Why do I have a pen name

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Below is my column from the July, 2012 Sturbridge Times Magazine, Page 20 explaining why I felt it necessary to be less common.

NOM DE PLUME

BY RICHARD MORCHOE (THE ARTIST FORMERLY KNOWN AS RICHARD MURPHY)

"What's in a name? That which we call a rose

By any other name would smell as sweet."

Such are the words of Juliet as she tells her Romeo he is not his name.  Is that true?  Is what we are called merely an incidental aspect of our lives?  I’m not sure, but I have a problem with my name.  There are way too many Murphys.

To give you an idea of what I’m up against, nobody in Massachusetts will ever say, “You know the problem with this state is you can never find anybody with the last name Murphy.”  It may not be the most common surname around, but there are a lot of us.

That is not the worst of it.  Murphy is the go to name for humorous treatment of Irish people.  Whether it’s Funky Murphy’s bar or the song, “Who threw the overalls in Mrs. Murphy’s Chowder,” we are the victims of our name.  We don’t even get royalties for Murphy’s Law.

Someone hears your name, they figure you are an expert or at least a source of Irish information.  In my case that might not be completely untrue.  I do have a lot of friends and relatives who are Irish.    There is a lot of Irish history I know, but I am a history nerd and probably know more about someone else’s ethnic record because that is my interest.

Then there is the subject of alcohol.  I am no teetotaler, but there is the assumption sight unseen that I must drink more than average due to my Hibernian ancestry.  True, in college I did my part to keep the American brewery industry healthy, but failed to become an alcoholic.  Though I can happily ingest the odd pint of Guinness, my preference is more vin rouge avec le diner.  

It has become such that when people ask me something that assumes i am Irish, I tell them my ancestry is full blooded Italian.  Upon their skepticism, I reply that when my great grandfather Giuseppe di Merfi came to immigration, those horrible Irish made him drop the di and change Merfi.  I then claim the cost in therapy for the family has been brutal.  Considering the number of people who actually believe that foolishness, I should think about becoming a conman.

I had thought a unique first name would solve the problem for my children.  I didn’t name my son Sue as in the Johnny Cash song.  There would have been no point to that as there are too many Sue Murphys.  He was given a name that I thought no one in America would possess.  Wrong.  I was sure until my sister handed me a business card of a co-worker with my son’s name.  I fleetingly thought it would have been good idea to use exotic names of other ethnicities, but Genghis Murphy doesn’t really work.

Then there was the recent Russian sleeper spy ring that was caught.  One of the spies was named Richard Murphy.  I am no expert on the subject of slavic nomenclature, but my guess is that Murphy was not the man’s original tag.

Getting other peoples’ mail can also be interesting.  Unfortunately there were never any checks.  Someone else with my name was the patient of the same doctor.  I would get notices that I was long delinquent on the bill.  Being considered a deadbeat by the man I was entrusting with my health is not where I wanted to be.

For a writer, the name is much too common.  Yet actually, I am proud to be a Murphy.  My family and ancestors suffered occupation and oppression and never gave in.  I don’t want to change my name, only its form. In fact Murphy itself is an Anglicization, and there is a form, Morchoe, which is more Irish though it does not sound so.  People will mistake me for something else, or nothing else.  I’m okay with that.  Best of all, there are no other Richard Morchoes in the country, or maybe the world.  Go ahead, google it.  There are nada, zip, zero.  When Richard Murphy is searched there are over seven million.

Maybe Juliet was completely wrong and we are our names.  Maybe I’ll be a changed man with a nom de plume.  My family might aver that it would not be a bad thing.  

Anyway, I never had a pen name before.