The Other One, Forever & Ever
Happy Birthday to the Dame
Hi, Friend.
Today is the late Dame Maggie Smith’s birthday. She would have been 90 years old. On social media, her birthday has typically been a busy day for me. Some years on December 28, I receive so many messages wishing me a Happy Birthday that I decide to have some cake to celebrate, too. I’m happy for any excuse to eat cake.
I’ve been the Other Maggie Smith since the day I was born and named. Before I had a career as a writer and had, as the saying goes, “made a name for myself,” I’d tell someone my name, and they would likely respond, “Like the actress?” I’m sure the same thing happens to people named Davey Jones, or Michael Jackson, or Julie Andrews. These are not unusual names, but we instantly associate them with famous people.
Sharing a name with a famous actress was innocuous enough, wasn’t it? We had little in common other than being white women. I am American; she was British. I’m a poet and writer; she was a renowned actress of the stage and screen. I was born in 1977; she was born in 1934 and had already won two Oscars by the time I was walking. Surely we wouldn’t be mistaken for one another!
But, to my astonishment and amusement, once I started publishing books and having a more public life, and especially after my poem “Good Bones” went viral in 2016, that’s exactly what happened. In 2017 Meryl Streep read my poem “Good Bones” at Lincoln Center, as part of the annual Academy of American Poets gala. I wasn’t in the audience that evening, but when I listened to the audio later, I heard her say, “I’m going to read a poem by Maggie Smith.” The crowd murmured with excitement, and she said, in her unmistakable voice, “Not that one. The American.”
I laughed. From that day forward, my social media bio has been either “Not that one” or “The other one.”
I hope Dame Maggie Smith, who was known for her wit, would have found all of this amusing as well. As her character Violet Crawley, Dowager Countess of Grantham, once said on Downton Abbey, “Life is a game, where the player must appear ridiculous.”
Given the forty-three-year age difference alone, receiving fan mail for Dame Maggie Smith has always made me chuckle. I’ve joked that you can receive only so many autograph requests for a woman in her eighties before reconsidering your skincare routine. Clearly I need more peptides, more retinol, more vitamin C!
One kind email from a thirteen-year-old French boy read, in part: “My dream is to play in a big movie like Harry Potter….My favorite character is professor McGonagall. You played her really well….My second dream is to meet you and have your autograph.” He had attached two press photos of Dame Maggie Smith as Professor McGonagall, hoping I might print them, sign them, and mail them back to him in France.
I tend not to respond to emails like this one, because responding personally to each email, letter, or DM I receive, whether intended for me or for the Dame, would leave little time for writing (and parenting, and living). This child was so sweet and polite, though, that I couldn’t help writing him back with the disappointing news that I’m not that Maggie Smith.
Is strikes me now that that boy, thirteen years old in 2017 when he sent that email, is twenty years old now. Other children—and adults—have sent autograph requests from all over the world: Germany, Canada, India. A ten-year-old boy from Greece emailed, in part, “I would love you to come to Athens and meet you. You have a lot of fans here. I look forward to your reply. Have a nice summer.” He attached a photo of himself giving the thumbs-up sign. It still makes me smile to see it. He’s my own son’s age.
The day we lost the Dame, friends started texting me immediately after the news broke. Some of them got quite the shock when they received a news alert that read “Maggie Smith Dead.” Online, I was mistakenly tagged in countless RIP posts, some of which featured a photo of her alongside a quote from one of my books. Truth is stranger than fiction. (Once, in a celebrity audiobook round-up in People magazine, Dame Maggie Smith’s photo was placed next to an image of my book Keep Moving, as if she were the author. I laughed so hard about that, and it’s still one of my favorite press-related moments as an author. As we say in my family: “Worth it for the story!”)
Dame Maggie Smith was an icon. I was honored to share her name for the first forty-seven years of my life, while she was alive, and I’m honored to share it now. I will always be, proudly, the Other One.
Now, let’s all have some cake in her honor, shall we?
Love,
Maggie
I truly laughed out loud! Now, to find cake.
This is my mother's birthday too! I think she would have been 91, but we lost her many years ago, way too young. Now I approach her age at the time she died and think of her often, especially because she was my first reader. She had a poem of mine published in the paper when I was six! Happy Birthday to Dame Smith, and to Pat Serra. And thank you other Maggie Smith, for your words. Always feel like making a cup of tea and sitting down to read when I see you have posted.