Los Gatos Weekly-Times

Name drops keep falling on my head

By Mary Ann Cook

Name-dropping has fallen on hard times. I blame the hippies, who made egalitarians of us all. Even Jackie Onassis went to work, for heaven's sake. But the hippies showed us we could do without--without haircuts, without baths, without benefit of clergy.

Another culprit in the demise of name-dropping is Silicon Valley. In an industry where companies and CEOs click in and out as fast as the digits on a clock tick, it's hard to keep current. I personally hate to drop the names of yesterday's millionaires, even in an offhanded way.

Well, it's true that as the world's resources decline we have to learn to live with less, but does this have to apply to name-dropping? Makes life so much less fertile for us snobs. Eastern philosophy teaches us less is more, but do you believe it for a moment?

We all have cherished memories of meeting celebrities, and I think that practice should be nurtured. I feel particularly compelled to burnish up my reminiscences because, as an added challenge, I like to try them out on my cousin. When you name-drop in most circles, you can score some points, at least initially. Painfully soon, though, your listener stops listening to search his own memory to pit his roster of celebrity encounters against yours. And then your point-scoring sun is eclipsed.

My cousin doesn't do any of that jousting, though, because she doesn't collect celebrities. She's the family historian and glories in the sepia tones of the past, not the sharp and unforgiving focus of the present. Centered as she is on history, she is remarkably out of touch about pop culture. Which makes her doubly hard to impress with name-dropping. So I figure if I can bestir her with a name, I could make Buster Keaton smile. No, not Michael or Diane--Buster. She's not the only historian in the family.

Let me give you some examples about how pop culture-deprived she is. When the movie 10 had just come out, and the name Bo Derek was bedecking everyone's conversation, my cousin asked, "Who's he?"

Years after J.R. Ewing had been found shot in the Dallas series, she looked up from her genealogy notes to ask, "Who did shoot J. D.?" She searches an atlas for River Phoenix and astronomy charts for Moon Zappa. You see what I'm up against.

But I continue to practice on her because of that very characteristic. I tell her I had breakfast with Ansel: she doesn't know him from Adam. That when I dated Buzz Aldrin, in spite of his engineering brilliance, he was lost when we got to Kissing Rock. Yesterday's heroes have always been lost in outer space where she is concerned.

I mention that Christopher Lasch was a first love and became such a noted historian that he served as adviser to President Carter and other nabobs. She isn't self-centered enough to check out The Culture of Narcissism.

"I helped John Jakes get through college chemistry." Now surely the Kent family saga would sound a familiar note. After all, those books were bestsellers for months and were made into a TV series. This man created in fiction an entire nation's history, and still she is unimpressed.

Lately her interest has turned to birds, so I'm counting on that to get through to her. Let's see, there's the Chicago hockey team; there's Mike Tyson's former wife; there's that comedian who played the title role in Mrs. Doubtfire; there's that guy who was incarcerated for so long in Alcatraz; there's Admiral Richard Evelyn Byrd. Just wait until I try some of those out on her.