Laura Geringer Bass: Hello. My name is Laura Geringer Bass. I started out in the world as Laura Geringer and most of my books were written under that name. Then I married Tony Bass and had two wonderful sons, Adam and Ethan Bass. I decided since my children's names were Bass I would add it to my author name.

When I was growing up my brother called me Laura Schnorrer. In Yiddish, schnorrer means a beggar who plays an instrument. "It's you who plays an instrument," I reminded him. I was referring to the piano lessons he received as the first child and the only boy. "You're the schnorrer," I said.

My parents raised us to work hard so that when folks sometimes confused my name with Laurel I associated the error with my mother shaking her head disapprovingly at the mention of someone who had achieved a little bit of fame and had decided to rest on his Laurel. "It's not Laurel. It's Laura," I'd say. Resting on your laurels, no matter what you had accomplished was a bad thing in my parents' code of how to live your life. There was always more to be done and more after that.

When I was a kid, people used to misspell Geringer by adding an H to it because of the famous baseball player, Charlie Gehringer. One of the greatest second basemen of all time. He was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame the year after I was born.

The name Bass is derived from the old English word bas, meaning short, but my husband's family is tall and I measure six feet in my socks. I guess the best way to remember Bass is by thinking of the fish. When I'm leaving my name to reserve a table in restaurants I often say, "Bass. You know, like the fish."

How can you remember my name? Laura, not Laurel, Geringer, not the baseball player, and Bass, like the fish.