Name Dropping
Oh, but no one cares if it's something close and obvious. If your are the illegitimate child of Sidney Poitier, that might impress a party of high-toned Manhattan art dealers, but it won't win you any points if they are playing Name Dropping. On the other hand, if your mailman is the illegitimate child of Sidney Poitier, that's something. After all, who the heck knows stuff about their mailman?
The thing is, you must be connected to the famous person by a chain of relationships. The more links, the better, because those long chains, while more common, are less known. So the game is all about your ability to notice and keep track of the chains. There's no formal point scoring or even voting, but everyone gets a sense of who the winners and losers are. (I should probably be ashamed to admit I usually win.)
This all came up today in an multi-party email discussion. Someone mentioned Ted Neugent and my friend Victor said his wife Marion knew Ted as a teenager. Ted was playing in a band and Marion told him to try singing: "its so loud people won't hear you anyway." If Marion played the game and said, "I'm the one who told Ted Neugent to sing" -- boooooooring. If Victor said "my wife..." -- that would be better. If I said "my co-worker's wife..." -- well, that would be worth a few points.
The ultimate name drop would be something like this:
The neighbor of my mailman's cousin was beaten up in kindergarten by a co-worker of the ex-wife of a guy who was hired once to shampoo Teresa Heinz Kerry's dog.If you could pull that one off, you would win by a landslide!
Umie the Umlaut says, "ask your doctor about the Fredösphere!"
1 Comments:
You may recall, Fredoshpere, that the Ted Nugent thing came around after I started the string by mentioning that I had discovered Lucy Liu is in my 1990 Michiganian yearbook. I would have known years ago, if she'd have been in anything I liked. I only discovered last week she graduated from Michigan (Asian Language-must have been a stretch). I went home and looked in my yearbook. There she was. Charlie's Angels "Full Throtle" was on HBO that night. I looked at the picture then looked up at the TV screen. It's definitely her. I could tell from her eyes. One is a little off center. Still, a beautiful woman.
I'm depressed that I never met her and it is now impossible to contact her. She's way too big a star to answer personal email. And, as you know, The flaxonned-haired goddess, Ann Coulter was in the law school when I was an undergrad. Although I was a heavy in the conservative movement on campus, we never crossed paths. I got on her website, just curious if she'd ever heard my name on campus or any of the groups I founded or was involved with-no answer.
But guys, if your still looking for that dream girl, or maybe girls you liked in college and almost but never quite hooked up with, go to that Yearbook. Let it be your guide. Last fall I googled a girl I liked from those halcyon days in Ann Arbor in the late eighties. She was in the music school then. Now she's a (still unmarried) music school teacher on Long Island. She was flattered that I had remembered so much about her, although she admitted she could not recall my face. We talked on the phone once, cathing up on old times, but like so many of these desparate attempts at re-connecting in the cyber age, it never went any further than that.
CS Lewis said in "Shawdowlands" that "part of the pleasure now was part of the pain then;" or was it "part of the pain now was part of the pleasure then.? Anyway, it's mostly painful for me now, and in fact it was painful then as well.
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