COMMITMENTS : The Human Condition : The Fame Game : Julia. Demi. Heather. Kato. Tired of our name-dropping yet? Well, don’t let it get to you. ‘People use name-dropping to spackle the cracks in their self-esteem.’ Or so say the experts.

Have you noticed a trend toward hairless chests? I recently visited a Beverly Hills salon to find Axl Rose getting his pecs waxed.

Wait! Wrong article. How in God’s name did I get on the topic of body waxing?

Hmmm, guess it’s that name-dropping thing again.

At least I’m in good company--starting with Rose’s facialist, who monograms every conversation she can with a famous moniker. (Ironically, she’d never heard of Axl. When I walked into the treatment room, she was asking the rock star what he did for a living. He was telling her, musician. And she was saying, “That’s nice, honey, but what’s your day job?”)

It’s a peculiar habit, name-dropping--that obnoxious manner of associating ourselves with a recognizable person in some circumstance that is most likely a real stretch. Why do we do it, even when we know our listener knows we don’t know the dropee from James Taylor--who I happened to sit next to at the restaurant counter at the Martha’s Vineyard airport?

To start with, few will deny that an “A” name, alley-ooped just so, can score big points in the game of business--most notably, when it’s the business.

“I see name-dropping done all the time,” says casting director Rhonda Young, “especially in those wonderful lunch and dinner meetings at Mortons. And it absolutely works. It’s used as an intimidation, (which is effective because) this business is made up of a lot of people who aren’t that sure of themselves and are looking for acceptability.”

Has Young ever considered trading in her casting credentials for a therapist’s shingle? Maybe she should, for while experts disagree on the psychology behind name-dropping, they bring up both insecurity and intimidation in explaining the “why.”

“People use name-dropping to spackle the cracks in their self-esteem left there by parents who didn’t love and accept them for themselves,” says Dr. Mark Goulston, assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute. In other words, if you were noticed only when you did something extraordinary as a child--like get perfect grades--later in life you may find yourself trying to get attention by substituting the A’s with “A names.”

“Name-droppers are not really trying to outshine other people,” he says. “They’re just trying to keep from being ignored.”

Not so quick to reach for the Kleenex, Santa Monica psychologist Judith Swerling says: “I don’t think name-droppers are more insecure than anyone else. They’re just less sensitive to the fact that they’re doing something others find obnoxious.” She adds that name-dropping is done consciously and is a form of intimidation used not just to impress, but to make the other person feel smaller.

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Who cares what the deal is really--at least, not when you’re cornered at a cocktail party by a bore who blathers on about how he attended the bris of Warren Beatty’s hairdresser’s son.

There may be six degrees of separation in the world, but at a moment like this, you just want to find the seventh--probably somewhere near the bar. (For one, Beatty’s not a particularly hot name in cocktail chatter these days. Better choice, says Dick Kaplan, editor of the Star: anyone from the cast of the O.J. Simpson trial. “If you can tell an intimate story about Bob Shapiro, and know him well enough to call him Bob,” Kaplan says, “you’re the hit of the party.” Madonna and Roseanne work too.)

Certainly some name-droppers are more irritating than others.

“I’m talking to a recording engineer about his German shepherd,” says Los Angeles musician Matt Thorne, singer in the band Matansa. “Out of the blue he says, ‘I was at my friend Stevie’s house and, you know, (pause) he’s blind.’ ”

It’s definitely more artful to slip your choice name subtly into the conversation--say, the way Hirshfield sneaks “Ninas” into his cartoons--than to scrawl it like graffiti all over the place where it doesn’t belong.

Another no-no: Overdubbing--embellishing the familiarity factor by calling Robert De Niro “Bobby,” for example--is about as couth as me asking you to help me put on my gloves, followed by, “Oh, you noticed my new diamond ring?”

And if the nickname is off by a few letters (“Ricky” for Richard Gere?), your reputation can get shaky.

The Robert Altman Approach (how many cameos can you fit on the tip of a film strip?) will also get you a bad review.

“I don’t trust anybody who drops a whole lot of names,” says Ed Dwyer, who writes the Insider column for Los Angeles magazine. “Usually they’re fringe.”

Lest we overlook pure logistics, it must be said that in this town, the right name can work better than a slim jim. Cathy Harris will tell you about that. Some years back, the Los Angeles ghost author simply couldn’t get reservations at Spago even though she called several days ahead.

Desperate--she’d already told her dining partner everything was set--she persuaded a visitor from Australia to phone the restaurant and pretend he was Paul Hogan. No problem, they said (“Crocodile Dundee” was huge at the time). Next, Harris had the impostor call back on the actual day to say he was stuck filming and would like to send his assistant and her boyfriend instead. “The restaurant told him, ‘Wonderful. We’ll take good care of them’--which they did,” Harris says. “I was so mad.”

Of course, the ultimate agony in the ecstasy of name-dropping is when you have to drop your own.

Let’s just hand over the mike to Frank Levering of Virginia, who was in Los Angeles 15 years ago writing screenplays and driving a cab.

“I picked up a woman in the marina and we started talking,” he recalls. “But after about 10 minutes she got sort of testy and said, ‘You don’t know who I am, do you?’ I glanced in the mirror and told her she looked familiar. And she said, ‘I’m Sissy Spacek.’ I was really dumbfounded. She had just been nominated for best actress in ‘Coal Miner’s Daughter.’ I asked her if she thought she was going to win, and she said, ‘Definitely.’ ”

Now, if Sissy Spacek can drop her own name to get a cabby’s respect, let me just ask, did you happen to catch the first name in the byline?

So, let me tell you a story about the other Liz. . . .