Today is the actor Alan Alda‘s birthday. He’s 77.

He was born with a name that was much more of a mouthful – Alphonso Joseph D’Abruzzo. You might be able to get away with a name like that in showbiz today, but in the middle of the last century they wanted things to be simple and catchy. Wikipedia tells me that the name Alda is a portmanteu, a word created from two or more other words, or in this case, two other names. Alphonso Joseph D‘Abruzzo.

Of course you should take a moment here to think about what your Portmanteu name would be if you followed the Alan Alda template. I’d be Dale Dalco, which sounds like a good name for a NASCAR driver, although I would be the worst race car driver ever and would certainly wind up disqualified or dead or both in the first lap.

R.I.P. Dale Dalco. We hardly knew ye.

Fortunately for the rest of us, Alan Alda turned out to be a very effective name for making it big in the entertainment industry, and many are the lives that have been enriched by Alda’s work as Hawkeye Pierce on the long-running TV series M.A.S.H. Apparently he is the only person who appeared in every single episode. My recollection is that in many of them, he is talking almost constantly.

Not all actors are comfortable facing an audience without a script, but Alda seems at ease and is quite the storyteller. He has written a couple of volumes of memoir – “Never Have Your Dog Stuffed“, and “Things I Overheard While Talking To Myself.”

A guy who likes the spotlight and is a natural raconteur should need no prompting at all to churn out a couple of books, but Alda claims the inspiration for these volumes came only after a near-death experience.

When has a single experience changed the course of your life?