Six Degrees of Seperation

I was watching Torchwood, a sci-fi show on the BBC last night and started thinking about weird connections in life. Don’t you have a feeling sometimes there are forces out there beyond our control?

Let me give you a few examples in my life:
One time when I was babysitting in college I picked the phone and it was a wrong number. I was about to hang up and the woman on the other end said, “Wait, I know you, I recognize your voice, who are you?” She was my cousin Barb.

I recently wrote a story about a new golf course in Ireland and interviewed an American who had bought a home there. Turned out he lived near me but more importantly he had grown up in the same small midwestern town as I did -a block away from me-and his mom was a teacher at my grade school!

One of my former bosses came to my house (70 miles from the job site) and realized he had been there to a party before I lived there and my husband had been to my boss’s vacation home some 15 years earlier with a mutual friend.

When went to College at UC Berkeley the dorms were surrounded by poster shops. I bought a painting of a blonde girl who reminded me of my younger sister. Some 25 years later I was standing in the Prado Museum in Madrid staring at that same painting, Las Meninas (Spanish for The Maids of Honour), by Diego Velázquez. I had no idea that was what I bought until then. (Okay so I wasn’t an art history major!)

I have been happily married for 25 years but resisted getting “set-up” with Rich…instead a chance encounter brought us together. A mutual friend at the TV station where Rich and I worked tried to arrange a date, but the silk scarf around his neck put me off. (Turns out he thought it made him look like director-I told you he's Kramer!). My boyfriend at the time, a reporter, suggested that I arrange a blind date with my sister because Rich was so nice. My sister was four years older than me Rich was six years her senior so he was closer to her age- it seemed like a good idea. I was with sis when I ran into Rich one night at a bar in the San Francisco area we called the Bermuda Triangle because there were three bars on opposite corners of the same street and singles were known to disappear from there for days. I couldn’t shake this assertive guy from Australia in red pants so when Rich called out hello from another table, I told the Aussie I was the Iowa pork queen and that Rich was one of my judges. Sitting at Rich’s table, I was thinking this was the perfect opportunity to set Jane up but as we began talking, I decided, “No I’m keeping this one for myself.” Rich asked me out on a date to Santa Cruz on Monday (we joke that we got together because we were one of the few people who had that day off) and in 1989 we moved to this romantic city.

I like to tell people my sister Debbie got together with her long time partner because of me. When she was going through a messy divorce in France she couldn’t leave the country with her three kids so my 9 siblings decided to have a reunion in Bordeaux. I was planning to go but couldn’t get away from work at the last minute so my brother Dave invited his friend since College, Doug. A lifelong bachelor, he and Deb fell in love and five years later they are all blissfully happy living in the San Francisco Bay Area.

But the strangest story I ever heard was from my friend Lora who was with her husband Phil on a train in Prague. She started chatting with a mother and daughter across the aisle and when they mentioned their last name, it was the same as Phil’s, an uncommon surname. After much discussion it turned out that the daughter was Phil’s half-sister and the woman his father’s ex-wife-0a family Phil never knew about!

Maybe there really are only six degrees of separation in the world. I slept with one of Sharon Stone's ex-husbands so my husband likes to think he kind of slept with her. I like to say Sharon’s ex couldn’t have me so he had to settle for a movie star.

I am hoping this separation theory is true because my time is overdue for meeting George Clooney. I’m sure we’d be perfect together-he’s an Oscar award winning director, but you never see him wearing a scarf around his neck!