Twosday: Name Games

I have one of those "technically a nickname but it's used so much it's my name" names, and the only problem I have -- well, I have with other people having -- is with the spelling.  Let's see, who are two people who forgot to include the e at the end of my name?  The first person who comes to mind is a teacher, actually, my fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Carter.  She was stiff and formal and strict, and really that whole school year it felt like I was getting it coming and going, because she was like Grams at her most stern and demanding, and then I went home to the actual Grams, who really began relying on me more and more that year, because Phoebe started kindergarten... anyway, Mrs. Carter was this older English woman, and I think she maybe just forgot the e most of the time, and she was also just snobby and pretentiously arrogant enough to be unable to admit that, so she'd say that the extra e was just a silly thing young American girls added to their names to be cutesy and nauseating.  So she'd write my name like this: "Pru" and then just the tiniest space, and "dence".  Yeah, she covered it up by writing my full, only-on-my-birth-certificate-or-when-Grams-had-a-serious-point-to-make name.  So, I wasn't that fond of Mrs. Carter. 

And when I was first introduced to Marjorie Laurent, the woman who almost became my mother-in-law, I was so strongly reminded of Mrs. Carter that I think I really did expect her to do the exact same thing.  She didn't, but she did prove to be about as snobby and arrogant, and, well, I guess it just shows you where my head was during that year that I didn't see the similarities as the red flag they were.

Who else, well, in the opposite direction Kerri Crenshaw, my varsity cheer squad leader, made a point of always writing my name without the e.  What can I say, we were high school girls in the late '80s, and doing whatever you could do to make yourself a credible hardrock or heavy metal groupie, well, that was the thing.  Everything from blocking routines to signing my senior yearbook, Kerri spelled my name "Pru".  Now, of course, I can just laugh fondly at what we were.