My roommate has a theory about me. She says that people like to talk to me.
When she first said it, I laughed and thought, “Well, duh! It’s because I try to be a good listener!”
After just a few weeks, though, I’ve realized that she means that random people like to talk to me. Not that people tend to spill their guts to me. No, she means that total strangers like to start random conversations with me.
Case in point: My friend Noelle came to visit me last weekend with her friend Courtney. They arrived on Wednesday night and I picked them up at LAX. There I was, standing behind the line of Suits With Signs, watching lines of people walk out of the concourse and sipping water out of a clear plastic MickeyD’s iced coffee cup. Totally and completely minding my own business. Ignoring the twenty or so people around me as equally as they were ignoring me.
…Until one of the Suits With Signs suddenly turned around, smiled at me and asked if I had brought water for him, too.
I looked at my cup and then at him and said the first thing that came out of my head. “Well, I thought about it, but decided not to. Sorry!”
He shook his head. “Thinking about it doesn’t do me any good, you know.” Then he proceeded tell me a joke about Obama. I politely laughed and he turned away.
And then turned back and told me a joke about Ted Kennedy. (I got the feeling he was a die-hard Republican. Either that or someone who really enjoys political jokes.) I polite-laughed again. He asked if I was waiting for New York. I said no, Milwaukee, and I was pretty sure that my friend had just walked past without seeing me, so I hoped he would have a good evening. And then I chased down Noelle and Courtney and we left.
Fast forward to Friday. Rachel (my roommate) got permission to bring all three of us onto the Warner Brothers studio lot during her lunch hour. She walked us all over the campus, showing us offices and soundstages and stores and the Gilmore Girls town square and the New York City street and everything in between (including Leonard from The Big Bang Theory reading over his script outside of the set), and when she left us, she told us that we could stay there for the rest of the afternoon if we wanted. We decided to visit the Warner Brothers Museum to see actual costumes from movies – including an entire floor of costumes and props from the Harry Potter movies. While we were browsing the HP props, one of the museum volunteers decided to start following me around, spouting information about the things I was viewing. He was actually very helpful and interesting and he talked to all three of us, but I thought it was funny that he approached me first.
Moving on to Saturday. We wandered around the LA Farmer’s Market and The Grove shopping mall for a few hours and then headed off to Santa Monica. While watching the sunset from the park above the beach, a man walked up to the fence next to us, gesturing to the sky and talking about blessings from God. He sounded kind of crazy, so we all ignored him.
And yet . . . I still managed to wind up talking to him for at least five minutes. Or listening to him with an occasional “Mm-hmm” thrown in. He was ranting about how the Jews control the media and they always portray couples with one white woman and one black man and it’s not right because it’s ruining the self-esteem of black women… And he somehow got the idea that the three of us were Jewish, and I let him believe that. It was pretty entertaining, and Courtney got most of it on video.
And then on Sunday, we picked up my childhood friend Ann from her hotel in Anaheim and went to Disneyland. It was a beautiful day, and at the end of it, Ann and Noelle were waiting in line at the Stage Door Café for funnel cakes while Courtney and I watched the crowds gather for the Fantasmic show. We were waiting right next to a roped-off area. A man walked up to the rope, about to step over it, and then stopped and asked us if he could unhook the rope for us to go through. (Courtney was in a wheelchair for the second half of the day.) I said no thanks. He asked us not to laugh if he tripped over the rope and then stepped over it and disappeared into the crowd.
Courtney turned to me and said, “Rachel’s right – they really do talk to you!”
And that was just one weekend…