As Morose by Any Other Name, Dana?

Life ain’t easy for a boy named Sue.

Friends are expecting their first child, and it’s going to be a boy. Our conversation inevitably got around to prospective names, and their short list includes Nicholas, Benjamin and Ezekiel.

Nick, Ben or Zeke.

Some of us only can imagine what life would be like with a manly name.

Who’s to say I wouldn’t have turned out normally if my family hadn’t moved when I began junior high from a small town where everyone knew me into the big city and where, on my first day in school, a boy wheeled around and said derisively, “Hey, you’ve got a girl’s name.”

Is there any humiliation worse than junior-high humiliation?

The laughter. The shame.

I could have retorted, “Do not!” It would have done no good. I came to learn that a lot of the kids knew a Dana Kessler, who also went to school there.

And she was a she.

“Son, this world is tough/

And if a man’s gonna make it

He’s gotta be tough . . .

So I give ya that name and I said goodbye

I knew you’d have to get tough or die,

And it’s that name that helped to make you strong.”

Years ago, there was a Golden Gloves champ from Omaha named Percy Titsworth. Gee, I wonder why he became a boxer.

Percy would have understood what Johnny Cash meant when he recorded “A Boy Named Sue” in 1969. My guess is ol’ Percy begged his dad to take him to the gym to learn to box.

My parents, however, had no such motive when they stuck this moniker on me 20 years earlier. They weren’t thinking of making me tough, nor, I’m certain, of hoping the name someday would help me tap into my feminine side.

My namesake was a football coach, Dana X. Bible. It was the only name my parents considered.

The name was my dad’s idea, who obviously didn’t consider the long-range potential for junior-high ridicule. But he really should have known better. After all, his given name was the rather formal “Milton,” but he went by “Bud” all his life.

“There’s far more in a name” than we think, says Irvine psychotherapist Sandra Harvey. Our name helps form the picture of how we see ourselves and how others see us, she says.

That makes sense. I don’t care how far he hits a golf ball, no one would ever ask for strokes against a guy named Eldrick Woods.

Now, “Tiger” Woods, that’s a whole different story.

Harvey says it isn’t uncommon for her patients to lament the names their parents gave them. One of her therapy techniques is to ask them what they would have named themselves.

Not even Harvey escaped the name burden. Her given name is Frances, which she was required to use in early elementary school days. But when her family moved to California and rules weren’t so rigid, she dumped Frances because it reminded her of the popular movie series featuring “Frances the Talking Mule.”

As for names with cross-gender potential, Harvey suspects the issue is less meaningful today. “Young people today have moved into the ambisexual, where there’s no differentiation,” she says. “In the last couple of generations, both boys and girls feel more comfortable in each other’s lives.”

Good for them. Unfortunately, I grew up in a time of gender stereotypes where a boy having a “girl’s name” put you behind the 8-ball. You either figured out a way to protect your honor or retreated.

It’s too late in the game for me to know whether a name like “Sam” or “Rocky” would have altered my life. It took me a long time to get comfortable with a “girl’s name” and its impact on my life. Only in recent years, for example, have I learned not to fight the occasional overwhelming urge to make a quilt.

Life is arduous enough, which is why I advise friends not to stick their boys with a name like mine. Don’t worry, they all say, we never even considered it.

That, of course, brings its own little twinge and evokes the whole set of childhood memories.

Like the friend who phoned a few years ago to tell me about her new baby. Although the child wasn’t named after me, she and her husband had decided on “Dana.”

It was a girl.

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821 or by writing to him at the Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa CA 92626, or by e-mail to [email protected]