“That’s my name, don’t wear it out!” was a sassy, cheeky way to respond to someone calling us out in the 1970s. Generations who weren’t on planet earth when this line was the thing can’t believe we were into it. When I put it in context and informed them that this was our playful way of saying that we did not fear confrontation. I told them it was the equivalent of, ‘Hey, I heard you the first time,’ when someone confrontationally called our name out a second time. When I told them that line could engender a “Woh!” from onlookers, they couldn’t understand it. “It’s not funny, it doesn’t sound effective, and are you sure this wasn’t just a you thing?” ‘No, it was all over the movies, the TV shows, and the commercials,’ I informed them. ‘We really thought we were onto something with this line.’ When I added that this line suggested to all parties concerned that we weren’t just ‘cool,’ in the face of confrontation, we were cooler than cool, they were ready to dismiss that entire time period as desperate, desperately confused, or sus.

When this idiomatic expression, or saying, first hit the streets, I was in grade school, and I either didn’t have the level of creativity or the intellectual heft necessarily to pull it off. It was too situational for me or something. I remember trying to use it, but it always came off as awkward. I didn’t have older brothers or neighborhood kids to teach and torture me into perfecting the nuances required to being cool. I was on my own, and I put far too much effort into it, I was always late to the party, and I didn’t know what to do once I got there. 

Since I didn’t have anyone to teach me, when I’d hear the cool kids around me say the same thing more than once, I would ask them where they got it. How uncool is that? 

“It’s just something I say,” the cool kids responded, and I’d drop it after that. I didn’t know how to be cool, but I knew the pratfalls to avoid to appearing too uncool, and I knew it was so uncool to try to figure out how or why something is cool. Cool is what it is, as they say. I knew trying to define the indefinable was not only difficult, it was self-defeating, but I’d obsess over trying to figure it out. As usual, with someone trying to figure out the nebulous and ever-changing, I overestimated my peers. I was always late to the party, as I wrote, but when I found out that the cool kids learned their favorite sayings from TV, movies, and music lyrics I couldn’t help but find that disappointing. I thought the difference between cool kids and me was their ability to organically create sayings. I wanted to be them, so I copied them, and I thought more of them. Learning that their sources were as simple as mine made it feel like all that I wasted a lot of time idolizing them. Then, when I saw one of their favorite sayings appear in a wiener commercial, it shattered my world for a while. It also left me in a weird place, because I impulsively thought less of them, but I also realized that it said something about me too, because they were my personal inspiration for what it meant to be cool?

Another huge inspiration for my definition was Danny Zuko, but when I heard him say, “That’s my name, don’t wear it out!” I was so late to the party that I didn’t know that all of the cool kids got it from this movie, because they saw Grease long before I did. I was also surprised to hear Danny Zuko say it, because I didn’t think he needed it. I thought he was so cool, so charismatic, and so everything that I wanted to be that I couldn’t believe he was saying what we were all saying to try to appear cool. It was the first time in my life that I thought someone was already so cool that they didn’t need to do anything to achieve that lofty title. I thought he was the personification of cool, and he had that it quality that the rest of us would never know. I wasn’t sure if I considered his effort redundant or overkill, but it tainted the character in a manner I couldn’t quite grasp. 

I was an eight-year-old who knew nothing about screenwriters and directors. I didn’t know that the primary job of screenwriters and directors was to manipulate us into thinking their characters were cool, and I didn’t know that casting agencies were hired to hire supporting actors for the expressed purpose of further manipulating the audience into believing that Danny Zuko was cooler than we were. I didn’t even have a firm grasp on the idea that there was an actor named John Travolta playing the role of Danny Zuko who had makeup people to enhance his skin, hair stylists to fashion his hair, and wardrobe personnel to fashion him into a cool character. I knew I wasn’t seeing 90 minutes of a person’s life captured for my enjoyment, but I didn’t know how manufactured and choreographed the image of Danny Zuko was. I just thought he was the essence of cool, and when I envisioned what it meant to be cool, Danny Zuko became my prototype. 

I’d love to say I quickly processed the difference between the definition of cool and cooler than cool as effortlessly as John Travolta, and the team behind Grease did, but I didn’t. It took me a long time to grasp it. After the writers, directors, and supporting actors manipulated my mind into believing I could form my own path to cool, I developed my personal definitions. We all did. We learned what lines to say and when to say them, but when Danny Zuko used that line we were all saying, it exposed the effort he put into it. If a Danny Zuko needed to learn the lines of the zeitgeist necessary to get in the club, In other words, then everyone did. When I later saw other screenwriters and directors pursue the cool motif for the characters of their movies, it further exposed the effort to me. Danny Zuko and The Fonz were my prototypes for cool guys, and the rest of them were frauds chasing after that characterization.

After seeing some of the effort Danny Zuko and others, put into trying to be cool, I wondered what I would think of them if they hadn’t said those lines we all copied, and what would I think of them if they refused to say those lines we all used to try to get someone, somewhere to think we were cool. We had a formula for cool provided by movies, music lyrics and wiener commercials, but what would we think of someone who strives for a place that leaves others wondering why we refuse to follow their formula? They taught us the formula for cool, but could I find a place that is cooler than cool by refusing to the follow their formula?  

The answer to that was no. No one appreciates a ‘dare to be different’ motif when it’s subtle and silent. We prefer the shocking and provocative definitions. Quiet nonconformity doesn’t sell. It doesn’t impress people to the point that they want to be our friends. It confuses them, and they rarely seek to define that confusion. They often just back away. When we want friendships, especially in our youth, we have to offer the kids around us a comfortable place they know. I struggled with all this, until I lost my conviction, and I didn’t try to find it again for years. No one who knew me then, or now, would ever say I found a “cooler than cool” place, and if you asked them if I was even cool, they’d probably laugh, “I don’t think so.” They would probably also add, “But I can tell you that I’ve never met anyone quite like him.”  

That was kind of it. They knew I was different, but they couldn’t see how those differences were in service of anything, so they didn’t want to have anything to do with me. Between ages eight and whatever age led to my personal age of enlightenment, I had no writers feeding me lines, and no directors giving me notes on how to project cool. I realized that I was on my own when it came to trying to figure this big mess out, because I wasn’t good-looking enough to play Danny Zuko, and my supporting cast was either not able or willing to play their roles in such a way that would manipulate our audience into thinking I was cool. The best course of action I found was “To be [my]self, because everyone else was taken.” I knew I’d run the risk of “impersonating my shadow” and I’d eventually become a shadow of my former self, but I already tried to be other people, I tried those masks on, and while I admit that it was a lot more fun than playing myself in this production, it never worked out the way I thought it would.