Why I Dare a/k/a I Hate Holly Hughes

WARNING - R RATED POST.... My young friends should skip this!

I caused quite a flurry on Facebook a few weeks ago - setting off a whole mess of emails from confused family and friends because I changed my name on Facebook. I dropped my legal last name. (Re: yesterday's post - Does anyone find it odd that you can change your legal given name on Facebook but...you can't add ONE WORD to your business name???)

And since I still get questions about this change, I thought I would spell it out in one linkable place.

Mystery Focal - My name is a mystery and so is this bead!

 

Due to the circumstances of my birth, I grew up with a last name that has zero meaning to me. It is not who I am. It makes things convenient for my family...that's all. I'm not attached to it in any way. I had always planned to change it to my father's name when I was 18. But he was long since deceased and I didn't really care for the kind of people my siblings on his side of the family were... it was not a name I wanted to share with them. So I kept the one I had for convenience and the alliteration (always a writer!) despite hating it for years....

I hated my last name because... I've always had a Holly Hughes twin in every facet of my life. And I hate her! All of them! The one I knew in high school... didn't have a good reputation. I was a good girl and hated being associated with her but I knew I was leaving for college. Yet another another found me in college. She was two steps from prostitution in my book. It was then I started using D - my middle initial to set me apart. Luckily she got married my sophomore year and I had two blissful years of being the only Holly Hughes in my life.

I moved to Los Angeles in 1987 and found another. HER - I truly despise. She was a performance artist. She got naked on stage and used toys to satisfy herself! For money! In front of strangers!!! Good grief! I worked for directors who had seen her shows and would pick at me endlessly. I always pointed to my middle initial... No, I'm Holly D.

Then one cold winter night, I found myself on some desolate set of a commercial I was production managing. I had nothing more to do until wrap except keep warm. One of our police officers had me sit in his car. We were bored. He ran my name for warrants as a joke. To my dismay there were 30 some Holly Hugheses in California and six had warrants out for their arrest! I didn't like those odds. I didn't like having to show my co-worker my i.d. so that he could verify that I didn't need to be hauled off to jail that very second!

Finally, I accepted myself as an artist. I was writing a book. It was the first time I was putting ME out there in the world and I simply deleted the last name that caused me so much pain. (Would you believe...the other Holly Hughes wrote a porn book the same year???? I can't get away from her!) When I bought my first business, I had the license put in the name Holly Dare and that's how I've thought of myself as ever since.

But with the advent of Facebook... things got muddy. As customer's became repeat customers and then friends, I would see them talking about my work and list me as Holly Hughes. It was upsetting to me and confusing to them. So I performed a Hughes-ectomy - I lopped it off and it will never return.