Bruce Feiler - Where God Was Born, Abraham, Walking The Bible

Eden and Savannah, the Faux Feilerettes?
Monday, February 26, 2007

Both of the names were my wife's idea. She first proposed Eden as a name for one of our girls just a few weeks after we learned we were having twins. I was in Turkey, actually, filming the Garden of Eden sequence in WALKING THE BIBLE on PBS, when she announced the idea. We both liked it instantly: it was biblical, it was a place, it was paradise, and it had an echo of my father's name, Ed. Matching Eden proved to be a problem; it overshadowed most of the possibilities we considered. Months went by and we had a short list but no finalist. Then one day my wife proposed Tybee. Tybee is a beach off the coast of Savannah, Georgia, where I spent summers with my family (back then we called it "seedy Savannah beach") and where we celebrated our wedding. I didn't like the idea at first: Tybee can be hard to pronounce (it rhymes with "why be?"), it's a Creek Indian word meaning "salt," which is problematic," and she would spend the rest of her life explaining what it means. And Feiler itself has some of these problems, as the president of the United States just proved.

But she insisted our daughters could pull off the names and it was done: Eden and Tybee, aka The Feilerettes.

So imagine our reaction this weekend when we learned that Marcia Cross, who plays the redhead Bree on "Desperate Housewives," gave birth last week to the twin girls that had kept her on bedrest for much of the last few months and her character in bed for the last few episodes. Their names: EDEN AND SAVANNAH.

What?! Eh? You've got to be kidding. How can this happen?!

Coincidence, copycats, or kindred spirits? None of us quite knows... But just for the record: one percent of humans are twins. Half of those are girls. That means one half percent of all humans are twin girls. What are the chances that two would have these two sets of names within 22 months?!

Labels: Family

Posted by B Feiler at 7:03 AM
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