Being that it’s almost Thanksgiving, I think it’s time to retire the $7 straw handbag that I bought at Target last summer. Brand name: Exclamation! Or maybe Exhilaration! or something really enthusiastic like that. Either way it’s cute and if asked where I got it, or anything about it, I do what any other style conscious yet cheap woman does, I lie and say I got it at Saks.
So I brought my red purse out from the back of the coat closet and began transferring everything from big straw bag into smart red bag which I got at, uh, Neimans. Confession: I never clean out purses before putting them away for the season so digging through them is a fun little walk down memory lane: business cards for people I don’t remember meeting, the lipstick I thought I lost, receipts, restaurant match books and snotty Kleenexes. Lots of snotty Kleenexes. At the bottom of the red bag was a nametag that I found last year in the ladies room of the Mayflower Hotel. I was so smitten with the porn star-like quality of the name that I wore it all evening at a networking event. The nametag was Tara O’Toole’s. Tara O’Toole attended a public policy research forum that evening and had abandoned her nametag in the loo where I found it, with great pleasure. Tara O’Toole, if you ever Google yourself and find yourself here because I have said, “Tara O’Toole” four times, I have your name tag.
A few years ago, when we were having work done on our house, my husband called me all excited and said, “Guess what the name of the HVAC guy is?”
“I have no idea.”
“Think ‘porn star!’”
“umm….Dick Black?”
“No! Harry Johnson!!!”
Yes. His name was Harry Johnson, and he was huge. It still makes me giggle.
This week we had a little in-house retreat for my team. We kicked off the day with a team building exercise designed to get to know each other. We paired up, interviewed our partner with a set of five questions, and then wrote and illustrated a “Biography” of that person on whiteboard paper folded twice over. With crayons. (None of this was my idea…) We then presented our “books” to the rest of the group. Despite being a senior manager and having a responsibility to lead by example and show the team what a positive experience the “Biography” exercise could be, I shirked my duty and mocked it. Openly. (Maybe I didn’t realize how seriously everyone else would take it, as most spoke movingly about members of their family, and shared pivotal moments in their lives. A few gave touching childhood anecdotes. Um. Yeah. Not me.) For starters my partner and I decided that our regular names weren’t interesting enough for our books, so we chose our porn star names: first name being the name of our childhood pet and the last name being the street we grew up on. I was Msy Surrey*. She was Flopsy Cranston. In fact, we decided that our real lives weren’t interesting enough either so we took a wee bit of creative license and gave snarky answers and drew inappropriate illustrations. Our books were best sellers.
What’s your porn star name?
* Our second dog was a greyhound named Nipper. I’m not sure that Nipper is a good name for a porn star.
It’s an even worse name for a fluffer.