Adam Blatner

Yes! And if you don’t like your name, maybe you can change your name, too! Why not? Re-invent yourself. Before that my given name was Howard, which was—how shall I say it—an okay name for the 1920s and ‘30s, but kinda dorky. Howard-the-Coward. Yuk.

But I had become involved in learning more about psychodrama, and in 1977 I had remarried, was beginning a new life, and my darling Allee and I attended a workshop in Berkeley given by Zerka T. Moreno, the widow of the man who invented psychodrama. She used as a warm-up for the group the theme of our names, how did we get them, how we felt about them, would we ever want to change them—questions like that. Bing! A tiny seed was planted. On the way home near Palo Alto, across the San Francisco Bay, we chatted about our experiences and I mentioned that I might want to change my name. In light of my new married life, the idea of a new identity seemed to fit. After a few months of playing with the idea, we found a name more to my taste: No longer Howard, since then, Adam. My family (to my surprise) was supportive, as were my professional communities. So here I am.

What it left me with, even more as the years passed, is that we can change parts of our identity, and I imagine that in light of Lady Gaga or Madonna or others “re-inventing” themselves, this idea may become more widespread. And if you’re being quite open about it, why not?