A Chance Meeting in Brooklyn (or: “As a Matter of Fact, I DO Know Everybody.”)

My friend Jay Goldman drove to New York this weekend. He decided to try the legendary Grimaldi’s pizza under the Brooklyn Bridge, which consistently ranks first in the Zagat survey year after year. While waiting in line, he struck up a conversation with a woman who turned out to have the same camera as he did. As the conversation progressed, he found out that she was also originally from Canada, as were her husband and the two friends from out of town that they were showing about. The woman and her hubby, it turned out, went to Queen’s University; the hubby was a manager at the engineering pub where I was the DJ and wrote for the weekly humour paper whose offices were my second home.

Jay thought that there were too many coincidences not to ask “You wouldn’t happen to know Joey deVilla, would you?”

“Oh, for crying out loud!” she exclaimed. “Does he know everybody?”

The woman in line was my friend Alicia (a.k.a. “Leesh”), the hubby my old buddy George (they’re the people who are neither me nor Iron Chef Japanese in this picture), and the two out-of-towners with them were my pals Chris and Rob, who’d gone down to Manhattan for the H2K2 conference.

The fact that I can exasperate Leesh even from a great distance amuses me to no end.