Small World

It is always strange when you find a connection to someone you just met. Right now I'm volunteering at WFUV which I do all the time. I saw someone's last name is Shankman so I asked if he were related to Neal and it is his cousin. Do you have any good small world stories?

hee! he also signed the bottom line petition.

here'sone of mine: on livejournal recently, a girl found me while searching for fellow patty griffin fans. we got to talking and we found out that we not only grew up about five or ten minutes away from each other, but she goes to high school with my favorite old babysitting charges and is in english class with one of them.

and to make the circle complete we were just talking about Patty Griffin.

My parents were friends with the Shillingers,� they babysat me a lot when I was a very young child.� The pic on my prof of me sleeping next to a kitten, was taken by Lamont Shillinger.� While they were babysitting me Kurt Cobain lived with them.� I only found this out like 2 years ago.� Odd odd.

My grandfather was a musician on the Borscht Belt when my dad was a baby.� All of the musicians and comedians used to babysit him, and one of my dad's favorite things to tell people is that he peed on Zero Mostel.� And it's true, too.

awesome.

hey, what about the time gordon, leah and i visited the engles, back when leah was living in montclair, and we found out that tim used to live in what was now leah's aunt and uncle's house?

Many years ago, I had an Iraqi boyfriend named Amir. Amir was a political asylee who came to the US via a Saudi refugee camp.
While dating him, I went to San Francisco (lived in Ohio at the time) to get my certificate to teach English abroad. I had an Iraqi student there named Ahmad. I chatted with Ahmad during class breaks and told him about my Iraqi boyfriend.
The next day Ahmad brought me a picture of my boyfriend Amir, taken while he was in the Saudi camp. I really just about fell over. Turns out Ahmad's roommate was also in the camp with Amir.

I was talking with a woman back and forth on a discussion list a few years back and I mentioned something about some relatives of mine, only by first names. She replied asking for a last name because she had a sister Nancy married to Bobby who had a daughter Faith along with 3 other kids... etc... Turned out she was my cousin's aunt I hadn't seen in years.
Another time I was working at a vacation resort / family campground and was taking reservations and I hav cousins who live like 4 hours away near the CT border where the woman on the phone lived. I mentioned I had a cousin out there and it turned out she knew my cousin and we talked for a while about my cousin's kids.

I used to live about 2 km from Kath, back in 1993-95. We didn't know each other at the time. I wasn't even a Fruhead at the time. I didn't meet her until I lived 750 km from her -- and in another country, of course.

One of my roommates who is from a different city than I am knows my best friend from high school from the one year that he moved away and went to her high school in grade 11.� We were living together for about a month and a half before I found out that she knew him.

I was talking to a friend of mine at the co-op pottery studio i'm a member of and it turns out not only did we graduate high school the same year (from rival schools) he was a year ahead of me at the same grammar school (in my grade1 year book he's sitting next to a girl who failed the 2nd grade and ended up in my class).� We spent many a freaky moment remembering all those wonderful memories.

I'm currently in Madrid for a long weekend. Friday night I was at a party with the kids from Middlebury who are studying here, and there was a girl there who wasn't in the program or from Midd or anything but was there to meet up with a friend from high school or something. So she and I and my friend Emily, who was travelling in Madrid with me, were talking and she was like, "Emily, you look so familiar...do I know you?" They soon found out they live, like, a couple blocks apart in Brooklyn. Then it turned out she also goes to Weslyan with my cousin. Then we found out she also knew a friend from Midd who was studying with her in Scandanavia. And then it turned out she was also staying in our hostel.

So...yeah. A really, really small world.

where in Brooklyn?

I was in a Jewish teen theater group in high school with a girl named serena. I found out at some point while we were in the group together that her brother was a friend of mine at my high school. When I graduated out, she was still there with my brother. Last year while working the alumni association phone-a-thon at my college Purchase, there was a girl sitting across from me who looked very familiar and kept staring at me, so I asked where I knew her from... we went through a few possibilities before I mentioned that I went to Stuyvesant high school and she remembered who I was. So we talked a bit about theater and our brothers etc... last night my mother e-mailed me asking if I knew that Serena Strausner was at Purchase... I asked who? She said "She was in theater group with either you or your brother" I said "Oh oh oh, serena... yeah, I worked phone-a-thon with her!" Apparently her dad and my mom work together. They yell at each other a lot. Freaked me out.

Am I the only one suffering with that song in my head now? Dangit, it won't go away for like, four hours now.

Anyway, I have a cool story.

I was in 4th grade and I was friends with this girl Alexis. We went to the same summer camp and were good friends and visited each other's houses and whatnot, even though she was two years younger than me. Fast forward 4 or 5 years, we had no longer kept in contact, when the director of the overnight camp I went to asked if we could give a ride to this girl, Alexis. I called her and got to talking to her, and then I asked her what her mom did for a living. She said she was a high school principal. I asked her if she used to go to Happy Times Day camp. Inevitably, it was the same person.

There's a few more good ones, but I can't remember them right now.

I can't remember... I'm not very familiar with Brooklyn, so the name didn't mean anything to me. Sorry. :-/

In January, I met a guy named Ryan on lavalife.com (yes, i'm a lonely geek resorting to internet dating). We talked online for several weeks and got along swimmingly. Somehow, we got onto the topic of halloween costumes and we both mentioned having gone to see Rocky Horror at the Bloor Cinema the previous year. I told him what my costume was and that i was in the costume contest and that the MC lifted my skirt up over my head without warning me, flashing 700 people. Ryan not only remembered my costume and my flashing the audience, he also remembers talking to me and my roomates in the lineup before the show about the fact that we had brough a 24 pack of toilet paper. It also turns out that Ryan's mom and my mom have the same birthday, right down to the same year. So, taking this as a sign from the heavens that it was meant to be, we started dating. And we're gonna get married next year.

My first year of college at Lawrence, all freshman music students had to take theory and sight-singing, and we pretty much had class that whole year with 18 other people based on our placement exams. So I spent a lot of time around Katie, who was an international student from Kenya, and we got to be good acquaintances.

I went home for the summer and was hanging out with one of my best friends from high school, and she broke out an old picture album from when she lived in Saint Anthony Park. There, in one of her sixth-grade field trip pictures, was someone who looked awfully familiar. When I asked, my friend said, "Oh, that's Katie. She was visiting Minnesota for that year; she's from the Cameroon."

Different country, but same Katie. I love it when that happens.

In '97, during my semester in Israel, I went on a 4 or 5 day trip to Cairo with some friends. One of them knew a guy who was studying at the American University there, and we planned to get together and he could show us around.

We ended up going to an expatriot bar for somebody's birthday party, and after we'd been there for a while, a really familiar looking guy walked in. I said "Sebastian?" and he said "Melissa?"

I'd known Sebastian since 2nd grade (and up through high-school), last I'd heard he was at The Citadel. Turns out he'd left, and was now also at the American University in Cairo. And he rarely went to that bar, but it was a friend's birthday party.

A lot of you have heard about this.. but here goes :D

I have been good friends with Il�ne since about.. umm..2� years go, when I started CEGEP.� Late last August, she was hosting a� Murder&Mystery party (that she wrote herself) for her birthday.� One of the characters was a troubadour, and he looked awfully familiar..looked like my�cousin Guy who�I hadn't seen in about 15 years.� Asked her who he was, turns out he's her cousin.� So in my head, its impossible for him to be both her cousin and my cousin.� At the end of the party, I ask him what he real name is, and hey!� you're my cousin!� *oggle*� His mum (the woman my uncle married at one point) is Il�ne's aunt.� Yeah.. Small world.�

Does anyone know what relation Il�ne and I have then?

nitsa <---cousin---> Guy <---cousin--->Il�ne