My name is Carrie. Like the movie.
Yeah. That movie.
Thanks to Stephen King, I spent most of my adolescence with people asking me where my bucket of blood was.
I confess I have never seen any of the three film adaptations, the 1999 sequel, or the musical. Nor have I read the book. I’m not a horror story person.
About the same time people were teasing me about my name, my mom and I watched an episode of “The Waltons,” in which an old lady, who Johnboy used to help with chores, dies.
I was disconsolate. Not for the character. But about death. I laid in bed with my mind running through the people I loved and the reality that they will die.
My mother thought this was hilarious. For the rest of her life she considered me a bleeding heart lightweight.
“It’s just a story,” she would say.
“A story about DEATH,” I would answer.
As an adult, my mother gave me her copy of the novel, “Sarah’s Key,” which tells the story of a little girl taken to Auschwitz after the Vichy French rounded up thousands of Jews in the Vel d’Hiv in 1942.
Sarah, who is 10, locks her 4-year-old brother in a closet (or some confined space) when the police come, promising to come get him when they leave. Which, of course, she can’t do, since the Nazis take her and her parents with them.
I don’t know what would possess a person to think of such a sick, twisted plot, but I got to that point in the book, shut it with horror and called my mother to ask how she could possibly think I would like this.
She laughed. Again.
She told me it was just a story.
I told her giving me this book was a form of child abuse.
We both laughed. But I didn’t finish the book.
What’s kinda weird is that I did not have this reaction to “Native Son,” which I read in high school, and which I am sure no sane high school teacher would assign nowadays. Come to think of it, maybe my English teacher, Ms. Lane, didn’t assign it. She assigned Richard Wright’s first book, “Black Boy.” I think I may have taken it upon myself to read “Native Son.”
“Native Son” also depicts a horror, and a death. But it’s a death of a privileged, stupid White girl, who ignorantly puts in danger the life of her family’s Black driver by trying to seduce him, then being loud - in her bedroom - when he declines. In fear of being found and then lynched, he puts a pillow over her mouth to shut her up.
You can infer the rest. It’s gruesome. And sad. And driven entirely by overwhelming, but completely rational, fear. It’s also a great example of heightening the stakes as a storyteller. Each decision the character makes is worse than the next. He’s trapped by his own desperate panic, and it changes him.
Wright meant this book as a parable for how racism changes the people it’s targeted at. How any systemic abusive environment changes its victims. And its perpetrators.
I understood this book in a way that I could not comprehend the revenge motif of “Carrie” or making a 10-year-old feel guilt for thinking she murdered her brother in the midst of overwhelming state genocide.
“Carrie,” of course, was not really about revenge. It is a film in a larger genre of “the danger of women’s power,” which proliferated (along with unnecessary hysterectomies) in the ‘70s. I have been told that in the “Carrie” sequel, one of the boys even gets castrated.
I would say that this is proof - even in 1999 - that subtlety is dead.
What’s In a Name
My mother did not name me after the movie, “Carrie.” I was already born when it came out. I was named after the daughter of the movie star crooner she had a crush on in high school.
She was, in fact, the vice-president of the Eddie Fisher fan club.
So, yes, I was named after Princess Leia.
And yes, the 1950s were so innocent that a group of young girls could form a fan club and elect officers for it.
Now, I would say, fandom is a much more serious affair than in the 1950s and ‘60s, with whole movements naming themselves after their favorite performers, and having knock-down, drag-out fights online about who’s best. My mother didn’t have this global information machine. Nor did she see her fandom as a competition - though, knowing my mother, if she had gotten a whiff that something she already did could be a competition, she would have been all in.
She beat me at Scrabble once, something like 400-10, and even though I was in my 40s, living in a different state, raising young children, I again accused her of child abuse.
And again, she laughed.
But I can’t say my mother was not as fervent about Eddie Fisher as today’s Swifties are fervent about their beloved. After all, my mother NAMED HER CHILD after the daughter of her stan.
I wonder if teachers around the world are starting to see an increase in the number of Taylors in their classrooms.
On the Road Again
When I was a kid, my family would take driving vacations, during which we would listen to music. Mostly show tunes. “A Chorus Line” came out when I was 14. “Fiddler on the Roof” was a favorite. As was “Cabaret.” And “Funny Girl.”
“Nicky Arnstein… Nicky Arnstein… Nicky Arnstein…”
My mother loved singers. So, of course, we listened to Barbra Streisand’s non-show-tune oeuvre, too. Barbra at the Wintergarten. At the Forum (the one in LA, not the ruins in Rome). On a Clear Day. My Name is Barbra (1 and 2).
And, of course we played our 8-track tapes of Liza Minnelli, who I listened to more with interest than delight. Minnelli always seemed to be reaching. Vocally. Emotionally. There was something about her performances that made me sad.
What made me happy was her song about her name, “Liza with a Z,” written by John Kander and Fred Ebb, who wrote “Cabaret.” And “Chicago.” And “Kiss of the Spider Woman.” You know, just a couple of struggling songwriters.
“It’s Liza with a Z, not Lisa with an S, ‘cause Lisa with an S goes Snoz. Its Z instead of S, Li instead of Lee.’ It’s simple as could be see Liza!”
Let’s ignore the fact that there was never anything simple about Liza Minnelli’s life, from the moment she was born to a woman who is STILL an icon 54 years after her death.
It’s the song that I was drawn to. A name pronunciation. A simple name pronunciation. And a calling out of the people who were too lazy to notice.
When I went to college at Brandeis, my fellow students from LongGisland would tell me I said my name wrong. It’s spelled with an A, they would explain to me, so you pronounce it in a short, flat way, like the A in “cat.” CA-ry. As opposed, they explained again, to John Kerry, who spelled his name with an E, so it rhymed with “cherry.”
Which is how I say my name. Carrie. Cherry.
I finally told them they could spell it any way they wanted, but they needed to say my name the way I want. It’s my name. They didn’t get to tell me I was saying it wrong.
Which is why, when I started doing radio, I became a stickler for saying people’s names the way they said their names. I even asked then-Assemblyman Nelson Araujo if he wanted me to roll the R. He was so excited someone asked. Then, I blew it when I introduced him, and went off and practiced rolling my Rs so I wouldn’t make that mistake again.
The point is, there is a lot in a name. I’m glad I got one that is given to both men and women, because that suits me. If my mom had named me Sissy, I might have opted to adopt a nickname that was more androgynous.
It’s a simple concept. This is who I am. This is how I choose to be called. This is not life and death. If I changed my name to Edgar tomorrow, it would be nobody’s business but mine.
But I won’t do that, ‘cause Carrie Fisher was a badass and I’m proud to be named after her.
Your name, as my mom knew very well, is part of your story. It’s just a story. Nobody dies because you changed your name, or spell or say your given name differently. It’s about your life. And nobody gets to tell you you’re saying or doing it wrong.
My mom knew that, even if she did like mystery books and thrillers.
For my part, every single time my mom heard me tell a barista, “It’s Carrie, like the movie,” she would laugh, then shrug her shoulders as if to say, “Well, I tried.”