The other night Chris and I were watching Chinatown, and we both said “Hey!” when Jack Nicholson ripped an obituary out of the paper for a dead guy named Jasper Lamar Crabb. Because you just don’t see my old maiden name that often.
Growing up a Crabb wasn’t easy. Kids made fun of my name, and I was a supersensitive crybaby, and that just made them tease me more. Having an odd last name is the sort of unheralded social handicap that, like having red hair, could keep you out of the Oval Office. Or so I self-pityingly thought.
Then Harry Potter came along and people became more accustomed to the name, as part of the unholy trinity of Malfoy, Crabbe and Goyle.
Older people might remember Jack Crabb from Little Big Man, or Buster Crabbe, an early movie Tarzan.
But Jasper Crabb rang a particular bell with me, since that was the joke name my parents called me in utero, back when you only found out the gender in the delivery room. And my middle name starts with L, and my big brother’s initials are also JLC. So had I been a boy, perhaps I too would’ve been Jasper Lamar Crabb. How odd to stumble across the name I might have had for life, in real life, in a fictional setting.
