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Name change

1. “Just finished your piece in Desert Companion about changing your name,” Erin Timrawi of Las Vegas recently Facebooked to staff writer Heidi Kyser. It was a reference to Kyser’s October “Open Topic” piece detailing her struggle to reclaim her maiden name after getting married — a process that Nevada law made jaw-droppingly complicated, as Timrawi understood. “My jaw dropped, it really dropped, and my blood is boiling in condolence. Thank you for sharing that horrific experience.”

Other women — this being a problem largely faced by women — chimed in: “When I got married, I wanted to make my maiden name an additional middle name and create a non-hyphened, four-word name,” Carly Brockinton wrote us.  “Nevada wouldn’t have it. I was told I could do it with the U.S. government, but not the state.” Reader Beth Lano added, “I spent a few weeks working on getting a marriage certificate and a divorce decree from a brief marriage in the ’80s, and the same from my second marriage. All so I can get the Real ID and a new passport. It’s one hell of a lot of trouble to amass the buttload of paperwork to prove you are who you are. Thank God I kept my last married name. Women shouldn’t have to go through the hassle.”

And heaven forbid your name have a nonstandard spelling, as journalist and sometime DC contributor Lissa Townsend Rodgers learned. “They rejected the extra S when I moved here, even though it was on all of my New York ID,” she commented on  Facebook. “The woman refused to accept my birth certificate because it ‘was not the original.’ It was the official copy I left the hospital with and have used for all of my ID throughout my life. But she wanted the ‘original.’ … She still refused and handed me a sheet with instructions on how to get ‘the original birth certificate.’ Which, of course, said at the top, ‘How to get an official copy of your birth certificate.’” One can imagine her blood boiling in something other than condolence.

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“Thus,” she concludes, “all of my Nevada ID is based on a temporary passport I got in Paris in 1990. So, basically, I got birthered back in 2004.”

 

2. Some late-arriving dissent from reader Don LeHeup: “I was a little taken aback by the article on Sean Russell in the July issue of Desert Companion.” Thinking back, you might recall that Russell created new sculpture by blasting blocks of clay with gunfire, stimulated by the shooting people engage in at various points on the edge of town. “Shooting bottles and strewing the desert with broken glass doesn’t strike me as art,” LeHeup says, “and is irresponsible, to say the least.” To be clear, the actual art didn’t involve shooting glass, but rather blocks of clay. The glass-shooting was more of a recreational thing — questionable in the minds of some, perhaps, yet legal and engaged in by quite a few people. It became the starting point of Russell’s series.

 

3. A bit of follow-up: In previous editions (August 2014, last August), we wrote about the fledgling UNLV medical school, wherein Barbara Atkinson served as planning dean. She’s now been made founding dean, and Heidi Kyser talked to her on the occasion: What does this change mean? “I’ve agreed to stay long enough to get the school off the ground and students enrolled. Planning dean implies a little more flexibility, that they might have hired someone else to start the first class of students. This means that I’ll be working beyond laying the groundwork to the point where the school is actually functioning. I’m really happy to be able to get the first class of students started.” What is the time frame of your commitment? “The first class of students will start in the summer 2017 and graduate spring 2021. So, May-June of 2021, they’ll graduate. I’m going to at least stay through their first couple years. I’m not all that young, but I’ll still hopefully be going strong enough at that point to make sure things are running smoothly before I hand off the reins to someone else.” So you’re still happy here, even though you uprooted your husband to move here and do this job? “Yes. That decision didn’t take long. It took my husband about three weeks to say he likes it better here than anywhere else we’ve been. He can play golf, he’s made a lot of friends, and the weather is great. There’s just so much to do here. And to me, everyone’s been so nice and welcoming. The community has really embraced the medical school wholeheartedly and shown their support in many ways.”