “damn,” you knew she was furious and on the one or two occasions when she uttered “GD” we ran for cover. She’d flirt with blasphemy, but heaven forbid she’d ever commit to it by saying “goddamn.”

As with most things in our culture, each succeeding generation gets a little looser in the morality department. “Damn,” “goddamn” and “Jesus Christ” were bandied about quite a little bit by my parents. You knew supper wasn’t far from being put on the table when you heard the pots and pans falling out of my Mom’s overstuffed kitchen cabinet followed by an annoyed “shit!” My Dad was fond of a “bastard,” “son of a bitch” and, my favorite variation, “son of a bitch on your mother’s side.” But like their parents before them, they drew their own bad taste boundaries and only under extreme duress would they enter into the land of “fuck.” The one time my Dad thoughtlessly spat out that forbidden invective in front of my brother, the engine in his van had caught fire. When The Old Man realized he’d said it within earshot of his son, he looked, as my brother described it, “like a kid who just pissed his pants” and apologized profusely.

Along with sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll, I’m happy to report that it was my generation who opened up the floodgates of fuck. Or am I?

Don’t get me wrong. Given a bad day, I will think, mutter or bellow “fuck me!” a good half-dozen times. “What the fuck?” is my knee-jerk response to the sublime or ridiculous events I witness on any ordinary day. And if you really want to hear a fuck fest, just put me behind the wheel of a car.

But a few weeks ago, I started wondering if maybe we’ve all gone a little overboard in our overuse of fuck. I was in the company of some friends, being jostled by the cattle run that’s known as Canal Street in New York’s Chinatown on a Saturday afternoon, when I looked up and saw a vendor selling a t-shirt that read, “Don’t fuck with me you fuck I’m from fucking New York.”

Like antibiotics in the face of a drug-resistant virus, it seems to me that our over-dependence on that one, four-letter word has taken some of the power out of the little fucker. It used to be the mother of all swear words, and now it’s just a, well, motherfucker.

So if fuck has lost its shock and awe explosiveness, is there a word today that “dare not speak its name”? You bet. And any woman who considers herself a lady in these here modern times knows which one I mean -- the “c” word (and I don’t mean “cocksucker”). Where “fuck” would have been a Hiroshima-like assault on my grandmother’s ears, the “c” word is Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined to her granddaughter. Say that filthy word in my presence and be prepared for the ugly consequences.

But don’t you fucking dare!

The "Funny" Paper

For years I worked in an in-house advertising agency for a fairly large cable media company. Except for a three-year period when I was given the green light to hire and then fire a junior writer, I was the lone copywriting wolf in a department that grew from one to over half a dozen graphic designers.

Over time, the company itself went from being a very buttoned-up organization to loosening its power tie. “Casual Friday” was expanded to the whole week, so you could wear what you wanted, within reason. But give a creative type an inch and they’ll take a mile, especially the boys who dominated the design department, a large, one-room space that, by virtue of its poster-packed walls and Eau de Locker Room fragrance, I dubbed “The Frat House.”

Out of all the baggy pants wearing, baseball cap sporting yet brilliantly talented miscreants, one of them really pushed the sartorial envelope. Let’s call him Niles. On any fine summer’s day, Niles would come rolling into work around ten-ish, fresh off an early morning surfing stint, with shards of seaweed in his hair, a threadbare t-shirt on his back, ripped up jeans on his backside and a pair of flip-flops on his sand-encrusted feet. Niles took a runner on the department a couple of times, once to do a regional tour with his band, the second time to surf with his buddies in Baja for a month. Although my old boss swore he’d never hire Niles back after either of these “sabbaticals,” he always did. Talent will out.

One day, Niles did leave us for good and ended up taking a gig at, of all places, “The New York Times”! Every time I think of this hyper-creative wise-ass trading in his surfer dude duds for a collared shirt and Dockers, it cracks me up. Niles and “The Grey Lady.” Talk about your odd couples.

Now, if Niles really wanted to work at a paper that would reflect his freewheelin’ style, he should have applied at “The New York Post.” Yeah, yeah, I know. “The Times” is the “paper of record.” It oozes journalistic integrity. It’s what “intelligent” people read. And, it has absolutely no sense of humor. At all. (Also, no comics, and if you read my previous blog, you know this is considered infamia on my part.)

“The Post,” on the other hand, takes pride in publishing the most biased, politically incorrect and downright hilarious headlines I’ve ever laid eyes on. To wit:

Ike Turner dies: “Ike Beats Tina to Death”

Ken Lay is convicted: “Cheato Lay Goes to Jail”

Arafat’s widow grieves: “The Arafat Lady Sings”

Eliot Spitzer caught in a sex scandal: “Ho No!”

and the granddaddy of them all that needs no explanation:

“Headless Body In Topless Bar”

I used to fantasize that “The Post” had one dark-humored misanthrope on staff who was paid big bucks to conjure up these guffaw-inducing gems. Turns out they can come from anywhere – the editorial staff, the readers and, in the case of the infamous “Axis of Weasel” head, a 21-year-old copy boy who was immediately given a permanent cubicle.

Ah well. Guess there goes my dream job.

The Funny Papers

Among the flotsam and jetsam of news items that I randomly pick up on any given day, I could swear I heard of a recent study that suggests children should not be actively taught math or English until they reach the age of six.

This must come as a shock to the parents who frantically wave flash cards in front of their two-months-olds’ adorable mugs, but that sounds about right to me. When I was a kid, there was no such grade as “pre-K” and, even though my house was a few doors down from Merry Makers nursery school, I can’t remember one of my childhood pals who was ever enrolled to play on its swing set or draw with its Crayolas, which I’m sure is about as advanced as the learning curved in that establishment.

Which is not to suggest that we were a bunch of happy-go-lucky nitwits the day we were taken by the hand and tearfully dropped off for our first day of school. In fact, by the time I became a pint-sized pupil in Miss Mulford’s morning kindergarten class, I was a pretty good reader. And I owe it all to the “funny papers.”

While a day doesn’t go by when you don’t hear about the nosedive that the newspaper industry is taking, I remember newsprint’s halcyon years, when delivered to our doorstep was not one, but two, daily papers, morning and evening editions. Best of all, one of those papers, “The Long Island Press,” distributed their full-color comic section on Saturday, as opposed to the traditional Sunday. When that pile of wood pulp and ink showed up around noon, I’d grab the comics like a hungry mutt snatches an unattended roast beef sandwich and fly through the house trying to hunt down a “grown up” who could read me the “bubbles” while I eyeballed the panels of brightly-colored characters and their antics.

My father was working and my mother’s housekeeping duties knocked her out of the box, so that left me with either my two brothers or one of my sisters who, by virtue of being a decade older than me, give or take a year or two, were my usual go-to readers. Whether I had been more bratty than usual this particular Saturday, or they finally became exasperated by blowing a few minutes of their only full goofing-off day entertaining their four-year-old sister (Mass on Sunday!), who knows? All I can report is that I struck out three times, with the final thumbs down issued by one of my bros, who followed it with a rather harsh, “Why don’t you read it yourself?”

After I got over my initial hissy fit, it slowly dawned on me. Yeah! Why don’t I read it myself? I mean, I’d seen my sibs pull enough bone-headed stunts that I knew they weren’t smarter than me. Besides, if I could learn how to read, I wouldn’t have to debase myself to those three teenaged tyrants ever again. I’d be free, I tell you. FREE!

I spent that Saturday afternoon, and a fair share of the ones to follow, hunkered down on the living room floor, picking my way through the “bubbles” until the letters became sounds, the sounds became words and the words became Charlie Brown. Or Broom-Hilda. Or Miss Peach.

Even today, the comics are part of my daily read. The players have changed (Doonesbury, Mutts, Dilbert) but my delight in the low culture fusion of art and words remains the same. In fact, I’ve developed a bad habit of judging someone’s intelligence on whether they do the same. Apparently, so do two of the most powerful and chillingly savvy men to ever dominate the silver screen:

Don Corleone: How's your boy?

Michael: He's good.

Don Corleone: You know, he looks more like you every day.

Michael: He's smarter than I am. Three years old, and he can already read the funny papers.

Don Corleone: [laughs] Read the funny papers...

Yeah. Read the funny papers.

"Me Talk Pretty One Day"

Apologies to David Sedaris for cadging the title of one of his best-selling books for this blog, which is probably skimmed over by tens of people (I can only hope).

If you’ve never read one of Sedaris’ subversively funny yet oddly sweet books of personal essays, get thee to a book store (or, if you’re a cheapskate like me, your local library) and start gobbling them down.

One of the subjects Sedaris comes back to again and again is his large, off-the-wall Greek-American family, which includes his actress-comedienne sister Amy. Being the youngest in an Irish-American brood of five with its own cast of immediate and extended family characters, I can relate. So far, the Bradys haven’t produced any notables like David and Amy, but I’ll bet the constant chatter that bounced off the four walls of our modest family Cape was also echoing throughout the Sedaris family abode.

And it wasn’t only the kids who were running off at the mouth. Houses were small (there were no McMuffins back then, let alone McMansions) and families were large (having only two or three kids meant you simply weren’t doing your part to propagate the Catholic faith). A popular saying was, “Children should be seen and not heard” which, loosely translated, meant: “We need to have an adult conversation now. We have no choice but to have it in front of you, so shut up and don’t interrupt!”

One of the big benefits of this cozy family arrangement was that there was no “firewall” between kid speak and adult talk. We were exposed to a slew of wildly inventive and mildly inappropriate bons mots like, “Get off the table Mabel, the two dollars is for beer,” “I’m hotter than a dog passing peach pits” or “Look who made the Irish sports page” (aka the obituaries).

All of this chitchat instilled in us a love of language that set me off on my writerly way and, I suspect, may have done the same for Sedaris.

Nowadays, I despair not only at the dearth of clan conversation but the dust-on-the-divan quality of it. I guess it’s hard to hold a dishy dialogue when you have four people inhabiting a living room that’s the size of my one-bedroom apartment, or an SUV that could do double duty as Army transport in downtown Kabul. Maybe that’s why I hear “awesome” used to exhaustion or “like” like, a lot.

But I think the final nail in juicy conversation’s coffin is the rabid use of digital and cell phone cameras, not to mention video cameras. Why bother using verbal gymnastics to describe an event when you can simply aim, shoot and upload?

I don’t own a camera, digital or otherwise, or a cell phone (vile contraptions!). What I do own is one helluva linguistic legacy, which is amply demonstrated by the following ditty, courtesy of my grandfather, the late Cecil Murphy:

“My fingers press my only cent,

My mind upon the rum is bent,

But three things I want:


Tobacco, rum, and snuff.


If I snuff I cannot puff,


If I puff I cannot snuff.


Hoping for better times to come,


Here’s my cent, gimme a rum.“

If you ask me, that’s, like, pretty awesome.

Who the Hell Do I Think I Am?

I once heard a sharp-witted commentator on NPR define an expert as “someone who knows slightly more about a subject than you.”

I’d like to refine that dead-on assessment to add “but they get a lot more jazzed about it.”

What subject gets my knickers in a twist?

The English language.

Its use and abuse. Its refinement and profanity. Its rhyme and reason. Its rules and misdeeds. How it swings when you hit the right notes and falls on deaf ears when you don’t.

By now you’re probably thinking, “So how are you ‘slightly’ more expert in the English language than yours truly?” In other words, “Who the hell do I think I am?”

I could bore you with my resume and portfolio*. Or, I could give you the hard-won appraisal of a hard-nosed professional, Sister Helen.

When I was in the seventh grade, there was a school-wide essay contest with the theme, "What Christmas Means to Me." The winner would receive a certificate and have their handiwork read over the PA system.

It was a pretty pedestrian assignment, but Sister Helen was built like an army tank and had an eraser-throwing arm that could have landed her in the bullpen at Yankee Stadium. If one of her students could ace this thing and give her bragging rights around the convent, they'd have it made for the rest of the school year.

I gave it my best shot and handed in my paper. The next day, Sister Helen summoned me to her desk. With forty sets of eyes riveted on my back, I made my knee-knocking way to the front of the classroom, where Sister H. started strenuously quizzing me about the origins of my essay. Had I really written it on my own? With no help from my parents? Sisters? Brothers? I answered truthfully to all queries and must have finally convinced her because her next words were, "Gloria, you are a very good writer."

As the saying goes, "Praise from Caesar is praise, indeed." Since that life-defining day, writing is how I've earned my coin and, I hope, entertained my readers. Whether it's creating advertising for a variety of clients or writing an e-mail to family, friends and the occassional jackass politician, I am, and always will be, a fairly happy ink-stained wretch. However, when I see the obscene piles of money being pulled down by those Wall Street boys, I start to think I should have paid more attention in Sister Ann’s math class.

By the way, I won the essay contest and still have the certificate to prove it.

*www.creativehotlist.com/gbrady2

You didn’t think I’d let slip the chance for a little self-promotion, did you?

What the Hell is This Blog About?

Back in the early Nineties, when the present-day independent film scene was just taking off and the Sundance Film Festival was the place for wool cap-wearing auteur wannabes to shill their latest screenplays, these cinematic upstarts began sporting t-shirts that read, “What I really want to do is direct.”

If I were to create a t-shirt along those same lines, it would proclaim, “What I really want to be is a rock star.”

As much as I admire J. D. Salinger, Ian McEwan, Gore Vidal and Marilynne Robinson, I want to be Thom Yorke, Jack White, Kim Deal and, it goes without saying, Keith Richards.

Who wouldn’t want to ply their trade in front of thousands of screaming fans with sex and drugs as a professional perk instead of sitting in a dark room, staring at a computer screen, with your only audience an overweight cat who occasionally needles you for attention? As for the sex and drugs, well, there’s always internet porn and your umpteenth cigarette of the day.

There is one thing, though, that bridges the gap between the public adulation of a musical performance and the private agony of the writing process – hitting the right key. (And no, I don’t mean your typing skills.)

“Music is what language wishes it could be,” stated Irish poet and philosopher John O’Donohue.

Think about that for a minute. While the writer sweats, second guesses and loses sleep over the right word and the almost right word (much like I’m doing now), we know that whatever we commit to paper will never elicit the universal, soul-stirring immediacy of a musical piece that disappears into the ether. Blame the hubris of Nimrod as he ordered the building of the Tower of Babel.

Now, go back to O’Donohue’s statement again, but this time, listen to it. Like a small symphony, it compels, it delights and it’s elegant as hell. In short, it’s as close to pitch perfect as words, strung so masterfully together, are likely to get.

Which brings me, finally, to the title of this piece, “What the Hell is This Blog About?” (Keep your pants on, I’m almost finished.)

What I mean to do is give my POV on language wherever it plays itself out – music, books, art, newspapers, magazines, films, TV, advertising, the internet and even what comes out of the Average Joe’s mouth.

In short, I want to have my way with words.

But what I really want is to be a rock star.