Ringing in the New Year with my first guest blog

Welcome to my site’s first guest blog. It’s from my self-proclaimed ‘chronically sarcastic’ daughter Jamie, who I featured quite a bit in last year’s blogs … because she features so prominently in my life! Despite her prickly exterior, she’s an inspiration, mentor, therapist and friend to me … an ‘old soul’ since birth with a killer sense of humor and a big heart. 

“There’s a game I like to play in my classroom to break the ice at the beginning of the school year. It’s called two truths and a lie. You have to come up with three statements about yourself – two are true and one is a lie. Then the class has to guess which one is the lie. It’s a quick way to get to know my students and for them to get to know me. Now here is one for my mother:

Brad Cooperman
Doris Kearns Goodwin
Neil Tyson Grasso

If you know my mom, you know she is bad with names. But what you don’t know is that it is me, her chronically sarcastic daughter, that she comes to for clarification. She will come to me with questions such as ‘Who is the guy from the movie we saw together? The one I liked and you didn’t?’  Naturally, since I am beyond clever, I always know the answer. ‘Josh Lucason.’

As any self-respecting child will do, I whine and tease and pretend to have no clue what she’s talking about and then give her a fake name.  Unfortunately, some do-gooder (like my pesky brother Dan) will usually correct me. But there are a few classics that I’ve had to interpret.

Neil Tyson Grasso – astrophysicist Neil Degrass Tyson
Teddy Redmond – actor Eddie Redmayne (Teddy is someone she works with!)
David Grolls – musician Dave Groll

And my personal favorite – Roberta Goodwin Kearns (for author Doris Kearns Goodwin).

And, finally, who could forget the coworker who, after she repeatedly called him Robert throughout  a lengthy phone call, finally said, ‘My friends call me Andrew.’ Because that’s his actual name!

Now I’m pretty sure that this blog audience will sympathize more with my mom than me. But remember this – she still sometimes calls her friend of 10 years Linda instead of Laura. Wouldn’t you tease her too?

Sadly, this is an epidemic with moms all across America, and if you don’t believe me, check out this Saturday Night Live sketch  [click on link] that I am positive was modeled after my mom.”

*Editor’s note: My pretty chronic name confusion is not so much of a mystery if you consider the name recognition genes I inherited from my mom. She will just randomly make up names she doesn’t know – Star Wars’ ‘Return of the Jedi’ has forever been known, fondly in my family, as ‘Jehudi.’ The current show ‘New Amsterdam’ has been referred to as ‘Dr. Patrick’ and other titles that escape me now. I’m nowhere NEAR the ‘mom-translator’ as Jamie but I try with my mom too! (Also in my defense, who DOESN’T occasionally have trouble with three word names? Or mix up ‘Andy Samberg’ with ‘Adam Sandler’ … ‘Jack Kerouac’ with ‘Charles Kerault’ … ‘Laurence Olivier’ with ‘Lawrence of Arabia’?)  Just saying …