WIT Voices

I used to only share my name with a distant cousin who is a psychiatrist – and conveniently once had an ex-boyfriend for a client. Cindy Fulchino. People either knew how to pronounce it or spell it, and never did the two met. But those friends who could pronounce it, boy did they love flaunting it. Google Cindy Fulchino and you got all sorts of interesting tidbits, including reviews in Backstage that hated a play I directed but couldn’t say so because the playwright shared my name (my father), to a stage combat club that I joined freshman year of college when my dream was to run a stage combat school in the wilderness somewhere. Cindy Fulchino had all sorts of interesting times in life in summer stocks and basements of New York City theaters.

When I got married, my original intent was to keep Fulchino as my professional name and use Jenkins as my personal name.

That’s all well and good if your husband and personal name have more to do with stocks trading than telling stories to people in a darkened room (which your husband usually lights). That’s fine if half the people with whom you work in theater weren’t at your wedding, shivering in their layered semi-formal garb while the sun set and the wind blew and your officiate tried not to get swallowed up by a riptide on “America’s Deadliest Beach,” – I’m serious, there was a sign – and so every theater into which you walk you are met by “The New Mrs. Jenkins!”

Even more than that, because there are still plenty of people who knew me as Cindy Fulchino, and more of them are having trouble with the new simpler spelled name, more than that is the fact that I would look at my husband and want to be connected to him. I WANT people to know that we’re married. I saw my new uncle Joe dancing on a table and my new father completely smashed on Cabo Wabo Tequila, playing hacky sack with teenagers – and using his cane – and I wanted to be a Jenkins. I want an immediate connection with my husband that I never thought I would experience, since I fought so hard for independence from a relationship. I stared at my Fulchino Family, the only representatives from my blood relatives who made it 3,000 miles to Bodega Bay, and I loved what they had given and would continue to give me, and looked across the yard to my new additional family. I knew all their quirks and I knew all their skeletons, and I knew they had each played their part in making my husband the man he is.

After changing my mind on keeping my maiden name at all, there are still people who are confused. There are still times when I refer to myself as Cindy Fulchino-Jenkins, and many times when I tell people to google me under my maiden name. When people give me criticism on my choice, I can’t help but say that if the decision involved them, I would have asked them. I didn’t ask the people most affected by this decision, and my own family never struggles with calling me Mrs. Jenkins.

So now if you Google Cindy Jenkins then you get a metalsmith bead designer, and Cindy Marie Jenkins brings up a felon.

I think I’m going with Cindy Marie Jenkins.