Last month, I wrote about giving yourself a Prince name. Since I published that post on a Friday and I’m all about celebrating Fridays, I decided it would be fun to offer myself as a Random Prince Name Generator for the day so that people could share their names and get a Prince name.

We wound up having a ridiculous amount of fun on Facebook that day. People shared names and I spewed out Prince-ified names in return. All totalled, I came up with about 35 Prince names. Whew! Here are a couple of highlights:

What I didn’t realize when playing the role of Prince Name Generator was that I would actually need a name for an alter ego the very next month. And in celebrating the fun of Friday and dubbing others with Prince names, I had inadvertently stumbled upon my alter ego: Aurora.

Aurora was birthed because it popped up when I plugged “Laura” into a “rapper name generator.” My mind loved that it rhymed with “Laura” and felt like it was in the realm of my given name while also having a je ne sais quoi that’s so essential to Living Like Prince. Emotionally, “Aurora” triggered a rush of childhood fantasies and dreams. When I heard the word “Aurora,” I heard a female narrator in my head say, “Aurora, which means `Dawn.’” followed by a tinkle of bells, which was a prompt to turn a page of a book. Unbelievably, I realized I had unearthed a voice embedded deep in my brain, thanks to a “Sleeping Beauty” record from Disney that I listened to incessantly as a little girl. If I’d given birth to daughters and not sons, the fact that Sleeping Beauty’s name was Princess Aurora would likely have been top of mind. As a boy mom, I was amused that my brain was able to retrieve that long-forgotten piece of data. Because I’m living like Prince, I then made the connection to the original fairy tale, where Princess Aurora sleeps 100 years until being awakened by the prince’s kiss. Prince? “Kiss?” Prince used the phrase “Welcome 2 the Dawn” on the back of many of his albums. Plus, Prince was a cosmic individual, and “Aurora” has a cosmic feel to it. “Aurora” it was.

Next up, I made a list of Aurora’s qualities, because how can I embody an alter ego if I don’t know who she is?

Hmmmm … why is it that Aurora’s traits are the ones I want to cultivate in myself?
According to my manual for Alter Ego living, The Alter Ego Effect, my next step should be to find a totem. When I put on the totem or carry it onto the “field of play” (which can be an office, a club, a restaurant — wherever your alter ego needs to operate), I will be transformed into Aurora. The totem can be anything you wear or can carry. Most anything can qualify, as long as it has significance to you. It could be a bracelet you snap on, or a ring, a pair of sunglasses, a hat, a pair of shoes, a necklace or … a cane. Wonder who used that totem? Guess I’ve got my homework cut out for me this weekend.