I was an unplanned pregnancy, a child of two filmmakers raised in the Minneapolis punk-rock scene. My dad became an anti-natalist after majoring in philosophy in college, whereas my mom was raised to be anti-domesticity by her second-wave feminist mother. They never wanted kids, but when my mom’s pregnancy test came back positive on a late July day in 2000—right on the edge of her career’s success—they decided to say fuck it and go against the only outright rule they had made with their coupling.

They wanted an anomalous but cool name for their baby, a unique one that reflected their lives together and raised their friends’ eyebrows. My dad insisted on a one-syllable name to rival his life-long prejudice against nicknames, while also following the Goodermote tradition of short first names (my dad’s name is Mark, my aunt’s name is Dawn, my uncle’s name is Kurt, etc.). My mom wanted something influenced by her favorite musical artists, the ones she grew up with and shaped her identity. She heavily pushed for Ramona, after the Ramones, and Lyden, after John Lyden of the Sex Pistols, but my dad rejected both options.

They met on the set of Wind on the Bonneville Salt Flats, introduced to one another by the lead actress, Jennifer Grey. They were both dating people at the beginning of the two months filming in Utah and were together by the end. The wrap party was at an outdoor barbecue place off a freeway and it was there that Jennifer Grey jokingly mentioned that they should name their kid after her. They forgot about it, the comment lost in smoked pulled-pork and local canned IPAs. The sound mixer of Wind, a mutual friend of theirs who had been present at the wrap party, reminded them of Jennifer Grey’s passing comment three months into their arguments over baby names. The name Jennifer did not work for my dad’s one syllable rule, but Grey did—and Grey could also work for my mother’s hunt for a musical name. She never particularly loved Grey Lagoons by Roxy Music but her opinion of the song has since changed; she now croons it over the phone on my birthdays.