camp laszlo

While I am characterized by any number of odd and inexplicable behavioral traits, one of the most such is probably the degree to which I hated my last name growing up. Nowadays of course I realize it's actually very cool, and its unusualness (in the US anyway) is a key contributing factor to that coolness. Of course, it's not the easiest name in the world to spell; my mother spells it "L-A-S-Z-as-in-zebra-L-O" which gets the point across. I tend to default to the pretentious (in the US anyway) but mostly understandable "L-A-S-zed-L-O" if I'm talking to someone who's likely to speak a little British, or else I spell it mom's way, but, being me, substitute in "zombie."

I pronounce it a little differently than the rest of the family, too; everyone else uses a hard A, while I use a sort of in-between semi-soft A, like "Lah-zlo" I don't have any clue which is more likely to be authentic, though given the sheer number of vowels Hungarian has, they're probably both equally distant from the real "a."

In any case, back to the hating. I will admit that there was a time in my life when, young and lonely and stupid, I wanted nothing more to fit in and seem, well, like everyone else I knew. Whieh, when one grows up in a hick town in Hawai'i, involves having a last name like Watanabe or Liu or Manuel or Keawe, far more than it does having one like Laszlo. So I hated it, pretty much up until college, when people started telling me how cool it was. And I started believing them.

It was quite some time before I found any Laszlos who weren't related to me. A few of them are pretty good. Discovering them helped overcome at least this aspect of my self-loathing. For the edification of others unfamiliar with the many Laszlos out there (and variants thereof), I present a brief best-of list.

Victor Laszlo is probably the most famous of Laszlos...the least important vertex of the greatest romantic triangle in all of cinema. My freshman year of college, I convinced much of the floor of my dorm that Casablanca was based on a true story and that Victor was some sort of distant uncle or cousin, and that Aunt Ilsa wasn't nearly as glamorous as Ingrid Bergman. Of course this was before the Internet, so such claims were far harder to confirm or disprove than they would be today.

In Hungary, Laszlo is far more common as a first name; Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, the graphic designer and photographer from the early 20th Century, is perhaps the most famous first-name-Laszlo. It was from his name that I first learned that if I wanted to be really pretentious I could spell my name with accents over both the "a" and the "o." Luckily I'm not that pretentious, at least not yet.

The geekily enjoyable Val Kilmer movie "Real Genius" was home to another Laszlo, or at least Lazlo. He was the weird guy who lived in the main character's closet, or at least in a set of rooms accessed through the main character's closet.

Then there was Erno Laszlo. I don't remember where I first encountered the cosmetics brand, maybe it was Macy's. I do recall that wherever it was, it was still early enough in my life that the sight of another Laszlo still took me somewhat aback. But it was late enough that I certainly didn't go around bragging to anybody about "Uncle Erno." At least, not in a serious way.

One would think that I would be thrilled beyond words by Roderick Anscombe's decision to name his bloodthirsty serial killer "Laszlo, Count Dracula." One would be wrong. I loved the title, but the book was, frankly, kind of sucky. Plus that's one less title available for my hypothetical spellbinding gothic thriller bestseller of, say, five years from now.

In my professional life, my one contact with a Laszlo has been Laszlo Systems, a Bay Area company that produces software that aids in the creation of rich internet applications. Oddly I've never gotten the story of the name's origin out of them when we've talked; there was no founding Laszlo or anything, it seems. However, I do make a point of reminding them that I'm readily available if they want to create a Chief Figurehead Officer role for me.

I will wrap up this brief tour of Laszlos with the inspiration for this essay, Cartoon Network 's near ubiquitous subway ad campaign promoting one of its new summer series, "Camp Lazlo." The eponymous Lazlo in this case is unfortunately neither a vampire nor a gloomy technology analyst. He's not even Hungarian (or Czech, a la Uncle Victor), but for some reason Brazilian. He's a nonconformist monkey who upsets things at the regimented summer camp to which he's been sent. The theme song, to the tune of "There was a farmer who had a dog…" unfortunately involves the endlessly repeated refrain "L-A-Z-L-O" which will only create a whole new generation of people predisposed to that spelling, and not the more consonant-heavy one that my family prefers.