So yesterday in my review of the then-two-day-old The Rosie Show on OWN, I riffed on Rosie O’Donnell’s quoting of her show’s critical reviews during her monologue: “Just in case,” I wrote, “it’s Pah-nuh-WAH-zick.’” Rosie, and her head writer Karen Kilgariff, evidently took this as a challenge, and also discovered that my surname has the same meter as Leonard Cohen’s classic “Hallelujah.” Which really does not get used enough on television.
[Note: The video from OWN’s website does not play well with TIME’s blog platform, so until/unless our tech wizards come up with embeddable video you’ll have to click this link to discover for yourself that nothing rhymes with “Poniewozik.”]
Thanks to Rosie, I will never be able to see a sad montage on a TV show the same way ever again. But next time someone asks me how to pronounce my name, I can just show them this clip. TV really does change lives!