“They call me ‘Stacey.’ They call me ‘her.’ They call me ‘Jane.’ That’s not my name!”
I associate The Ting Tings’ catchy hit “That’s Not My Name” with a drag show I once saw at The Jungle. My gay friend brought a gaggle of straight girls out that night, and we watched in wonder as decked-out drag queens took the stage in towering heels, far more confident in their club wear than I will ever be.
The clear star of the evening was an olive-skinned drag queen in black and purple costume who lip-synched “That’s Not My Name,” the pop-tastically perfect Ting Tings anthem on identity. It didn’t matter if her off-stage name was Joe or Cheryl; she had chosen the right jam for the occasion.
For oddly-named people everywhere, “That’s Not My Name” is a war cry for all the botched attempts at our foreign, weirdly-spelled or unusual names. Sure, it’s more of a personal war cry we belt out in our cars to de-stress than something we spit at our bosses when they mispronounce our names for the fifth time in a day. But a war cry sung privately in the car can do a lot for a frustration that starts in babydom and stretches into adulthood.
Do you know those “fun facts” where you learn that the average person will spend 336 hours of their life kissing or a third of their life sleeping? I’d like to know how many hours of her life an Alaia spends correcting people’s pronunciation and spelling of her name. Or a Jaron. Good luck at roll call, Dariella.
I’m one of the oddly named minority, bound to five letters just as deeply as I’m bound to my red hair and freckles. My name is Hally and immediately upon seeing it, people pause. The “Hall” at the beginning feels like it’s leading into Holly. It looks like a close cousin of Haley but there’s no telltale “e” or “i.” But nine times out of ten when meeting someone for the first time, I get called a name that isn’t mine.
Growing up with this unusual name predicament was embarrassing. As a shy child, I would sometimes accept my suggested other names, my misplaced Haleys and Hollys, rather than live in a vortex of correction. By the end of middle school, my whole class would yell, “It’s Hally!” at our forgetful chorus teacher. (Thanks, guys.)
Unlike braces and rainbow-colored glasses, you don’t shed the difficulty of your unusual name as you age. We graduate from blushing school roll calls to awkward job interviews where you don’t want to be confrontational. Just the other day in class, my name felt it was being workshopped just as much as my essay. “It’s Hally, right? Haley? …Let’s just refer to her as ‘the author.’”
The good news is that I love my name. I find it worth fighting for, worth correcting endlessly for the rest of my life. Will I resist naming my own kids something zany? Maybe, or maybe I’ll give them a name that’s just on the fringes of public knowledge. Sometimes the only way to save your name’s pronunciation is an easy public association. Beyonce wasn’t a “known” name at one time, and now it’s a household name.
After all, if it weren’t for Halle Berry, I don’t know where I’d be. You know, Hally. Like the Berry.