Is A Part Of
I had gone and forgotted that this is Wendell Only Wednesday, the one day in the week when I make the most self-indulgant, self-referential, self-linking posts. But when I got a comment on my “Celebrity Names” post from WendellWit-reader #7 Buddy B. (who also got David Letterman’s List of Katie Couric sign-offs blogged before I could), I jotted off a such a long reply I knew I had to move it to the Front Page.
Shouldn?t a disclaimer in this entry be required, with regard to your use of the name Wendell? Not that it would require disclosure of your true identity, whatever that may be, but enquiring minds would want and deserve to know.
I outed my not-my-real-name-ishness long ago, both here (though it apparently did not make it though my multiple changes of webhost and blogware? I have to look for it in my backups) and at MetaFilter (the site is down at the moment but my name story is in the comments somewhere – it?s a #2 Google result). In addition, my editors at MSNBC.com forced upon me the following credit line after all my long articles in exchange for a link back here: ?Wendell Wittler is the alias of an online writer in Southern California.? I?m not keeping it a secret.
And now, just to further embarass the only Web Neighbor who actually remembers me from being a ‘radio sidekick’…
For me, ?Buddy? was a nickname attached to me by a colleague, for no apparent reason other than its alliterative ring. I have actually fantasized about taking a job as a traffic reporter on some Los Angeles radio station. If that ever happens, I?ll be referring to myself on the air as, Sepulveda Boulevard.
You can call me Sep.
First, no can do with the “Sep”. One of my other Eight readers already uses the short-name “Sev” and it’s just too confusing. As for ?Mr. Sepulveda Boulevard?, you did read my musical tribute to the former community of Sepulveda here, dintya? If I were going to use an L.A. streetname for an alias myself, I?d use Sherman Way or Mulholland Drive or that one near where I grew up that an old sitcom got a character name from: (Eddie) Haskell Street. By the way, in that old neighborhood, ?Gloria Street? was right next to ?Gaynor Street?? I moved away before Gloria Gaynor got her one-or-two hit records, but I believe it later became known as Disco Block. Or should have.
Of course, there’s that old “make your own Porn Name” formula where you use the name of a childhood pet and your home street name. Based on my last four L.A. addresses, which do you think sounds better? Farnsworth* Langdon, Farnsworth Saticoy, Farnsworth Arch or Farnsworth Kittridge?
Ah, I found my old confession:
Wendell is not my given birthname, and somewhere around the age of seven, I was getting tired of my “real” name (I couldn’t ‘customize’ it, like Robert can be Rob, Bob, Bobby or even Bert), and asked my parents what else they had considered naming me. My dad made the rare (for him) joke that, if he’d had one more vodka martini the night I was born, I’d have been named Wendell, because it was alliterative. Fast forward five years and I’m in a somewhat pricey private school in the San Fernando Valley (my parents primarily took me out of public school to get away from bullies… I only ended up meeting a much higher socioeconomic class of bully), and my mother worked there as a librarian and substitute teacher to help pay for it. Dangerous combination. During one ‘rainy day recess’ when she was looking over a class one grade above mine, she started spilling family secrets to the kids, including “Wendell”. Armed with that name, the school bullies (including one of the sons of a “television legend”) moved me up from the third-most-picked-on-kid in school to number one. I consciously escaped “Wendell” in high school, and did some creative writing using a ‘pen name’ with the same initials as my real name. Then, in college, I got into radio, specifically some of the more creative, less serious talk jockeys who were on L.A. radio in those days (if you’ve ever heard of them, Dick Whittington, Frank Buxton, Ken Griffin, Dave Hull, Lloyd Thaxton and the intentionally-youth-oriented Elliot Mintz). I made the calculated decision to become a ‘regular’ caller, and since they were always known only by their first names, I wanted a unique nom de talk. I’d heard several people use both my real name and my previously adopted pen name, so, since I had already decided to push the humor in my presentation, after long consideration, I publicly became Wendell. Using the name actually liberated me to become less introverted and more of a performer (“It’s not me saying that, it’s Wendell”) And if I wanted attention, it worked. I got so aggressive calling Dick Whittington, he once commented “can’t we just put Wendell back on hold”, and that led to a running joke (with my full cooperation) that had me being brought on the air for a minute, finish half of what I wanted to say, and be put back ‘on hold’ until Tomorrow’s show. I ended up with sympathy, a fan club, “Keep America Beautiful, Keep Wendell On Hold” t-shirts, an almost-successful attempt to con my way into the Guinness Book of World Records, and, two years later, the job of screening the phones for Dick Whittington. Wendell has been veddy veddy good to me, even if I haven’t been all that good to Wendell sometimes. But I wouldn’t recommend anybody naming their first son Wendell any more than I would recommend naming him Sue, Cartman, Deutronium or Oxyclean. (In the currently low likelihood that I do pass on my DNA, I’d probbly want to name him Benny or her Gracie)
*Yes, Farnsworth. I had a distinguished-looking basset hound, and I came up with the name 35 years before Futurama did. Although I didn’t even know I was naming him after the inventor of the TV tube.
