What's in a Nickname?

As a freshman in college, I took an introductory theater course to try to stay in touch with my long love of all things theatrical. This course was part literature, part acting, part technical elements of staging...a true broad introduction. One of the requirements was that we spend a minimum of ten hours that semester working on the production of a play -- as an actor, scene painter, lighting lackey, or whatever. As soon as I heard that one of the options for fulfilling those hours was in the costume shop, I took myself immediately down to the bowels of the theater and introduced myself to the professor who was head of the costuming department.

"I am in the intro theater course, and I have to do ten hours or work on a show, and I was hoping I could do them down here," I said softly, a little shy.

The spry, mustachioed man tilted his head to one side (I would come to learn he did that whenever he was considering anything carefully), looked me up and down, and said, "Well, the thing is, you have to already be able to sew."

"Oh, I can sew," I replied hurriedly.

"No," he said patiently, as if he'd heard that line a lot. "I mean you really have to be able to sew. I don't have time to teach you."

"I can really sew," I said, more forcefully this time. "I've been sewing all my life."

His head tilted so far to one side that I thought he might hurt his neck.

"Not just you think you can sew," he reiterated patiently. "I can only use someone who can actually sew. If I hand you something, I need you to be able to do it."

I was puzzled as to how I could prove to this man that I could really sew. And not a little mystified that he seemed so skeptical; his doubt suggested that he'd heard this a lot. I began to wonder just who these hordes were who came down to his windowless basement costume shop and asserted in off-hand, dismissive tones, accompanied by a casual wave of the hand, that they knew how to sew when, in fact, they did not. Did he really get so many patent liars about their sewing abilities that he had to be this cautious?

I don't recall whether I offered to hem something on the spot, or explained patiently that my mother was a professional seamstress and had taught me to sew as a child, or twirled around in some funky skirt I happened to be wearing that I'd actually made, or what. But whatever I said or did, he finally chose to take a chance on me. (Note, I do not say that he believed me yet, only that he agreed to give me a try.)

I do recall that he led me out of the costume shop and into his office to pursue the conversation further. I can pretend that I know how that talk went, but I don't -- although I suspect I trotted out phrases that I thought would help convince him, such as mentioning that I knew the difference between things cut on the bias and things not, that I had designed my own prom dress, or that my mother kept me home one day each year just before the big spring play went up to help her with all the last-minute details of the costumes. I had constructed bustles and trimmed hats. I knew my way around a pattern and could put a rolled hem into a skirt without ironing it first.

It came to pass that he decided I really could sew, and then he said, "Come on, I'll introduce you to everyone." He started to lead me out of his office and back into the costume shop, when he paused. "Your name is Andrea, right? Are you Andie?" I let him know in no uncertain terms that I was definitely NOT Andie. "Well, then, what's your nickname?"

I was stumped. "I don't really have a nickname."

He tilted his head to the side. "Everybody has a nickname," he said.

Finally I offered, "Well, my father used to call me AJ when I was a child, but no one has called me that since I was about six..." I trailed off. I didn't tell him that I'd insisted no one call me that because it was a "boy name." I simply assumed what you would assume too, I imagine: that someone you've known for fifteen minutes will not adopt a nickname for you that you have just said is not in fact a name anyone calls you.

And yet, he led me into the costume shop and proceeded to introduce me by saying, "Listen up, everyone! I'd like you all to meet AJ. She's going to be working down here this semester. She knows a lot more about sewing than you do, so mind what she says..." Or something along those lines. Basically, he told his entire diligently-working class that I was good people, I knew what I was doing, they weren't to mess with me. And my name was AJ.

As it turned out, I really had just met "everyone." The room was full of theater majors accomplishing some stage of the signature garment in the Fundamentals of Costume Design class: the Basic Ugly Bodice. This unwearable garment had curved seams and straight, two different kinds of sleeves, ruffles, trim, a zipper, buttons, and every other element of sewing you would need to know, all in one muslin blouse. Hence its name. I was later to learn that more than one student in this required course had presented his mother with a Basic Ugly Bodice as a Christmas present, so proud was he of having acquired the skill of sewing. In this room full of everyone who mattered in the theater at that particular moment, two things were assured: I was "in," and no one would think of me as an interloper from that day forward. And in the theater, my name was AJ forevermore.

It was unquestionably the strangest introduction I have ever had in my life, although it turned out to serve me well. I went on to be employed as a work-study student in the costume shop for twenty hours a week throughout my whole college career. I ran the shop during marathon sewing sessions before big performances; I worked as the main dresser during shows -- not just helping people in and out of clothes, but repairing things on the fly. And to this day, when friends of mine from those long-ago theater days find me on Facebook, they only recognize me because of my last name. And they address all their "hello, long-lost friend!" emails to AJ.

Although no one calls me that now, I do not find these greetings strange because it is the simple truth that I grew into the name. AJ was the person I was in that theater and in that crowd. AJ was confident, flirty, skilled, outspoken -- all the so many things I had a harder time being in real life. AJ loved to act but didn't have a lot of time for rehearsals due to her job, so she got her theater fix by hanging out with actors and sewing. And because all these people were in training, even the actors had to sew, so AJ -- in running the costume shop -- got to know absolutely everyone.

The AJ stories could fill a small book, and I smile to myself when I think back on those days of folly and wonder set in the magical space of a theater that served as a second home. And much as I intially resented being introduced under a name that was not my own, I know now that the new name gave me a chance to reimagine who I was. It became not just a nickname, but marker of my freedom. And for that, all these twenty-odd years later, I thank the man who foisted upon me, when I was only seventeen, a real and true break from my childhood.