Constable: Isis the waitress now struggles with her name

By Burt Constable

I gave money to Isis and have the receipt to prove it. It wasn't a donation. Isis earned every penny.

"Hi, my name is Isis, and I'll be your server," begins Isis LaPuma, a 38-year-old Palatine woman who has been a popular waitress at an Italian restaurant chain in Arlington Heights for the past nine years. If diners miss her introduction, Isis also sports a name tag.

Do hungry customers accept her basket of breadsticks and still feel compelled to mention that a barbaric group of head-chopping international terrorists go by the same name?

"Yes, yes they do," Isis says.

For most of her waitressing life, customers who noticed her name doled out compliments.

"A lot of people would say, 'Isis is a pretty name,'" Isis says. "That's what I was used to."

Recently, though, people hear Isis and think of the nickname for the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

"Starting about three months ago, almost every day somebody says something," says the waitress Isis.

"I'll bet you hate your name," some diners quip.

"There was a little time that I hated my name because no one could pronounce it or spell it," Isis says, recalling a few years during her childhood.

Isis' own grandmother used to "mangle" her name by using too many S's and adding an E or two, says Isis' mom, Debra LaPuma. "And a lot of people would say Iris."

Everybody knows how to spell Isis today, but the name is losing popularity. Woman's Day magazine just printed a list of "12 baby names that should be illegal," and Isis topped the list. Last week, The Sydney Morning Herald in Australia reported that the Nutella company rejected a personalized label request on behalf of an adorable 5-year-old girl because her name is Isis. The company issued a statement explaining how printing a special jar of its chocolate-and-hazelnut spread for Isis "could have been misinterpreted by the broader community."

"It's sad," says Isis the waitress, recalling how she never could find a keychain with the name Isis when she was a kid. "I'm an adult. I can deal with it. But for little kids, I can't imagine."

Wha> Isis LaPuma was born, she (or at least her mother) was ahead of the curve. Isis didn't crack the Social Security Administration's annual list of the 1,000 most-popular names in the United States until 1994, when Isis was the 991st most-popular female name. By 2005, Isis climbed into 522nd place. In 2014, Isis had dropped to 706th place. The name isn't likely to rebound any time soon.

"My mom heard the name when she was pregnant with me, and she just fell in love with the name," Isis says. "Before she knew she was going to have a daughter, she knew that she was going to name me Isis."

Friends suggested the name after Debra LaPuma told them, "I was looking for a name that was simple and powerful." Isis was an Egyptian goddess who rose to prominence more than 2,000 years before Christ. A deity associated with healing and raising the dead, Isis became a strong role model for women. Bob Dylan even wrote a song about a girl named Isis for his album "Desire."

"I thought it was a beautiful name," says the mom. "It felt right."

In grade school on Chicago's Northwest Side, Isis' young classmates didn't know the history of the name.

"Kids were mean. I was always Is Is," remembers Isis, who wanted a name with a catchier nickname. "As a kid, I always wanted to be Samantha."

But she used her name as a chance to educate.

"As a child I learned how to explain it," Isis says, recalling how she'd begin those teaching moments. "Actually, I was named after the Egyptian goddess."

Isis and her mom figure that her unusual first name helped mold Isis into the woman she is today.

"She's got a good, strong personality, and people respond to that first. She's always been a people person," her mom says.

"I'm pretty personable. I'm pretty relaxed," Isis says.

While there have been cases of people intentionally naming a baby after Adolf Hitler or something equally vile, that's not the case for Isis.

"I had the name first," Isis says. She's noticed that President Obama often refers to the group as ISIL (an acronym for Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) and that others call the group Daesh, which is another acronym based on the Arabic pronunciation.

"I much prefer ISIL in the news," Isis says.

In the meantime, she smiles, does her job well and politely responds to any comments that come her way. She puts a happy face on the word Isis, and doesn't inspire people to feel sorry for her because of her name. As Isis says, "Nobody's ever said, 'Isis? Oh, I'm sorry. Here's an extra 50 bucks.'"