THE OTHER STEVE HARVEY

It does only happen on the telephone.

A woman-it is always a woman-and I may be talking about insurance or a credit card or my medications, while I'm standing in the kitchen twirling the telephone cord and the subject of my name comes up. The voice at the other end of the line that had started off businesslike, polite, and unaccented, suddenly breaks into a nervous laugh, sheds its formality, and is full of attitude.

It turns black.

"Are you really Steve Harvey?"

It happens to those of us with the name of someone who is famous, in my case a black television star known for his charisma, chutzpah, and thick moustache.'Tm here with Steve Harvey," Ellen DeGeneris once joked, "and Steve Harveys moustache." He is an entertainer who presents himself as saucy, sexy, and full of good cheer.

"I just love that man, hmm mm," the voice on the phone once added. "He's somethin'."

It is the voice of a black woman letting down her defenses. A woman among friends, and I hear in it an opening, a thinning of the distance between us, even, perhaps, a call to kinship from a confidante, and I usually try to join in with a self-deprecating joke. "No, he's the rich one," I say. Or I might be a little evasive."Me, Steve Harvey? Only on the telephone." Usually I just tell them what they know already: "No, I'm the other Steve Harvey."

What I don't say is what I am thinking.

The other Steve Harvey

I remind people that I had the name first. I was born in Dodge City, Kansas, seven years before the TV star, and my parents chose the name because they liked the sound of it. No one else before me in my family was named Steve as far as I know. My mother called me Stevie.

As for the name Harvey, my dads father was a cattle rancher in Dodge City and the last name has a question mark beside it, since that side of the family, unlike my mother's side with a lineage that runs back to a witch in Salem, is not well known. There may be a reason for this blank spot in the record since my dad liked...