Lydia the Tattooed Lady

Marx Brothers

Kelly from the Buffalo area wrote:

I hope her birthday was wonderful. Here’s an “Ask Me Anything” question: When she was a kid, did you ever make her listen to “Lydia the Tattooed Lady”?

Of course, her birthday was terrific. She has such wonderful parents.

Before I answer that, I should remind you of a post from ten years ago about naming the child.

No name in the top 10 in the Social Security list of most popular names for the most recent year available.

No naming after any family member, living or dead. I want her to have her own identity. 

No unisex names: Terry, Madison, Lynn, e.g., This comes directly from the fact that my father AND my sister were both named Leslie. 

It had to have two or more syllables, to balance off the shortness of Green.

It should have a recognizable spelling.

No names beginning and ending with A.

Lots of rules

That post was based on a post I wrote in my first month of blogging in May 2005.

“So, Lydia, it was, named in part after a woman in Acts who was rich even to put up the apostle Paul and his cohorts. Only later, a friend pointed out that the church I attended as a child, Trinity A.M.E. Zion, was on the corner of Lydia and Oak and that I walked down Lydia Street every day on my way to school. Obviously, I knew this to be factually true, but never crossed my consciousness.”

Then I wrote: “The only downside to her name has been those streams of choruses from Marx Brothers’ fans of “Lydia the Tattooed Lady,” a song that had TOTALLY slipped my mind.

“So, even with RULES, tattoos happen. But so do encyclo-pidias.”

When she was days old, my friend Walter observed that song, and I groaned. All my rules and planning, yet that song slipped by me. It’s not that I would have necessarily changed the name, but the information would have factored into the thought process.

To the actual question I asked my daughter since I couldn’t remember. She said that I told her about it. I might have even shown her a video clip, probably in 2013, since someone’s comment prompted that post.

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