Yes! And if you don\u2019t like your name, maybe you can change your name, too! Why not? Re-invent yourself. Before that my given name was Howard, which was\u2014how shall I say it\u2014an okay name for the 1920s and \u201830s, but kinda dorky. Howard-the-Coward. Yuk.<\/p>\n
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\u2014questions 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.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cre-inventing\u201d themselves, this idea may become more widespread. And if you\u2019re being quite open about it, why not? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Yes! And if you don\u2019t like your name, maybe you can change your name, too! Why not? Re-invent yourself. Before that my given name was Howard, which was\u2014how shall I say it\u2014an okay name for the 1920s and \u201830s, but kinda dorky. Howard-the-Coward. Yuk. But I had become involved in learning more about psychodrama, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-824","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-autobiographical","category-events"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/824"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=824"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/824\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":825,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/824\/revisions\/825"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=824"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=824"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=824"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}