My Noms de Plume? - Al Corriente or Oscar Rosa

Years ago when I worked in an office that had a WATS line, I would call a friend of mine who worked at an American Global Financial Service in Manhattan. My little dot on the map was on the first floor of the Octagon House on Green Street in San Francisco. She was the administrative assistant to one of those preppy boys who managed hedge fund pools over power liquid lunches. As such, she was also given an assistant to screen the calls. Well, actually, the calls came through a reception desk, and the girl at the desk routed the calls accordingly.
I never liked to give out my real name. I didn't want it to seem as if she were getting too many personal calls from the same guy. So I would between two names. One was Al Corriente and the other was Oscar Rosa.
The Latin from Manhattan never understood how I came up with these strange names. I told her that Al Corriente was Spanish for up-to-date. She had to think about that for a moment because the name was said with the pronunciation of someone from the upper west quarter of the Lower East Side.
"And what's up with Oscar Rosa?" she had asked.
"Oscar Rosa? That's one of your mother's favorite words," I told her.
"Oscar Rosa isn't a Spanish word. Óscar. Óscar. Rosa. It doesn't even make sense. Oscar is a man's name and rosa means pink."
"No, girl," I told her, "your mother says it ALL THE TIME. It's part of a long declaration that she spills out... like when Ricky is really mad with Lucy. Your mother says, '¡Asquerosa! ¡Sinvergüenza! ¡Hija de mil chingadas!'"
The girl must have bust a gut when she heard me say that. She also went into parochial schoolgirl embarrassment at hearing a non-Latin from Manhattan use the gutter-snipe tongue with the correct inflections.
"We need to change your names," she told me.
I need to call her one fine day.