There are two stories to my name.  The mom story and the dad story, and I’m not sure if either are actually true.

The mom story goes a bit like this: Once, a long, long time ago (1982 to be exact) a very pregnant woman was enjoying a quiet walk through a field.  (No joke, my mom really was walking through a field.  She used to work at a living history museum as the blacksmith’s wife, so she actually did things like walking through fields and baking pies and spinning wool.)  She walked through the field, this pregnant woman, and thought about names for her unborn baby.  Edmund James, Tiffany Rose, Jacob Emerson, Emma Rose…  Emma Rose… Emma Rose.  And LO AND BEHOLD, the mother knew the baby would be a girl and she would be called Emma Rose.

Okay, so maybe when my mom tells it I don’t sound like the savior incarnate but that’s what happens when you hock out your newborn to play Jesus in the Christmas nativity scene.

The dad story goes like this: There was once this guy who was in love with Emmy Lou Harris.  So in love in fact that given the chance, he would gladly trade in his very pregnant wife for a little whoo-hoo with Emmy.  Not that the father is a bad guy, he’s a great guy in fact, maybe the best guy ever but truth be told, he’s still a guy.  And at times his ‘little guy’ still rules over everything else.  And even though his wife was generally considered a ‘real catch’, he still might risk all that for a shot at Emmy Lou, if given the chance.  (Twenty years later, he actually finds himself in Emmy Lou’s dressing room.  Sure, she’s beautiful.  And sure, maybe if he tried hard enough he might just get that chance. But when it comes down to it, he’s older and tired and he’d just rather go home and get into bed with his wife.)  In any case, he wants to name the baby after Emmy Lou but the wife, understandably, isn’t too keen on the idea so they compromise.

So Emma Rose the “and so it shall be” baby and Emma Rose the chick-I’d leave-your-mother-for baby.  Either way, is it any wonder I’m always uncomfortable when people call me by name?

by e. miller
Oakland, CA

Wherefore it came to pass, when the time was come about after Hannah had conceived, that she bare a son, and called his name Samuel, saying, Because I have asked him of the Lord.

I Samuel 1:20

Before I was born, my mother suffered several miscarriages. I would have been the youngest child, not the eldest, had I been born if these fetuses survived. With a heavy heart, my parents sat down and implored God for his mercy and prayed for a son. A deaf son.

Before exploring avenues of indignity, consider this:
At a very young age, both my mother and father underwent a bout of serious childhood illnesses with onsets of fevers that destroyed their hearing. Until late in high school, my father was placed in an oral language school which taught that using gestures to communicate was wrong; he went to Gallaudet University after a short stint at the Texas School for the Deaf. My mother was the only deaf child in a small town in Upstate New York and had her first exposure to sign language after she graduated high school. They both endured their own tribulations towards comprehending and accommodating a world that viewed their condition as an aberration. Events conspired to bring them together at a deaf bible college in Kansas City, where they met and before long, married.

Reflecting on their respective lives growing up deaf, they knew they wanted a deaf son, to allow him an experience of the world denied themselves. They were determined to make a difference for the boy, to show him and their own parents there was a much more kinder approach to raising a child with deafness. That this particular disability wasn’t something to be wrestled into submission, but something to be compromised with, and from an unique perspective, used as a tool.

So they prayed for a deaf child and into a silence asked of the Lord, I was born unto Jerry and Leslie Sanders.

by Samuel Sanders
Olathe, KS

It’s sort of a dorky name but as I’ve gotten older I’ve grown into loving it.  Still I can’t deny it’s let me down over the years, over and over, without a pang of remorse, pretty much the way Bill Clinton let Hillary down.  The one that comes to mind is when we were on a flight to Vancouver and I was sitting on the aisle, pretty far up, though not in the first class, and it just seemed to me that I was getting a lot of foot traffic brushing by me.  People coming up from behind me, then turning heel when they were a few feet past me, and invariably I saw them looking at me curiously, and then a look of disdain or whatever would cross their faces.  They would peer right at me and then they’d turn away as if from some tragedy.  This happened three or four times, then I thought to myself I was being paranoid.  To test my theory I unbuckled my seat belt and made as if to stretch, then started sauntering towards the restrooms at the rear of the plane.  Was it my imagination or were whole rows recoiling from me?

In Vancouver it all sorted itself out.  A writer I knew was also on the plane, and told her girlfriend she had spotted Kevin Killian way up in the front.  The girlfriend thought she’d said, “Kevin Kline.” There were a whole group of drunk girls on the plane and our flight turned into a game of Telephone as they whispered my name in one ear and out the other.  “Kevin Kline!” By the time the rumor hit Row 26, some had heard the name as Calvin Klein”—all of which explained the mass disappointment when they came sidling up to my seat and instead found not a star, nor a great designer, but instead just a guy with a name that sounds like something else.  I guess I’d feel chagrined too, so I can’t really blame them.

In a way it’s sort of like, when I was in school, I had a boyfriend of sorts who told me I looked like Neil Young—exactly like Neil Young—and he’d say it with such force I had no choice but to accept it as a compliment, but now I wonder.

by Kevin Killian
San Francisco, CA

Three days before Emily Rivens’ premiere of Jane Eyre starring herself as Jane and a young television heartthrob coated in make-up, wearing a padded suit as Edward Rochester, the internet was flooded with NSFW photos and video depicting Winston, her husband and longtime accused homosexual, of passionately indulging in what had been nothing but rumor and speculation. Until then.

The 20 minute clip showed Winston Graham and an unknown, handsome young Latino, filming each other on a yacht that was floating in the middle of an ocean. Some speculated it was just off the California coast while others believed it was shot during downtime in the Mediterranean while Graham filmed the third movie in the successful Spencer: For Hire franchise.

Within a day the boy was located and an exclusive interview was conducted but with his face shaded, his voice neutralized, expressing his fear of retaliation on the part of his one time lover. Why he bothered to shield his identity when, by then, hundreds of journalists stormed his numerous public education schools to gain access to yearbooks and school paper articles, was the idea of his face-time craving attorney.

Emily Rivens remained silent behind the ivy choking walls of her Frank Lloyd Wright designed home. No one came in or out and it was well known that Winston Graham was collecting his forces on the other side of the meridian, in Stockholm, for a barrage of lawsuits from his side of the fence and everyone else’s. His team was spinning illusions, smoking smoke and shattering mirrors, giving Silicon Valley too much credit for technology far from executable by saying the footage had been doctored. When he managed to contact his wife she, a personal friend suggested to People, told him she was humiliated and wanted no part in this double life he had been leading and told him to “F@ck off.”

Rivens’ first public appearance was impeccable, transcendent and legendary. Entertainment news rocked back and forth that week, never having so much fodder to gorge upon. Two wild stories in the space of a week, the later trumping the former.

When asked if the rumors were true, she responded, “What rumors?” and smiled. When asked if there was to be a divorce, she responded, “I’m not sure I’m the right person to ask.” When asked what would happen to her infant son, she responded, “Ganymede’s only concerns right now are when he gets to suckle from my breast. Other than that, I worry about his regular diaper changing schedule. Please, enjoy the movie.”

Years whirled on; The Beard became an icon for homosexual men everywhere. Her grace and poise in stepping around being viciously lied to and trodden on, even by gays themselves, led her to rise like an Airbus 360 into their rainbow skies triumphant and sexy. Rivens went from mousy teenage soap star to haphazard and lukewarm actress to Halloween costume worthy, remarkable in the literal sense, and queen of telling it like it is with the wit of Mae West and the audacity of Rosie O’Donnell. She was trumpeted as the prophet of the return to the nitty-gritty, not so nice Golden Era of Hollywood.

Near Rivens’ retirement she was interviewed for Barbara Walter’s 10 Most Intriguing People of the Year hosted by Ruby Galaouix where she stated that she had written a memoir but was unable to publish it because of truths that would be contested to the point of exhaustion and she didn’t have it in her.

“Are you saving someone? Winston, perhaps. Some undue embarrassment?”

“Saving? Undue? He’s had his embarrassment and he’s past due. No, Ruby, I’m not interested in inflating the egos of judges or enriching the soil of our civil dispute judiciary system. They don’t need my legacy buggering up their tubes. This book deserves an unchallenged release and it will have what it deserves. It’s going to have to wait for me, or everyone else in it, to keel over.” And she looked into the camera, stroking her cheeks with her diamond ringed hand. “Either way, it’ll get out.”

Queens all over the country placed bets on who would kick the bucket first; The Beard or Winston Graham. Las Vegas casinos got in on the action and added a category for the two celebrities on their gambling boards. But the looming question remained: What could be more damaging than what had happened nearly forty years previous? Turns out quite a bit.

by David Morini
Hokkaido, Japan

The Beard (Part 1)
The Beard (Part 3)

1. Storms are brewin’ in your eyes (Starship)
2. You’re the poet in my heart (Fleetwood Mac)
3. Won’t you smile a while for me (Hall & Oates)

***

“Hi. I’m Sarah.”
“Ooooh have you heard that song…”
The eyes close, the head drops, and the hand-mic comes out.

Innocent fun, right? I feel there is one thing people tend to forget about these songs:
Even though they contain some of the most dramatic lyrics of the 70s and 80s, they are pop songs, chart-toppers, if you will. In general, one of the reasons a pop song becomes a universal hit is due to the vague nature of its lyrics, i.e., everyone can find a sense of “application” within them. So, as a “Sarah” experiment, I have collaged three Sarah songs into a poem that I feel highlights the fact that these love songs could have been written about any woman with a two-syllable name.

Feel free to substitute any name you want in the “huh-huh” space.

Waiting for the sunlight
no time is a good time for…

If you feel like leaving
hold on
there’s a heartbeat
there’s fire and ice.

(And huh-huh) loved me like no one has ever loved me before…

Alone and watching in the night
I’ll never find another girl like you
all I ever wanted
within the wings of a storm.

(And huh-huh) hurt me like no one could ever hurt me more…

I’d go anywhere
it doesn’t matter what for.
Woman’s eyes
stay until tomorrow
in the sea of love
where everyone would love to drowned.

If you’re reading this and realizing that upon introducing yourself to a Sarah you too have dropped to bended knee and belted out “No time is a good time for goodbye,” then know this: I don’t blame you. In fact, I think it’s safe to say that we all agree with that line. But, I guess, that’s just my point.

by Sarah Suzor
Boulder, CO