Two weeks ago a friend and I went to the Rubin museum in NY to see a talk by a person who is a legend in his field. It was, as expected, a wonderful talk, insightful and full of information and fascinating anecdotes.<\/p>\n
Afterward, people went up to the stage to talk to the great man. My friend asked me whether I wanted to go up as well. She knew I had questions I wanted to ask him.<\/p>\n
I said I’d rather not. I’ve seen that scene before: An already exhausted speaker, patiently entertaining random questions from strangers who want a moment with the famous guy, when all he really wants to do is chill out and rest after being up on stage for an hour.<\/p>\n
I told her I’d rather just wait until I run into the man at some professional event, when he and I can meet as colleagues. I don’t think my friend quite believed me, and I’m not really sure that I believed me. She and I both knew that the speaker and I are not at all in the same field.<\/p>\n
By complete coincidence this same man and I were both invited to be speakers at this weekend’s little Sea Island think tank. We ended up having a deep conversation about one of the technical points in his Rubin museum talk, followed up by an email exchange with references to published research papers.<\/p>\n
So it turns out, by some crazy twist of fate, that I had been right. I did indeed meet the same guy at a professional event, only this time not as a random audience member but as a professional colleague.<\/p>\n
Maybe it was a complete coincidence, or maybe it was just the Universe having a bit of fun. In either case, it’s nice to know that sometimes life hands you a backstage pass.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Two weeks ago a friend and I went to the Rubin museum in NY to see a talk by a person who is a legend in his field. It was, as expected, a wonderful talk, insightful and full of information and fascinating anecdotes. Afterward, people went up to the stage to talk to the great … Continue reading “Backstage pass”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18421"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18421"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18421\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18422,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18421\/revisions\/18422"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18421"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18421"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18421"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}