It's a Small World

Sometimes chance encounters bring many of us into contact with very unlikely people. Today I'm watching a CBS's Sunday Morning piece on Rosanne Cash, daughter of Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash. It made me remember when, incredibly, I once spoke with Johnny Cash on the phone.

It was purely coincidental. I happened to be in my agent's office on Wabash Avenue one morning when he got a call from Johnny's current agent from Nashville. Johnny had an upcoming engagement in town at a club my agent represented, and they were working out arrangements. Apparently the other agent put Johnny on the phone to talk with my agent, and while he was on, my agent said to me, "Want to say hello to Johnny Cash?" "Sure," I said, and took the receiver. "Hi, Johnny," I said. "Hey there, buddy," he returned in that low, smooth baritone of his. Surreal. Serendipity.

Another time I had a late-night gin and tonic with an ex-President of the BBC and his wife after he spoke at my small-town college, and I've spoken at various times and places with quite a few celebrities since then, quite by chance. But probably my most unlikely encounter was when I took a personally posed picture of Lech Walesa, the anticommunist labor leader and former President of Poland, who stopped his exit from a speech at my university to pose for a snapshot with our campus priest, with our priest's camera. Surreal. Serendipity.

Someone wrote a few years ago that there are no more than six degrees of separation among everyone on earth. I believe it.