True Confession: My real name is not Dan. If you were looking to stalk me, I would be honored, but you would need to know that my given name is a tad more ethnic than Dan. Dan is not short for Daniel. I have my father’s name, Donato. Yes, Donato. For reasons I don’t know, Dan is a typical translation for Donato. Do NOT ask me why my name isn’t Donald. All I know is that it isn’t and if it was, I would have jumped in front of a moving train years ago.
Truthfully, I am proud of that name. My father’s name is Donato and he comes from a village called San Donato in Italy. I am forever grateful that he didn’t come from Dildo, Newfoundland (or you could substitute your own funny place name here).
Very few people know my real name. This works to my advantage when I get a phone call and I hear the telemarketer (my way of saying bill collector) stumble and ask for Dante or Donatello, or my favorite, Leon.
Having trouble saying it? Well then feel free to call me Donut-hole as EVERYONE else did when I was growing up.
The reality was that I invented Donut-Hole when I was in my 30’s. No one ever called me Donut-hole but I play that card when I am feeling like the world needs to feel sorry for me. But the fact that no one did call me it just highlights the lack of creativity of most of my friends. Instead, my nickname fluctuated between the boring Mama (as in Mama Leone’s Restaurant) and Chubber (or in the Boston accent “Chubbah”).
Just a couple of years ago, I bid on an authentic menu from the Mama Leone Restaurant in NYC on Ebay. I went toe-to-toe with a non-Leone and after a grueling week of attack/counterattack, I won the bid. $6.50 later plus shipping, and I am the proud owner of a real, tomato-sauce stained menu named after no one I know. In fact, the name Leone in Italy is akin to Smith in America or Chins in China. To top it off, I have never framed the damn thing because it is some stupid shape that doesn’t exist in the entire Frames-R-Us store without paying a billion dollars for custom framing.
Chubber, or Chubbah, was not because I was fat. I was quite svelte when I was younger. Stop for a second here and picture it. Chubber came from an assignment we had to do for our History class way back in the 4th grade. We were told to draw a picture of the U.S.S Constitution (In Boston, you really needed to know the difference between your Old Ironsides and your Minutemen). My best friend, Whatshisface, drew a picture and his was very precise and perfectly fit in the center of the 8.5″ X 11″ sheet of construction paper. My picture, on the other hand, was enormous and the masts would not fit on the paper so I had to shorten them. They were stubby masts. The fourth graders, did not call me Ole Stubby Masts….they just called me Chubba instead.
From that day forward I convinced myself that I didn’t have a creative bone in my body and here I sit typing non-creatively into my blog 30ish years later.
What nicknames have you had to endure in your life?