So last week I met Rick Steves, the PBS European travel-show host. I was in Orlando for the Travel Goods Show and if you've ever been to the Travel Goods show you know it is THE MOST BORING TRADESHOW OF ALL TIME. At a particularly dull point in the show, there happened to be a book signing over at the Rick Steves' booth and I gladly escaped my own booth to shake hands with one of my true PBS heroes, aside from Nancy of the cleverly named "Sewing with Nancy." I should state that for the record, Rick Steves' book led my sister and I to some wonderful off-the-beaten-path locales en France a couple of years back, and that I was actually quite excited to meet him, even in such a dismal venue. I happen to have a business contact in the Rick Steves entourage and he brought me to the table to meet the man and get my book signed, at which point Rick Steves looked at me, but actually not at me, more like to the immediate left of me, to the extent that I half turned around to see what he was staring at. It is hard to describe the feeling I had that this man was drunkity-drunk-drunk, but not completely showing it. He was kind of hunched over in his chair and as he was getting ready to sign my book, he looked at my badge which I wish now I hadn't thrown away so that I could scan it and you could get the full effect of the funny that happened next. (TBS would give me a pretty, if not very, funny) He read my badge, which looked like this:
ShedRain Corp
Robin Bonebright
He stared at the badge for a second, and then looked up at my immediate left, and said "Shedrun...shedrun...is that a Celtic name?" I looked at the guy I know, and he looked at me with a look that said, "Yep, that's my kooky drunkity boss," and I said "No, ShedRain is the name of the company where I work, my name is Robin." and then he kind of stared at my left for an awkward few seconds, and then he proceeded " Shed...Rain....is that a family name? How did they come up with that name? Where did the name come from?" I was thinking, hey buddy just give me my signed book because I was really about to burst out a donkey-peal of laughter. So this other guy jumps in and in an exasperated voice, he says " No, Rick..like SHED RAIN, like SHED RAIN, like RAIN BEING SHED OFF OF AN UMBRELLA. NOT A SHED YOU KEEP YOUR LAWNMOWER IN!!!!!!" He was obviously angry at Rick Steves. I'm going to keep working at being a better writer because this was a really really funny thing that happened but as I read over it here it doesn't seem that funny anymore. Mwah!
