Latest news with #ChroniclesofPrydain
Yahoo
17-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Kat Dennings Reveals She Chose Her Stage Name At Age 9 For Hilariously Silly Reasons
Considering that Kat Dennings likely chose her stage name in 1995, at least she didn't end up with, 'Topange Hocus Pocus Dunkaroo.' The 'Switching Gears' star appeared on Kylie Kelce's podcast, 'Not Gonna Lie,' last week, and was asked about the meaning behind her stage name — and Dennings had an adorably unhinged answer. The '2 Broke Girls' alum explained to Kelce that her real name is Katherine Litwack, and that she chose the stage name 'Kat Dennings' when she was just 9 years old. 'My real last name is Litwack — that's all you need to hear,' she joked, before continuing. 'At 9, I was like, 'This isn't going to work for me. This is not going to work,'' Dennings said, mocking her younger self. 'She-slash-I was very ahead of her time. It was a CEO situation. I was like, 'This can't be displayed on a poster. It shant happen!'' The 'Thor' alum then explained that she got the idea for her last name while visiting with a family friend, children's fantasy author Lloyd Alexander, who is best known for his 'Chronicles of Prydain' series. 'Randomly, he was my mother's best friend,' Dennings explained. 'So I went there every week until I was 15 years old, and they were like my grandparents, he and his wife. So, his wife's name was Janine Denni, she was French. …And I thought it would be a super sick idea if I took her name and made it kinda different. Literally, that was the thinking. That's as far as it went. So 'Dennings' is from her.' Most would assume that Dennings got 'Kat' from her own name, which is Katherine. But no. There's a very silly reason why she landed on 'Kat' as well. She explained that Christina Ricci's character in the 1995 film 'Casper' was named Kat, and she was Denning's 'favorite character at the time.' 'So I was like, 'OK, Kat Dennings. This is it, I can really picture it.'' she said. 'It's insane.' As whimsical as her choices were, Kat Dennings isn't a bad name stage for a kid to come up with. It could have been way worse. Kristen Bell, for instance, admitted during a 2015 appearance on 'Jimmy Kimmel Live!' that when she was a kid, she 'hated' her first name and took it upon herself to change it. 'When I was about 3 1/2, I said, 'No more! You will call me 'Smurfette' or nothing at all!'' Bell recalled to Kimmel. Bell explained that her parents didn't take her decision very seriously, until she refused to answer to anything other than 'Smurfette.' 'So, they sat me down and said, 'This isn't going to fly.' And I said, 'Fair enough, my name is now Matthew.'' Bell's parents weren't feeling that name, either. So, Bell said they eventually agreed to use the name 'Annie' from the titular role from the musical 'Annie.' 'And I was called 'Annie' by my whole family until I was 16,' Bell explained. 'My grandparents still call me Annie.'
National Geographic
20-02-2025
- Entertainment
- National Geographic
I took a leap of faith—and it led me in search of history's lost slave ships
It transports me back to a place of remembrance—back to the 1970s. To my childhood. To Wells Drive in Atlanta, Georgia. To the apartment on the top floor of a two-story walk-up where I lived with my mother—just the two of us in five rooms. How does the universe match parents and children? I don't know. But I do know that my mother was the perfect parent for me. She was a reading teacher. I loved to read. And my mom had access to books. She used to bring home boxes and boxes of them from her reading conferences and conventions. The joy I felt opening those boxes, pulling out the crisp packaged pages, smelling their woody scent, cracking open their spines, and disappearing into other worlds. I could spend all day with a book and all night long reading it under the covers with my flashlight. I loved fantasy books the most. Magic. Quests. Dragons. Unicorns. Outer space. Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time series was one of my favorites. I yearned for Mrs. Who, Mrs. Whatsit, and Mrs. Which to tap outside my window and charge me with helping to save the universe. I so wanted to be Charles Wallace—not Meg, mind you—anointed with a big life purpose. Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain was another favorite; I would reread the entire series each year. I wanted to be Taran, discover that I had a hidden birthright and set out with a sword on a magical adventure. I would close my eyes and wish hard for the universe to name me as worthy and call on me to do something big to help the world. Back then, my imagination was big, broad, deep. No limits. But as I grew up, I began to notice that Black girls were never at the heart of these stories. And the books that did have Black girls in them were often focused on tragedy and pain, based in the grimmest of realities. I came to understand that there was a prevailing narrative about Black people—a narrative created through a distorted lens that emphasized, to the exclusion of much else, our struggle, our pain, our trauma. From my front window, I could see a big hill that curved upward between the buildings in my apartment complex. When my mom got home from work, I would ride my bike up and down that hill. I remember huffing up and then soaring down with my legs out to the side, hands off the handlebars, the beads at the end of my braids clacking in the wind.
