What's in a name?

True story: I've mentioned the soap opera The Brighter Day several times over the years, particularly in the weekly programming listings. It's not one of the better-remembered soap operas of the era (it ran on CBS from 1954 to 1962), and it was always a 15-minute soap, a carryover from the the days of radio, where The Brighter Day began in 1948. At any rate, here's a clip from a May 1955 episode.

The reason I mention this is because I have a somewhat oblique personal connection to this soap. (As you know, I don't often write about personal things, but I thought this one was too good to pass up.) One of the show's regular characters is an attorney named Mitchell Dru, played by actor , and his was the first character to cross over from one soap to another; after The Brighter Day went off the air, the character (and the actor) appeared first on As the World Turns, and then Another World and Somerset, all owned by the same company, Proctor & Gamble. After all, every good soap has to have an attorney present for one of its sensational murder trials, right?

Anyway, my point. I was born in early May 1960, while The Brighter Day was still on the air. My mother had wanted to give me, for a middle name, the last name of some family relation, cousins or something (I don't remember now), but she wasn't quite sure how to spell the name, nor could she find anyone who was, and because the birth certificate needed to be completed, she chose another middle name: Drew.*  

*It's a nice enough name, but I always felt kind of bad that it wasn't the name she'd originally wanted, and I seldom use it, or even my middle initial.

Granted it's spelled differently, but many of her friends teased her that she'd named me after the character Mitchell Dru. She said she'd not even been aware of it; she must not have watched The Brighter Day, but she did watch Another World later on, which is when she related the story to me, and I got to see my "namesake" in action. I've remembered this story all these years, but it wasn't until seeing this clip on YouTube, quite by accident, that I discovered the connection to The Brighter Day. Ah, the things you learn here: TV as a family tree. 

TV