"Say My Name."

"We need a name. Give us a name."~The Delivery Man from the Seinfeld Episode-The Race asking Elaine who the order is for.

You know, I thought long and hard about this one. It's easy enough just to point out my real name and call it a day. But how boring is that?! I can't stand being me most of the time, and the thought of telling you what I do during the day might bore you to tears. It would most likely go something like this:

8:30:00am-Alarm goes off (forgot to turn off the alarm from the other day's important wake up call).

8:30:45am-Hit the snooze, have no clue where I am, or what's going on. Go back to sleep.

8:35:00am-Alarm goes off AGAIN (still realize I didn't have to get up, but forgot to turn off the alarm still).

8:35:05am-Lay there, can't sleep. Stare at the wall. Contemplate life's ill-decisions.

Yeah, like that.

So anyway. Like I was sayin'. It dawned on me that I need to liven things up. I need the "alter-ego". Just be SOMEBODY else (for this blog). But how to go about this without being completely pretentious? The self-declared nick name has a certain amount of "stupid" to it. It's gotta be something cool that you like to be called, and yet you want others to think you're cool with a cool nickname. I once worked with a guy who had the self-proclaimed "Bass man" , but he turned out to be a lame-o.  Without him knowing, we started calling him "Ass Man" (*actual nickname and pseudo nickname have been changed to protect the idiots).


Nicknames have never been able to stick with me, except for the bad ones.   Why bother keeping with a demoralizing alter ego?  

First off, I am a trombone player.  This is very key into the whole summer project thing I got goin' on.  So it's gotta be something along the lines of a trombone-reference.  I gotta tell ya, there aren't a lot of cool names with 'trombone' as an underlining reference.  We'll get into it more the better we know each other.

 We could go with "Bones", but that name is so iconic in our pop- culture.  You say "Bones" and you get William Shatner's voice uttering Dr. McCoy's nickname.  He's the cranky doctor on the starship Enterprise who doesn't get along with Vulcans.  Yeah, I'll be the kid who gets picked on for playing trombone AND being a Star Trek fan.  No good.

Also a big no no is the fact that one of the top trombone players around goes by the name "Bones".  Tom Bones Malone has been with Paul Shaffer and the CBS Orchestra for many years now.  You see him usually with a purple or blue jacket with the horn section doing silly stuff on Late Night with David Letterman at 11:35E.  Still don't know who he is?

His biggest claim to fame was probably in the movie "Blues Brothers",  where he was introduced to the movie when Jake and Elwood  walked into a dingy night club to hear Murph and the Magic Tones and were playing this...   

This is suppose to portray once great musicians resorting to cheese music to stay afloat, wilts playing in the slums for less than enthused audiences.  I've been there...A LOT.  I might be the only one who thinks this recording is pretty awesome.

I actually met Bones a few times.  Each time, I say, "Your acting on Blues Brothers was Oscar worthy."  He gets a chuckle out of it.

How could anyone in my generation not forget Richard Milhous Stabone?  He was Mike Seaver's best friend in the show Growing Pains back in the late 80's.    Nickname.... BONER.  How that one ever got past the FCC is beyond me.  Every guy on a tv show back then had a dopey side-kick with no brains and always getting into trouble.  They tried to give him some street cred, as his character left the show to join the Marines.

In an interesting twist, the actor who played Boner (Andrew Koenig) is son of Chekhov, the guy on the ORIGINAL Star Trek (who worked with Bones, catch-22).  Sadly, Andrew took his own life this past February in a bout with depression.

OK. So we got Bones and Boner that are off the list.  Not a lot of choices left.  Then it dawned on me: the only nickname I've been given that's stuck for many years.  And so, I am hereby named:

  BONE. 

This is not a self-proclamation.  In fact, I was given this name as we sat around in the middle of nowhere at an Applebee's more than 7 years ago.  No prefix, no suffix.  My friend just gave me the name "Bone".  Bone really was only used on tour,  and when I chat online with my friend who we keep in touch to this day.  I was also given an element of coolness when my nephew said that he likes to use my avatar character when he plays on the Wii.  One day, I'll include real pictures of myself as we move along.

Well, that took entirely too much time to explain.  But that's it.  I like it.   We'll go with that.

~Bone.