Gina Lollabrigida

Oh The Rhythm of Life dept.

Some names are short.

Babe Ruth. Ty Cobb. James Joyce. John Wayne. Bob Weir.

Some names are just one name. Cher. Prince. Elvis. Satchmo. Bruuuuce.

And some names are three names.

You’d never hear Charles Reilly, but Charles Nelson Reilly.

Julia Louis Dreyfus. Oliver Wendell Holmes. You might not know Alexander Bell, but you’d instantly recognize Alexander Graham Bell.

Then there’s Neil Degrasse Tyson. William Jennings Bryan. Norman Vincent Peale. Jean-Claude Killy. Vincent van Gogh. James Fenimore Cooper. Jimmie Dale Gilmore. Jean-Paul Sartre. Billie-Jean King.

You might call him Kareem, and you might call him Abdul-Jabbar, but more likely you’d call him Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

Here’s a cool rhythm of a name: Gina Lollabrigida.

Crispy crunchy Oreo.

Doesn’t rhyme, but the rhythm is the same.

Gina Lollabrigida. Crispy crunchy Oreo. David Hockney painted me. Benjamin Netanyahu. BEN-ja-min Ne-TAN-ya-hu. Leonardo da Vinci.

I used to play this game a lot. I mean, sometimes. Lists of people whose names have the same rhythm.

John Lennon/Bob Dylan/Joe Namath/Bill Buckner/Tom Brady

William Shakespeare/Frederick Douglass/Henny Youngman/Marlon Brando/Sandy Koufax/Clara Barton/Peyton Manning/Buddy Holly/Barbra Streisand.

Buddy Holly

Sean Connery/Bob Zimmerman/Fats Domino/John McEnroe/Wilt Chamberlain/Kurt Vonnegut.

Marilyn Monroe/Joe DiMaggio/Billie Holiday

You get the idea. You can do it forever.

Flannery O’Connor/Michael Martin-Murphy/Semolina Pilchard.

Maybe this is what people did with their spare time before there was scrolling.

Or maybe it was just me.

I have to say, there may be madness down this path.

I don’t necessarily recommend it.

It’s the kind of thing, once you start noticing it, the rhythm of names, it becomes something you can’t not be aware of.

And you may well not want to be.

I can’t think, really, of any advantage to it.

Sometimes it may be useful in songwriting, or poetry, but not necessarily.

And if not, then there’s really no good to come from it.

Just something spinning in your head you can’t get rid of.

Anyway. It’s something to do.

If you feel like it.

Sometime.

Anytime, really.

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Here’s “Marilyn Monroe”: