Nicolas Cage and Names...

I smiled ear to ear when I read this piece of news: "Nicolas Cage gives Superman's birth name to son".

Nic Cage further cemented his fanboy creed by naming his baby after his favorite comic book character. (I guess Nic hasn't really gotten over losing the title role in the new Superman movie.) His son now owns the hip alliterative Kal-el Coppola Cage. Nic himself swiped his surname "Cage" from the famous Marvel Comics character Luke Cage. It's amazing how people are more adventurous nowadays when it comes to naming their kids. Clerks director Kevin Smith named his kid Harley after the Joker's moll. And Bruce Willis and Demi Moore named one of their daughters Tallulabell, a name that normally opens you up for serious ridicule in the Blue States and a date with a guy named Cletus from Hazzard County.

I used to hate my name. When I was growing up, I went through a period of self-loathing about my own name. I was conscious of being an immigrant in the produce capitol of the world, 2 hours south of the San Francisco Bay Area, but not far enough removed from the days of segregation. My mother, as devout a Roman Catholic as you'll ever get, adored Italian culture, so she and my dad agreed to name me after a Pope -- thus my name Lionello Bravo Partible. (Though, I'm not sure which one of the 13 Popes. My mom said he had 'The Great' tacked on after his name which might've done wonders for his self-esteem but didn't exactly give me a sense of entitlement.) So my full name is a combination of names from 3 countries that conquered the Phillipines: My first name is Italian (they conquered the Filipinos through Catholicism), my Spanish middle name is my mom's maiden name, and my last name is Portuguese. Every year I dreaded the first day of school because I knew of the impending trauma. I braced myself for the routine. At the beginning of class the teacher read aloud the names from the roll call, each one easily rolling off her tongue until...she saw my name. "Uh, Lie-oh-nell-oh..." Then came the sound of a roomful of snickering elementary kids. I'd meekly raise my hand and correct the teacher. "It's Leo. Lee-oh-nell-oh." And then more snickers and the loss of a dozen potential friends as I slinked down my chair thinking, "Dear God! Why couldn't I have a name like Bob Smith, or Joe Jones, or even Jimmy Sims."

The apex of my humiliation came in the 4th grade when our teacher (a well-loved disciplinarian named Mark Vinas who moonlighted as a Greek Orthodox priest) asked us to create a rhyme with our first names. One smart aleck kid made a well-timed remark. "Lionello Funicello." It sent the room into hysterics. He continued with, "Lionello full of Jello." You could hear the chairs fall over as dozens of tiny legs thumped with glee on the gray carpet like fans going nutso on the bleachers at a Patriots game after the Pats scored a touchdown.

In later years I adopted the diminutive Anglicized version of my name, Leo. I continued to wrestle with my name all through my high school years while trying to figure out what to do with my life. My main talent was art and I knew I wanted to draw comic books. But art skills, no matter how talented you are, just don't catch the attention of school girls, especially the dreamgirls with the plaid skirts. At best, I'd get crowds of computer nerds and stoners surrounding me for 10 minutes and a high-pitched comment from a passing cheerleader that went something like, "Ooh, you're such a good drawer!" (Correction. I'm an artist. Drawers are what you put your socks in.) So I looked for another possible career to prepare for that would allow me to do some self-aggrandizing during my high school tenure to get a date or ten. High school gave me the opportunity to refine my other talents. I always loved movies so I was set on becoming a filmmaker in my freshman year. Early in my junior year I wanted to be an actor after I wandered past the drama room and saw a bevy of cute thespians on stage.

Then I decided it would be cool to be a writer a couple of months before summer began and Steinbeck's writing took hold of my imagination. (John Steinbeck was loved and loathed by the locals, depending on whether he wrote your family in a bad light or made you a local hero, but nevertheless his legacy was a boon for local tourism.) In my senior year I wanted to be a rock star when I found out singing in church got the little girls' hearts-a-thumpin'.

But I was still in a conundrum. How was I going to get anywhere in the entertainment industry with a name like Lionello Bravo Partible? Up till that point I figured I needed to be Jewish to succeed in entertainment. I recited the names of great Jewish entertainers almost daily: Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Steven Spielberg, Woody Allen. Heck, I even suspected Elvis Presley of being Jewish because he had the Jewish root el in his name. I not only wanted to succeed, but I wanted to be great at what I did. Ergo, I needed to be Jewish. My prospects seemed dim for a time because simply adding a berg or a stein to my last name just wasn't going to solve my problem. (Partibleberg? Nah.)

My most immediate problem though was my name seemed to hinder my dating life. The girls gravitated to guys with athletic last names like Koslowski and Turner or an All-American boy-next-door named Sean, Steve, or Tim. Guys named Leo -- well, that's what they called their uncle. (Well, it wasn't all that bad. I did have dates, however clumsy and akward they were, and I wasn't an outcast. I was more like an in-betweener, with popularity highs or at the extreme, persona non grata low depending who was mad at me at the time.)

Thankfully, I figured out what I proudly believed to be a Solomonic resolution to my problem. If I wrote a book or directed a movie, I would be known as L.B. Partible (in the tradition of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis). If I was playing rock n' roll I would be Leo Bravo. Problem solved.

Well, not quite. I went with the handle Leo Bravo for a couple of years during my bar band days and then later as a singer-songwriter. Then my brother Van became an animator and created Johnny Bravo for the Cartoon Network. (Strangely enough, Van's real name is Efrem Giovanni Bravo Partible. If you translate my brother's middle name -- Giovanni is Italian for John -- he's actually the real Johnny Bravo.) So I scrapped Leo Bravo. Thank God the age of Leo happened. Leonardo DiCaprio, that is. His popularity made guys named Leo more dateable. No longer would the name be synonymous with some greasy car salesman with an open shirt and hairy patches of brillo pad twirling out from under or the Mafioso hitman who happened to be the close relative you saw only at Christmastime.

And then the world changed seemingly overnight and now it's cool to have an exotic name -- Usher Raymond, Giovanni Ribisi, Alfonse Cuaron, Bokeem Woodbine, Neil Gaiman, Serena Williams, Evangeline Lilly, and even Madonna Ciconne. I realized while looking back that I had nothing to fret about. I should've paid more attention to the uniqueness of famous names. Then I would've been comforted to know that the initials in C.S. Lewis' name were Clive Staples.

Today, I'm not only comfortable with my name, I actually appreciate the fact that my parents gave me the name that I have. Names have a meaning, and in the Bible they can indicate a person's character or define him. My name means "Lion" which is in turn a symbol of royalty. (Now if I'm supposed be some kind of royalty, I'm not sure, but for a while it looked like I was the king of fools with one disastrous relationship after another.)

Also, one of my heroes in high school was Leonardo Da Vinci and in him, I figured out what I wanted to do with myself. I took the Scripture "I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me" to heart.

Kal-el Cage has a surprisingly Biblical name. In his marvelous essay on Superman, Gary Engle makes some great observations about the name of Krypton's last son:

"...It seems hardly coincidental that Superman's real (Kryptonian) name is Kal-El, an apparent neologism by George Lowther, the author who novelized the comic strip in 1942. In Hebrew, el can be both root and affix for God. As a root, it is the masculine singular word for God...As an affix, el is most translated "of God," as in the plenitude of Old Testament given names: Ishma-el, Ezeki-el, Samu-el, etc...The morpheme Kal bears a linguistic relation to two Hebrew roots. The first, kal, means "with lightness" or "swiftness" (faster than a speeding bullet in Hebrew?). It also bears a connection to the root hal, where h is the guttural ch of chutzpah. Hal translates roughly as "everything" or "all." Kal-el, then can be read as "all that is God," or perhaps more in the spirit of the myth of Superman, "all that God is." And while we're at it, Kent is a form of the Hebrew kana. In its k-n-t form, the word appears in the Bible, meaning "I have found a son." (1)

I wonder if Nic knows what a wonderful name he gave his boy? I mean after all, he is a professing Christian. And Kal-el's name just might give an indication of what he may become.

(1) Engle, Gary. "What Makes Superman So Darned American?"Sign of Life in the USA:

Readings on Popular Culture for Writers. Sonia Maasik, Jack Solomon, Ed. 2nd Edition.

Boston. Bedford Books. 1997. 351.