Filed under: Humor, Celebrity, Weird, Asylum Exclusive
There are names that are clearly perfect for the line of work one has chosen to pursue. (See: weightlifter Magnus Ver Magnusson or celebrity publicist Ken Sunshine.) There are also names that are clearly unfortunate. (See: urologist Dr. Dick Chopp or online gambler Anurag Dikshit.) Finally, there are names that were fine when the parents bestowed them onto their child, but turned out to be kinda sucky. Austin actress Jenny Jemison knows what that's like. Sometime around adolescence, her name suddenly became two soft vowel sounds away from being that of the world's most famous porn star.
For obvious reasons, Jenny now works under a combination of her first and middle names, Jennymarie ("which ironically still sounds like a porn name," she says, "but at least it's not a porn name that's taken").
Outside of her professional life, friends, casual acquaintances and even landlords have found the coincidence to be totally hilarious."One place I was living, my sink got stopped up, so I had to call my landlord," she says. "And he got really excited. 'Oh, Jenna Jameson needs me to come down to her apartment and snake her drain. He called Jorge, the maintenance guy, on three-way -- he thought it was great that we were on three-way -- and told him, 'Hey, Jorge, Jenna Jameson's on the phone right now and she needs us to snake her drain.' And Jorge didn't really get it -- he was just like, 'Que?'"
The actress, who recently wrapped production on the stoner comedy "Austin High," doesn't harbor a grudge against the star who hijacked her name, not after an incident that happened several years ago, when Jemison and Jameson found themselves in the same building for the first time.
Several years ago, Jemison was working for a media company that's been the subject of more than one exposé on its crappy treatment of employees. ("You couldn't go through the day there without being called a 'useless whore' or a 'f**king c*ntface,' or something like that," she tells Asylum.) One particularly hated boss, who had been given the nickname "Toadbaby," hired Jenna Jameson to record some sexy audio for promotional materials, apparently with the aim of calling a bunch of friends to sit in a studio and listen to the famed porn star make sex noises for three days.
"Jenna ran through the dialogue in about 30 minutes and said, 'Well, I guess we got it,'" she says. "Toadbaby tried to argue, but she just said, 'Look, I'm Jenna Jameson. I know how to make sex sounds. We got it.'"Standing her ground against her boss endeared Jameson to Jemison and her fellow employees, but the porn star truly became a hero around the office when she told him, as Jemison recalls, "'You're a nasty little man who wants to make me make sex noises for three days, and that's not going to happen. It's not my fault that you can't find a woman to actually make those sounds for you.'
"She said everything that we couldn't," Jemison explains.
So take heart, if you're a guy with a name like Rod Jermie or Jon Homes -- the person who made your name something of a liability might one day turn out to be your greatest hero.