Piccolo Mondo

There are six billion people on earth, but it's astonishing how frequently you find yourself talking with someone who has intersected with someone else in your life.

During our just-concluded trip to Europe, we had quite a number of "piccolo mondo" episodes. Here are just four that happened in the last few days:

*On the ship, we befriended a delightful couple from New Zealand. Over dinner last Thursday night, we learned that the gentleman once served as prime minister. He said he has also been a Constitutional lawyer and teacher, and that he and his wife had once lived in Iowa when he taught at the University of Iowa Law School. I asked whether they might ever have met Nick Johnson, an FCC commissioner under President Johnson, whose work influenced Ann and me to get involved in communications policy decades ago; I knew that Nick was a long-time member of the Iowa Law faculty. Turns out they knew Nick well enough to have been his guests for Thanksgiving dinner back in Iowa.

*We took a walking tour through the Cannaregio siestri (district) of Venice. Our guide was a young graduate student of the art of Renaissance from Arizona. He brought us into a dusty workshop (which had served as Tintoretto's studio centuries ago) where men wearing handmade hats of folded newspaper were cutting and carving marble into tombstones for the city cemetery on the nearby island of San Michele. Our guide pointed out the maestro of the shop, a near-deaf 94-year-old man who stood silently as he delicately chiseled the face of an angel into stone. We struck up a conversation with another stoneworker, a man of our age. Upon learning that we were Americans, he reported that he has a nephew who owns a restaurant in Los Angeles on La Brea Boulevard. "What's it called?" our young guide asked. "Al Angelo," the man said. "Wow!" our guide said. "When I lived in L.A., I worked in that restaurant. Piccolo mondo!"

*We were waiting in line at Gatwick for a transfer to Heathrow. I was wearing a fleece jacket promoting the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen (now sadly defunct). A woman tapped my arm and asked, "Are you actually a comedian or just a judge?" "Neither," I replied. "My son is studying film in college and is a comedy writer and improv artist." "Oh, our children do comedy, too," she replied, and said that her daughter's name is Rebecca Drysdale. "We saw her perform in Aspen," we exclaimed. In fact, Rebecca won the top performance award during our first year at the festival. Her material and characters (particularly her musical comedy) made a strong impression on our son, who works in a similar vein. The Drysdales also said their son, Eric, was a long-time writer for Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, and was a part of this year's Emmy-winning Colbert writing team. I told them that the sister of a former member of my staff was the sole woman on that writing team. And, to top it off, we discovered that 20 years ago, Eric attended the same college in Boston that our son attends today and had the same (outstanding) writing teacher.

*As I write this aboard our British Airways flight back to the States, Ann is chatting with Norma, the flight attendant. It came up that Norma hails from Belfast, Northern Ireland. Ann mentioned that she and our son visited the city last July at the invitation of our friend George Clarke, a one-time camp counselor for our son, to attend the premiere of George's independenly financed political/zombie movie (a first for Northern Ireland in countless ways!). No, Norma wasn't at the premiere, but she knew all about the film from local press.

Piccolo mondo, indeed.