I lived in DC before moving to NC from, oh, 4th grade on.
I went to a school in NY initially for ugrad, and I met up with two of my first-grade classmates there. We recognized each other on sight too!
[spoiler]putting in a spoiler box because the above looks so much cooler on its own…
Okay, it’s not really as impressive as it sounds. I’m deaf, they were HOH, and RIT’s undeservingly well-known for its educational support for deaf/HOH students. Plus, for some reason, if you’re deaf, you keep running into deaf acquaintances no matter where you are, for some reason. I’ve met up with a few of my East Coast friends on the West Coast.
[/spoiler]
My name is David Clarke Mayo. In high school, I went to a summer camp that had high school and middle school kids. Th middle school kids had to wear nametags, we didn’t. At luch, this moronic kid ran into me, causing me to drop my tray. I grabbed him and was about to tear him a new one when he said, “Your name is David isn’t it?” “Yeah,” I say. The kid comes back with, “What a stupid name!” At this point, I’m steamed, and so I say “And what sort of @%$* name do you have?” I turn his nametag around and read “CLARK MAYO.” I was pretty stunned. This punk was the first and, to this point, only Mayo I’ve ever met that isn’t a relative. And the fact that his first name was the same as my middle name was even more spectacular. All I could manage was, “You spelled Clarke wrong, moron.” I don’t think he ever learned my full name. Punk.
Back in '78 I lived with my friends Gary and Eve. We used to often go over to a neighbouring city to pick up our friend Wes. We’d just sit in the car and honk outside his house. There’d often be a guy sitting on the porch with a guitar, but I never met him. Fast forward to late '80. I’d just met my huibby, the guitar player. He took me over to meet the people where he used to live…turns out, he used to date Wes’s sister too.
In '81 we moved to an apartment in Edmonton. Under the fridge I found a paperknife from Kalispell Montana - where my grandmother grew up!
The Mr and I have a lot of friends that we both knew independantly of each other. One example is a fellow named Dennis. We were in our local bar one night when Dennis walked in and sat at our table. He said “Hi zoo, hi Mr zoo” then did a kind of double take. He’d just realized we were a couple. I knew him through some friends I had in my teens and the Mr went to Air Cadets with him.
We had a work experiance student at the zoo earlier this year. She’s forty-five minutes younger than my son! I found out because her work experiance happened to be the week proceeding their birthday, which she mentioned.
Last but not least. A couple of years ago I went to our local Doper Dinner. I got there a bit earlier and so did another Doper, who I’d met before. We went for coffee to kill time before the rest showed up outside the restaraunt. During coffee, I found out that he had family still living in the same small Saskatchewan town that my dad was raised in. When I got home I had an email waiting - a fellow from Geneology.com was researching my family as they’d been friends with with his back in the '20’s in the the same little town! I hooked up the Doper and the Geneology guy for a little info sharing.
So I was talking to the guy next to me in the courtyard of the Kathmandu Guest House (which is really the only place to stay in Kathmandu, but anywho…) and find out that his best friend and college roommate was my Nazi Director from Hell for my most recent show. Of course. Just glad I made the connection before I started whining about how long the tech rehearsals were.
I met my fiancee (El Perro Fumando) via a blind date in 2001. We lived one school district apart and had a mutual friend who introduced us. In summer 2002, my family went on vacation to Ocean City MD, and Fumando came along as a guest. At one point, we make a date to visit Fumando’s grandparents, who live on a golf course in the area.
My family arrives at her grandparents’ house, and my dad looks at Fumando’s grandparents quizzically, sure that he knew them from somewhere. Turns out that about a decade before, he had golfed as a single on the golf course, where Fumando’s grandparents are members, and had been put into their group for the round. During the round, they had talked about kids and grandkids, where both my and Fumando’s name came up. Thing is, my dad golfs about two or three times per year, max, and usually when he does, the chat is general and forgettable. One of the few groups he was ever in where he had a meaningful conversation was about children, two of whom get set up on a totally separate blind date ten years later.
Aside from that, there is the time that I was reading T.H. White’s Once and Future King on the DC metro. The guy next to me notices the book, and shows me the book he is reading, a different novel by White. Odd because so many people on the metro read newspapers or trash novels, if anything. And White is not really that popular a writer in any case.
And the time that I was working (I conduct interviews and record checks for Government background investigations), and had a random source on a case recognize my name (it’s not common. Let’s say along the lines of Mortimor Barleybeer, where there is a somewhat concentrated geographical region of Barleybeers that is not exactly nearby, and which is uncommon anywhere outside of that geographic area). But I’m Mortimor Barleybeer IV. The guy had been a middle school and high school friend of my father’s, Mortimor Barleybeer III.
I have a good friend named Drew. He’s a giant screaming queen (more than me, if you please) with fantastic stories (remind me to tell you the Two Million Dollar Sex Toy story sometime).
Anyway, it turns out I know him, like, SIXTEEN different ways:
[ul]
[li]directly over the Internet;[/li][li]via Evil Ex-Roommate; they used to go to the same parties, at one of which Evil Ex-Roommate took too many shrooms and had to be reminded to breathe. He recognized him when I told a story about him.[/li][li]Via Kat, whom I know:[/li][list]
[li]because my brother was best friends with her through cegep;[/li][li]through Upside Down Amber;[/li][/ul]
[li]via Big Gay Pat, whom I know:[/li][ul]
[li]directly;[/li][li]unrelatedly via LaurAnge;[/li][li]via this one big group of pagan/poly/theatre people, whom I know:[/li][list]
[li]through a subgroup of pagan/poly people, one of whom hosted my website for a while;[/li][li]through Evil Ex-roommate;[/li][li]through Shayne, my brother’s best friend when we first moved to Montreal;[/li][li]through Lance, a trekkie in Toronto, whom I know through:[/li][list]
[li]Esprix;[/li][li]a counsellor I had at Project 10;[/li][/ul]
[li]Floh, whom I know through Allies/Queer McGill;[/li][/list]
[/list]
[li]through LaurAnge’s boyfriend, whom he apparently knows independently;[/li][li]via my fag hag Ros who is friends with a very close friend of his;[/li][li]via Steve, whom Hamish and I have known forever and who used to go to high school with him, it turned out at my last birthday party; and[/li][li](this is the best one) through his insane ex-gay ex, who later did gay porn with:[/li][ul]
[li]Miguel, whom I used to date;[/li][li]Ricky, who used to be the best friend of someone I used to date.[/li][/ul]
[/list]
It’s getting to the point where I am no longer surprised when I find out that someone knows him. It’s truly disturbing.
While in Vermont and in Kentucky, I met two people who knew two of my cousins.
The two cousins are brothers; the Vermont person had met the youngest in NYC, the Kentucky person had met the eldest in Yellowstone.
We’re from Spain.
Hotel elevator in NYC. One is broken. 9 people get into the one that works. Being closest to the buttons, I ask each person “what floor” and punch buttons. Between floors 5 and 6, it stops.
We all cuss.
In Spanish. And some - Catalan? Say what?
Turns out the only person there who wasn’t from or living in Barcelona was the Costa Rican mechanic, who was being sworn in as a US citizen the next day. The lift restarted by itself, by the way.
Barcelona. Buses on strike. I have to take bus 34 to the end of the line, which is a long ride on any day. An old lady asks, “anybody else going all the way to Sarrià?” and we decide to share a cab. We start chatting - turns out she is my grandmother’s first-cousin, whom grandma has never met (my great-grandpa was the family’s black sheep). 3 million people and I run into a relative.
The place is Madrid, the year is 2002. I’m with some Spanish friends. We are going to get some falafel. Just south of the Puerta del Sol, we turn the corner…
And there is Señora Saba, my Spanish teacher from McGill, from the year before.
Big whoop, you’re thinking. But she’s not even from Spain; she’s Chilean. And she’s not visiting Madrid; she happens to be there briefly on her way to or from Alicante.
On a different continent, out of a whole planetful of people…
My Drew is Bryce. (Link illustrates Bryce-Thing well, but does not put our fair city in the best light.)
I went way past being unsurprised to find out that any new acquaintances happened to know Bryce, and began to actually assume that everybody knew Bryce.
More than once, I’d be in converstation with people that I was just getting to know, and when the conversation turned to one obscure corner or another, I’d say something like, “That reminds me… I was talking to Bryce the other day and he mentioned…” …and of course they would know him. East Van ne’erdowells, art mavens, Drive people, computer programmers, Wiccans and OTO folk, everybody just knows Bryce. If entropy wasn’t such a huge part of his life, he’d be saddled with the nickname “Ubik,” fer sure.
I had a neat one yesterday – I received an e-mail from a client who needed my help. I researched a solution, and called her up to give her the answer. She picked up the phone, but seemed confused when I told her who I was and why I was calling.
“Yes”, she said, “I know why your calling and thank you for getting back to me, but how did you know to call me at this number?”
It turns out that she had some computer problems after sending her e-mail to me, so she went to a different desk. I had dialed a wrong number and reached her anyway.
