Pleased To Meet You / Hope You Guess My Name

My name is Rebecca, after Miss America 1974. Really.

I didn't used to like the name. When I was little, I thought it was kind of stuffy, but I feel like I've grown into it. Once, when I was working as a cashier in high school, a customer — picture the exaggerated stereotype of a big, loud black woman — read my name tag and pronounced to the whole store: "REBECCA! THAT'S A SEXY NAME!" That may have been the turning point.

It's Hebrew, but I'm not Jewish, which has caused some confusion. And for some reason, a lot of people mistakenly call me Rachel — also Biblical and starts with an R, maybe...?

I've been called, at different points in my life: Jeebah, Budgie, Becky, Becca, Speckle, Bex, Elsa, Dexter, Schneidy, Bird, Peta (my roller derby alter ego — some of my teammates never even knew my real name), and Haggard Attention-Whore. Seriously — that last one was meant to be an insult, but I found it so awesome, I've adopted it as my title on an Internet forum.

If I had been a boy, I would have been named Michael, which would have made me the fifth Michael in my age group on my block growing up. If my dad had his way, I would have been Gretchen, so thank you, Mom, for sticking to your guns.

I've had some issues with my surname. People routinely mispronounce and misspell it, even though it's only five letters. During my radical feminist period, I believed it was sexist to have to change my last name if/when I got married, and for a while I was considering switching to my mom's un-Americanized maiden name, but "von Votrubova" is kind of a mouthful. So my solution has been to just eliminate a syllable from each name, and voilà — BeccaGo is born.

Welcome to my world. :)