Friends Cast Members Change Legal Names

n a move labeled practical by some, good business by others, the cast members of NBC's hit Friends have saved years of fruitless optimism and professional disappointment by changing their legal names to the monikers they're known by on the popular show.

Series stars Jennifer Aniston, Courtney Cox-Arquette, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc, Matthew Perry, and David Schwimmer, will here by be known in future professional projects, and their personal lives as, respectively, Rachel, Monica, Phoebe, Joey, Chandler, and Ross. The declaration by a judge made the decision legally binding Friday.

"Why waste years that could be spent getting used to your typecasting denying the inevitable outcome?" said a spokesperson of the William Morris Agency, whose name we didn't bother to get. "Kim Fields wasted valuable years before changing her name to Tootie. And most people assume Todd Bridges changed his name to Willis long ago. It just makes it easier on everybody, and you can capitalize on that fame without needing to remind people, 'Do you know who I am? I used to get a million-plus an episode!'"

"It will make it a lot easier to do the last season of Friends at any rate," said NBC executive Brian Norris. "We spent a bundle a few years ago just on the typeface to 'Courtney Cox-Arquette' alone. Now we can just say starring Rachel, Monica, Phoebe, Joey, Chandler and Ross. Now people will have more brain space to remember which one is Will and which one is Grace."

Of course, according to various reports, all members of the Friends cast are hopeful about future projects in film and other series after the show's finale next year. But seriously, with their legal names at last intricately linked to their characters, the serious money for commercials, infomercials, state fair and car show appearances, and other forms of necessary income will be much easier while searching for elusive post-Friends success.

With luck, according to some insiders, Matt LeBlanc will be free of his Friends obligation in time to secure a spot on the fifth installment of Fox's Celebrity Boxing program.

Even with the name change, some members of the cast are adamant about making the jump from television to movies.

"It's not easy, no one's saying that, but it has been done before by quite a few popular actors," said Matthew Perry in a recent interview. "George Clooney is one example. Johnny Depp, another successful film actor. And Michael J. Fox, before he returned to television with Spin City. Don't forget Tom Hanks. Although Bosom Buddies was never really a big hit or anything… hmm… Will Smith, the Fresh Prince himself. I guess, uh… Alan Alda? Shit. Why can't I think of more people?"

Some fellow actors are not applauding the Friends cast's decision.

"You can't simply give up your humanity, who you are, to what people perceive you as. In the end it's not going to improve your success, you're just grasping to retain what had once been the peak of your fame," said Mallory from Family Ties.

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Omar Bricks has never been afraid to get his hands dirty. On the contrary, more often than not it looks like I've been playing patty-cake with a tar baby. I consider it a badge of honor that I've always been willing to roll up my sleeves and get into shit others considered best left untouched, and have always walked on my hands where others feared to tread. But this gyro sauce is a different matter altogether. This shit makes Lava soap seem about as useless as an eight-year-old wet nap. I need some napalm, and I need it with aloe.

You truly can't understand the horrors of discrimination until you've gone through a day with your hands smelling like a Greek man's testicle cheese. People won't look you in the eye, the glove store locks their doors when they see you coming, and dogs faint when you enter the room. This is also the first time I've understood the meaning of that "People are Strange" song by the Doors, I'd always thought that guy was singing about visiting Oklahoma. Turns out his hands just smelled like the inside of a bulimic Yeti's yak bowl. No wonder that dude did enough drugs to kill a roadie.

This whole misadventure started out innocently enough, last week when I was throwing water balloons full of piss at some Mormon missionaries who made the mistake of trying to infiltrate the commune offices. Don't get me wrong, it's not the usual Omar Bricks style to be so free with the bodily fluids, but we were all out of water. The city shut our building off following Red Bagel's TV appearance when he told everyone the government was adding tooth whitener to the city's water supply. So it was either going to be piss-balloons or blood-balloons, and unfortunately for the Mormons, my bladder wasn't bursting with blood at the time.

It turned out the missionaries had been working at the commune for weeks, hatching a terrorist plan to lead us all to Heavenly Father's love. In retrospect, it should have been obvious, since they were the only two guys in the office dressed like they worked in an office, and they were the only people who didn't refer to Bagel as "Sir Fucks-It-Up."

But all in all, everybody here was too busy avoiding all awareness of work reality to pay much attention to the missionaries, that is until the tall one made the mistake of trying to convert Ivana Folger-Balzac and she hit him with the fire axe we keep in the kitchen for opening cans of food foraged from Crochet!'s food drive bin downstairs. This started some kind of unholy Mormon-on-commune rumble, which ended well for the missionary who fell out the window at first sign of trouble but poorly for the one who was left to try and Jackie Chan his way out of the office. Luckily for him, Ramrod Hurley took the brunt of the violence, and most of the piss balloons, because he made the mistake of wearing a tie into the office that day and no one likes him. At some point the missionary got away, or else was stomped into a copy machine or some dark corner of the office from where he has yet to emerge.

Either way, all the rumbling worked up a powerful appetite within yours truly, and I decided to celebrate by trying out lunch at the new Greek place down the street. I figured gyros sounded good, since I like food that spins, but unfortunately the one I got was broken. What it did do, however, was stink up my hands like goat shit in a cucumber patch. I tried washing my hands with soap, lye and banana custard, but none of it did a damn bit of good. And when I got back to the commune offices, everyone kept calling me Boris. I couldn't tell if they were being sarcastic, or were just blinded by the Boris Utzov-like frunk emanating from my own raunchy-ass hands and thought Boris had returned from wherever the hell he's been since our bus trip.

After a few days of this indignity, however, this morning I happened upon a solution that killed two birds with one stone, solving both my stank-hands problem and my I've-never-run-through-an-office-building-with-my-hands-on-fire problem in one beautiful blur of lost time. To be honest, I don't remember exactly what happened myself, but do an internet video search for "Flaming Office Mime" and you can judge for yourself.

Bricks out.

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So it turns out my sister's gay. Quite a big bomb-dropping, for a regular family, I guess. If you ask me it's just a ninth-inning attempt to reinvent herself like a third-rate Madonna, or a 1970s David Bowie. Anything to liven up her boring life and make herself more noticeable in a family spilling over the brim with shwat-a-veev—whatever it is the French call it.

Of course, she has her own story: That she's always been gay, that ugly dude she went to the prom with was actually a lesbian, and she told me this all before. I suppose it's possible I'd forget it, if I was watching TV or thinking about something else. When I get hungry I can't concentrate on nothing. But I still say she's making up this whole life as being gay just to be more interesting—backstory, that's the acting term we use.

She introduced me to her checkmate, or whatever the cool new term for it is, and we didn't get along very well. I didn't remember her name at all and kept calling her "Marcy," like that chick in the Peanuts cartoon. Like I'm the one who cut her hair into a bob and made her wear glasses. I tried to get along with her for my sister's sake, I really did, but the bitch was saying all kinds of stuff to bait me. Like she had never seen my show before and that it must have been tough being a child actress. I told her it must have been tough being a lesbian for her, and she took it like I was serious, instead of implying it was hard for her to find women to date her.

I'm taking all of this pretty cool, really. She invited me to her office for lunch and promised she wouldn't get mad if I made paperclip slingshots, so it was off to as good a start as we get. Then instead of a good old fashioned paperclip war I get this Very Special Episode of Ellen dropped on me, which I'm fine with, only to have her tell me my parents don't know and I can't tell them. She said they're so closed-minded and everything, but I would understand 'cause I'm more worldly. I almost knocked her out but her butch friend wrestled me to the floor. It may be true I've packed the pounds on my thighs a bit in the last few months, no reason to call me out on it, and I definitely don't see how it helps me be more understanding of lesbos.

In addition to keeping her secret that she's a sci-fi fan (I'm pretty sure Marcy was that dude dressed as the centaur at the convention, upon thinking about it) now I have to not tell everybody she's lesbo. I wouldn't mind keeping the lesbian secret, actually, if she'd just let me tell the sci-fi one. But no, she says mom and dad won't understand. I asked if she tried to talk to Toot but she said he only wants to talk about the Leader of Glorious Light, the one true prophet. Which leaves me alone to carry the new family secret.

The last thing I want to do, of course, is be the only secret-holder, 'cause then when it comes out to everyone they know it was me who let it slip. It's better when almost everyone knows because then they can't trace it back to me. So I told her mom and dad were down with lesbians, dad especially—they star in over half the tapes in his video collection. That only got macho Marcy to wrestle me to the floor again then, and don't tell anybody, but I'm afraid I'm starting to like it.

She gets all sobby on me then (sis, not Marcy, though Marcy did offer me a cigarette) and tells me I'm the only one left in the family she has any relationship with. I thought she was getting weird, but she meant "relationship" in the broad sense of the word. Or the sisterly, non-broad-on-broad sense. And she gives me a big hug and says she can trust me with her secret.

And I suppose she can. I mean, besides writing columns about it at the commune, but that's practically like keeping a secret. So we had a little bit of coffee, talked about my career, her career, the new gym her and Marcy are opening, and then I left without even getting any paperclips and rubberbands. But I did manage to get wrestled to the floor once more before I left.

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