The Oda Syndrome

Nobody picked today in the OMBBBPC. So to pass the time, I'm going to tell you all the story of "Oda Mae". When Brenda and I were "Special Friends", we would hang out a lot and talk about how our families had nicknames for us. Brenda was called "Bean" or "Beany" 'cause when she was born, she was mostly arms and legs. Like a string bean. When I was born my dad called me "Turkey Bird" which eventually got shortened to "Byrd". I was also called "Bubba". I'm not sure if I know any person of the male gender who has an older sibling, and who lives in Texas who isn't called "Bubba". But, I digress. My friends from college and I started calling each other "Bubba", as kind of a running "east Texas red neck" joke. When Brenda and I would get together we started calling all the little boys we saw running around, "Bubba". So that's where that name came from. After awhile, we were like..."What do we call little girls?" We had no idea so we would just wait until the right name came along. One night we were watching "Ghost" on TV. [You can see where this is going....] Whoopie Goldberg played a character who was a psychic, and her name was "Oda Mae Brown" (actually, I think that is an alias she used at some point during the movie -OM). She was totally funny in this movie and we just cracked up at her name. I said, "If we ever have children and one of them is a girl, then we should name her 'Oda Mae'." Brenda was decisively against this, but eventually I wore her down. Ever since then we've called little boys, "Bubba" and little girls "Oda Mae".
Then we were thinking, "What if we have more than one boy or girl?" "We can't very well call them both 'Bubba' or 'Oda Mae'." So we decide that if we have a second boy he will be called "Elmer" simply because he's the second male. Poor "Elmer". We haven't thought too much about a second girl. We have come up with "Mae Oda" then when we needed both girls to come to us, we'd just call ' "'Oda Mae Oda!!!!' get in here!"

So that's the story and we're stickin' to it!

OD