In October 2011, a Madison, Wisconsin man walked into a Dane County courthouse, paid the standard fee, and walked out as Beezow Doo-Doo Zopittybop-Bop-Bop. He had been Andrew Wilson. He never explained the choice in detail. The court approved it without much resistance, because in Wisconsin, you can legally change your name to almost anything you can spell, as long as you’re not trying to defraud anyone.
The headline launched on local news, made the wire services, and quickly became one of those true-news-of-the-weird items the internet recirculates every couple of years.
Why the courts allowed it
U.S. name change law generally falls to the states, and most states permit any non-fraudulent change. The bar isn’t dignity. It’s whether the new name is being used to dodge debts, evade a criminal record, harass someone, or claim a celebrity identity. “Beezow Doo-Doo Zopittybop-Bop-Bop” failed none of those tests. It was unusual, but not deceptive. The judge signed the order. The Wisconsin Department of Transportation issued the driver’s license. The Social Security Administration updated his record. Bureaucracies, given a properly filed form, generally do what the form tells them to do.
The complications were almost entirely typographical
Within months, the new name began bumping up against systems that hadn’t been built for it. Database fields with character limits truncated his name. Police computers, when he was later arrested on unrelated minor charges, displayed varying spellings and hyphenations across reports. Court records sometimes broke the name across two fields. Reporters had to verify the spelling each time. None of this was illegal — it was just the friction of running a 27-character single name through systems that assumed three short words would suffice. People with long South Asian names or hyphenated surnames have known about this friction for decades; Beezow simply turned the volume up.
The follow-up was less amusing
In the years after the name change, Beezow accumulated a small string of low-level criminal charges in Madison and later in Idaho and Washington, including drug possession and disorderly conduct. The arrests, predictably, generated more press than they would have under the name Andrew Wilson, because every booking photo carried the headline-ready name. The case quietly became a study in how a comedic legal record interacts with an actual legal record. The name didn’t cause the trouble. It amplified its visibility.
What this kind of case does to legal precedent
Practically, nothing. Courts continue to grant unusual name changes routinely. There are limits — courts have rejected attempts to change names to slurs, profanity in some jurisdictions, and strings of numbers — but creative, non-offensive names are generally permitted. The Beezow case is now occasionally cited in law school discussions of identity and state recognition, more as anecdote than precedent.
The takeaway
Legal name change is one of the few areas of American life where the rules are almost as permissive as they look on the surface. If you want to be Beezow Doo-Doo Zopittybop-Bop-Bop, the law mostly lets you. Whether the systems that have to process your name will keep up is another question entirely.
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