My Stage Name!

One of the organisers for our IT department's upcoming "End of Year Function" has asked me to submit a stage name for my "First Real Performance". I never gave this some real thought until now.

I remembered certain magicians names from a couple of years ago when I was still in school. Their names were Martino (very famous) and The Great Mafisto (not so famous), but I did not want to be a copy cat.

I read about Harry Houdini and how he named himself after Jean Eugéne Robert-Houdin and just added the "ini" after the last part of the double-barrelled surname. I thought about Willini and to my surprise, someone is actually using that name and most importantly I don't like the way it sounds.

I then thought of famous magicians of our time and the first name to pop into my head was Dai Vernon. I tried adding the ini after the first part of his surname, but Vernini made me laugh.

I Googled a few things about stage names, magician names, etc. and I got some hits of sites that can give you your gangster name, horror movie name and almost any other name you could possible think of. All of them were terrible. Finally one of the many sites added a little something to me selecting my stage name. At first I thought it is supposed to give you your magic name, but I soon realised that it gives you your "magic words". My name generated the slogan "I don't need words" or something along those lines. I used other random words and one word that was frequently being generated was "Presto".

I thought about The Great Mafisto and wanted to add "The Great" in front of the name I choose. I know a lot of magicians have that same phrase or something similar preceding their name, but that doesn't bother me. The word "Presto" again came to mind and decided I can use the "esto" instead of the "ini" and combine it with the first part of Dai Vernon's surname. The result was an easy to pronounce, ease to spell, easy to remember, awesome stage name: "The Great Vernesto"!