NOMEN OMEN?

"Are we imprisoned by our names?" asks Stephen Holden, in his New York Times review of a new documentary called "The Grace Lee Project." Director Grace Lee goes on a quest to discover whether her many namesakes live up to the good-girl, high-achiever image conjured up by her name. The answer, depressingly, seems to be mostly yes. The typical Grace Lee, she finds, would be a 25-year old Korean-American woman living in California, with a master�s degree and a few years of piano lessons under her belt. There are exceptions, of course, the most outstanding being an 88-year-old Grace Lee who is a community activist from Detroit and still going strong.
I haven�t see "The Grace Lee Project," but it still sounds like a good idea for a film because it taps into a primal curiosity. Most of us harbour the suspicion, or the conviction, that our names are intricately wound up in our character, the bearer of some psychic DNA, and may even determine our fate. For evidence that this is not the case, click on "Other Paul Wilsons" on the sidebar of this site.