NOT
I must admit I could have made this post last week, as this change actually happened before the first read, but I thought it was still important to explain, albeit a bit late.
Fergie is no more. She had to go. I really liked the name Fergie, which was a nickname given to the character whose real name was Felicity. I thought Fergie was a perfect balance of toughness (it almost could be a boy’s name) and cuteness. Fergie could be your buddy, she could be one of the guys, the kid at school that everybody loves. My thought was that Fergie would be called Fergie, not really because it was short for Felicity, which is a bit of a stretch, but because she actually looked like Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York…as well as the “short for Felicity” angle, I suppose.
This was all working out very well in my mind and as I was writing, or so I thought, but as the play takes place in the fall of 1983, the Sarah Ferguson thing actually doesn’t work. It turns out that Sarah didn’t link up with Prince Andrew until 1985. This would certainly mean that she wouldn’t have been on anyone’s radar yet, certainly not a bunch of high school kids on the west coast of Canada…unless we are dealing with bunch of clairvoyant high school kids…which would be a totally different story all together. Vampire high school kids? No.
The final nail in the coffin for Fergie was the recent run of ads for the new movie of “Nine”, starring an impressive array of actors including, Fergie, the Black Eyed Peas singer. I’ve known of Fergie for years and her existence did cross my mind a few times since the start of this project, but I had decided that she wasn’t a concern to me. But seeing her face on the TV every few minutes just was too much.
I even came up with another explanation for my Fergie being nicknamed Fergie to make up for the Sarah Ferguson impossibility, something to do with a grade nine history project involving Ferdinand Magellan, but it just seemed lame.
So Fergie is gone.
Say hello to Harriet. But we’re going to call her Hattie…for now.
Saint Aggie's '84 
I, of course, love the name Harriet. This (in a different spelling) was my maiden name and was very nearly part of one of our girls names. And if considered for a first name we would have called her Hattie. I think it has the exact feeling you were looking for. Femine enough for a a girl with the potential to be saucy but not all nail polish and lip gloss. Hattie is a girl with brains and wit. By the sounds if her character she need nit fall in the shadow of someone else’s iconic fame.