Everybody look at the fool. There he is, grinning like an idiot, at the top of this page.
One of the first things they teach you at newspaper school is to always have people spell out their names when you write them down. Otherwise, you’ll never know if a regular jackass named, say, Jeff, was born to people who never heard of a spelling they couldn’t over complicate.
So, here we are, 10 years into a newspaper career, and we’re still getting names wrong.
And we do it in blogs about retired English professors trained to watch for such mistakes.
Here then, are the correct spellings of the talented cast from “Fool For Love,” the recent Saint Leo University production based on a play by acclaimed actor Sam Shepard: Joe Pless played the booze-swilling, rifle-cleaning Eddie in performances Thursday and Saturday; Eddie’s lover and half-sister, May, was played by Emily Belvo on Wednesday and Friday.
The worrisome part of all this is that Mark “Tiger” Edmonds, the retired professor and “old, dead guy” in the play, was called so he could read the spellings directly from the playbill. He was out fishing, so The Tall Girl, his betrothed, read them off instead.
And some of the names were gone over more than once.
The Tall Girl doesn’t have a speech impediment, so somebody must need a Q-Tip.
Or a brain scan.