It's a Small World After All

I've written several times about weird, geez-the-world-is-small coincidences. One involved Julia, a friend from TC, who randomly knows Lia, with whom I went to Cate. (This one's particularly unlikely because there's no reason at all I should know Julia; we're not in the same program and except for the day we met in August we virtually never cross paths.) Here's another one in which Julia proves that perhaps there are fewer degrees separating us all than we originally thought:

Julia, who is from Wisconsin, is a huge musical theater fan. She can practically recite the casts of most of the shows on Broadway, knows who won which Tony in which year, etc. I don't know how much she performs/performed, but I know that in college she was involved in costuming, set design, etc. She and I were walking around the other day and she told me about taking a visiting college friend to see "A Little Night Music," a hit musical on Broadway featuring Angela Lansbury and Catherine Zeta Jones. I was anxious for her to get to the end of her story because I was all ready to impress her - I know somone in the show. Sort of.

Back in Visalia, Jan V. was the principal of St. Paul's when I was in kindergarten. She pulled my friend Margaret, me, and two other students (Danny and Meghan?) out of class a few days a week and taught us to read because she felt we were ready. Fast-forward 21 years and you'd find Jan and I teaching middle school English in adjacent classrooms at St. Paul's. We chatted a lot, and while I learned volumes about education from her, I also learned a lot about her sons' endeavors. I remembered them vaguely, particularly the younger one, Kevin, from when we went to St. Paul's together in elementary school. Kevin, two years older than I, was living in New York. As an actor he was barely scraping by until he landed a job as an understudy in "A Little Night Music." So I couldn't wait to rock Julia's world by sharing with her my sort-of brush with sort-of fame.

Julia gave "A Little Night Music" two thumbs up, then said that the best part was that one of the cast was out that night and a guy she knew filled in. "Yeah," she said, "it wasn't a huge part, but it was kind of cool to look up at a Broadway stage and see Kevin V. up there." After I'd picked my jaw up from the sidewalk, I explained to her my connection to him. Turns out they'd gone to the same college, although she was a freshman when he was a senior and she said he probably wouldn't recognize her name. She knows of him because, as she said, he was "a big deal" around campus his senior year, particularly to her and her friends who were a bunch of theater geeks.

Julia and I attended a free opera benefit concert at a lounge and spent the rest of the night interspersing our commentary on the acts (which included an acapella ode to the Pythagorean Theorum and a heart-wrenching duet between Mama Cass, played by my friend Eddie, and the ham sandwich accused of killing her) with exclamations about our revelation. One of these days, if things like this keep happening, I will cease to be surprised by them. Today is not that day.