Crazy food life. My friend Brendan just announced, he's flying to LA to cook for the Dalai Lama!!!

Wasn't that just the greatest scene? One I will never forget.either is in the Erin Brockovich film

Ed Masry: What makes you think you can just walk in there and take whatever you want?
Erin Brockovich: They're called boobs, Ed.

 
ha! Here is my six-degrees of separation tale

First I have to explain my own...issue:

I grew up painfully shy and would constantly turn away from people rather than make eye contact. I wasn't autistic, but was pretty darn close. "Talking" on the Internet has been a blessing for me because I've made more friends than I could ever have made on my own. A defense mechanism as I got older was to literally force myself to stare at a stranger looking at me until they either spoke or they turned away. If they turned away first, I considered it a win that I hadn't caved into my Black Hole Of Shyness.

Okay...so Larry and I were traveling and stopped at Chatauqua Village in New York for the day to see what it was all about. I walked through a large reception hall filled with people and stood to one side of the room. Directly across the hall was a group of people surrounding a man dressed in red Buddhist robes. The man was staring directly at me. I looked to the left. I looked to the right and looked back and he was STILL staring at me. So I locked into Marilyn Protection Mode and started staring back. Then I noticed that the people surrounding this man had begun to fade away--while he stood out, still staring at me. People were talking to him, but he never answered them and never left my gaze.

I was now FIRMLY determined to win this challenge.

Have you ever seen a group photo where a single person has a circle of light around them, while the rest of the people/image is grayed out...a clear circle of light? Well, that is EXACTLY what I was looking at. This guy had a 6 foot circle of light around him while everyone else was faded out.

I just assumed it was my eyes getting tired from staring.

He finally turned away and I declared it a VICTORY for Marilyn and left the hall to look for Larry.

Semi-end of story.

Several years later I was in Philadelphia and turned the corner to see a full window display in a Barnes & Noble book shop. The entire window was filled with the same book, stacked with the image of the author. My FIRST thought was: "hey! that's the guy that was staring at me in Chatauqua!" My SECOND thought was "Holy Crap, THAT'S the Dalai Lama!!!!!"

At that point, I had to do a bit of revisionist history. His Supreme Holiness, the Dalai Lama had been silently meditating in that reception hall, his aura completely visible to me--and was NOT challenging shy Marilyn from western Pennsylvania to a staring contest.

 
Awesome! My MIL used to proudly display a photo of her with the Daili Lama...

finally we had to tell her not every Buddhist monk is the Dali Lama and that maybe the fact that she met him at the nail salon should've been her first clue it wasn't actually him.

 
Hi Gail...I live south of New Smyrna Beach but work in Orlando...I still

have days where I think I'm actually DEAD and this daily commute is my own personal Hell.

I was at UF in Gainesville for 3 years...loved it. But I imagine it's changed considerably since 1994.

 
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