By any other name, not so famous
After criminal charges were laid against Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos this past week, another George Papadopoulos took to Twitter to protest that he was not that George Papadopoulos.
To which Michael Bolton (no, not that Michael Bolton) tweeted the reply: “I feel your pain, brother.”
That, in turn, inspired James Taylor (no, not that James Taylor) to add: “we should record together, man.”
And that led to John Ratzenberger (no, not the one from Cheers) to chime in with “maybe we should start our own support group.”
It must be weird to go through life like that, hauling around a name made famous by someone else.
It must be weirder still to grow up with an unremarkable name that, out of the blue, gets dragged into the spotlight (or the mud) by someone else. Haida Gwaii has a Brad Pitt. Vancouver has a Harry Potter. Victoria’s Mandeep Shahi went to school with an Eddie Murphy.
Shahi’s name might not be famous, but it is shared with someone who made it problematic. The other Mandeep Shahi was an Air Canada flight attendant who was caught sneaking four kilograms of cocaine into Heathrow Airport in 2010.
“I was travelling at the time,” the Victoria woman recalls. “My parents got a phone call saying their daughter had been arrested for smuggling cocaine.”
Not only that, but some news sites plucked her photo from her LinkedIn account and ran it beside stories about the smuggler. Super. Our Shahi had the pictures removed, but can’t do much about the name. She’s in e-commerce, so gets Googled a lot, and up the stories come again, like last night’s pizza.
The worst part? The smuggling Shahi got banned by Air Canada, which means the non-smuggling Shahi must go through a 20- to 30minute Who’s On First Abbott and Costello pre-boarding ritual every time she flies with that airline or one of its partners, which business requires her to do. “I just have to go to the airport fairly early. I can’t do any online check-in.”
This has been going on for seven years. “It has kind of been weird.”
Some people never get over having a name that becomes a liability. I once interviewed an immigrant from Saudi Arabia who had high hopes of landing a job in Victoria when he moved here in 2001. Unfortunately for him, nobody wanted to hire a guy named Osama after that September. He left the country. True story.
Others embrace the coincidence. The late Freddy Krueger, who drove the Victoria airport shuttle, used to dress up as the horror-movie character on Halloween.
He even lived on Saanich’s Elm Street at one point.
Some take on their namesake’s characteristics. The old Monty’s strip bar was run by Cary Grant, a showman whose Hollywood flair brought the Miss Nude Commonwealth contest to Victoria during the 1994 Games. It wasn’t just a peeling competition: The winner, a Saskatchewan-born dancer named Roxette (yeah, pretty sure that’s what it said on her birth certificate) won by singing Michael Jackson’s Heal the World before shouting: “Let’s work together, country to country.”
Speaking of Michael Jackson, Victoria had one of those, too. “People used to like doing Beat It or Thriller,” he said a few years ago. “I probably know something like 250 Michael Jackson jokes.” It wore thin after a while.
Salt Spring Island has a guy who can relate. Mike Tyson’s name was pretty ordinary until the emergence of the heavyweight boxer in the 1980s. It got really strange in 1997 after the fighter, apparently hungry for more than victory, bit off half of Evander Holyfield’s ear during a title bout.
For Salt Spring’s Mike Tyson, that meant a steady diet of comedians who would cover their ears when they saw him coming. Har de har har. (The story took an odd twist once when the Salt Spring Tyson discovered his Hawaiian hotel was next door to one where Holyfield was staying. Fortunately, there was no rematch.)
“It has kind of died down now,” he said this past week. “There’s no more bite-the-ear jokes. He’s kind of faded into the sunset.”
George Papadopoulos can only dream of that day.