name game

I still have a "Google News" alert for my name. This is left over from by bureaucratic days when I found it helpful to keep tabs on my periodic appearances in the news (like my stint as a rogue). I've never gotten around to canceling the alert, so periodically I get a message that someone with my name is mentioned somewhere on the internets.

Earlier today I received an e-mail alert telling me that I was mentioned on this blog. Except, it's not me. The author is referencing one of her favorite childhood toys, a Cabbage Page doll named .... you guessed it ... "Susan Francois."

How incredibly strange is that!!!???

Update: Here's a bit in from an article in USA Today, where they interviewed the man behind the Cabbage Patch Doll phenomenon:

Each Cabbage Patch Kid comes with a birth certificate. "I used an old 1930s baby book to come up with the names," he told me in a phone interview from his home in Atlanta. (Today, Play Along uses the Social Security register.) That helps explain why the names of my Kids never mirrored my friends': When was the last time you ran into an Elsa, Kendall or a Benny?

I was never very into dolls, but my friends were. I remember succumbing to the peer pressure and asking for a Cabbage Page Kid. My mother of course would have none of it ... she had a policy of not buying things that we saw advertised on tv. (Only Santa Claus did such things - and she had no control over his purchasing decisions).

What if my mother had bought one for me .... and what if its name was "Susan Francois?"

(By the way ... I know both an Elsa AND a Kendall in real life. Not sure if I've ever met a Benny though.)