You Never Know Who You're Sitting Next To

You Never Know

6:20

Okay, so this is like a tier one serendipity article, I guess. There is a particular kind of magic that happens when you talk to strangers.

Not networking.

Not the performative little exchange where somebody asks what you do so they can figure out whether you are useful to them.

I mean actually talking to somebody.

Tonight, I was sitting with a woman named Julie Stewart.

And somewhere in the course of an ordinary conversation, I started pulling on a thread.

Then another.

And another.

Until I realized I wasn't just having a conversation with a stranger anymore.

I had accidentally walked into a piece of American dance history.

Julie is the daughter of Delia Weddington Stewart.

That name probably won't immediately register for most people.

It didn't for me.

And that is precisely what makes this story so interesting.

Because Delia's life was ridiculous.

In the best possible way.

She was a girl from Meridian, Mississippi, who went to New York at fourteen years old and joined the ballet corps at Radio City Music Hall. At sixteen, she was already working professionally in Pal Joey.

Think about that for a second.

Fourteen.

Mississippi.

New York City.

Radio City Music Hall.

This wasn't somebody who took dance lessons as a kid and later became interested in the arts.

This was a teenager dropped directly into the machinery of professional American entertainment during an extraordinary period in the development of theatrical dance.

She would go on to study theater, earn bachelor's and master's degrees, return South and, in 1965, found the Mississippi Coast Ballet in Gulfport. She later brought artists and companies associated with the highest levels of professional dance into that community, including Mikhail Baryshnikov, Peter Martins and Houston Ballet.

Then she did something equally insane.

She started over.

In 1980, Delia moved to Houston and created the Delia Stewart Dance Company and Center, building a professional jazz dance organization that eventually became part of the lineage leading to Houston Metropolitan Dance Company and METdance.

She taught.

She choreographed.

She built institutions.

She worked internationally.

She helped develop dance education.

She affected generations of dancers.

All of which would make for a perfectly respectable historical profile.

But that's not actually the part of the story that got me.

Because I wasn't sitting with a historian.

I was sitting with her daughter.

And children know different things about their parents than history does.

Julie told me:

"Delia Stewart was an amazing woman. Her love of dance, but especially her love of people, was probably what impressed me the most as her daughter."

And then:

"But she also loved her family dearly and made sure that we were also a priority as well."

Beautiful.

Touching.

Wonderful.

And then Julie immediately delivered perhaps the greatest daughter-of-a-dance-teacher line ever recorded:

"Although she would have given me up for adoption had I not been talented."

And there it was.

A whole human being suddenly appeared.

Not a bronze plaque.

Not an archive.

Not a list of accomplishments.

A mother.

A teacher.

A force of nature.

A woman who apparently loved people enormously, loved her family fiercely, demanded excellence...

...and maintained sensible contingency plans regarding untalented offspring.

That's the good stuff.

That's the part history almost always loses.

We are very good at preserving what people did.

Dates.

Awards.

Jobs.

Performances.

Companies.

Press clippings.

We are much worse at preserving what it actually felt like to know them.

Julie remembers her mother making people feel important.

Delia brought together people from radically different backgrounds. Friendships formed. People fell in love. Some married. There may literally be families walking around today because Delia Stewart put two people in the same room.

I love that.

Because if you're a choreographer, maybe eventually you stop choreographing dances.

Maybe you start choreographing lives.

And here's the thing I haven't been able to stop thinking about since talking with Julie:

I could have missed all of this.

That's the entire story.

A person is sitting near you.

You don't know them.

You know nothing about the worlds they carry.

Their parents.

Their childhood.

Their disasters.

Their triumphs.

The people they have loved.

The things they witnessed.

The rooms they were in.

The stories nobody ever bothered to ask them about.

Julie Stewart could simply have remained another stranger.

Instead, I asked questions.

And suddenly there was Mississippi.

Radio City.

Broadway.

Houston.

Baryshnikov.

Dance companies.

Students.

Teachers.

Marriages.

A fourteen-year-old girl walking into Manhattan with absolutely no idea how far the consequences of her life would travel.

And sitting in front of me was her daughter.

Still carrying the stories.

That's what gets me.

We spend an unbelievable amount of time looking at our phones trying to discover interesting things.

Meanwhile, the most interesting thing within fifty feet of us might be a human being we haven't bothered to speak to yet.

There are libraries walking around disguised as people.

There are documentaries standing in grocery lines.

There are history books sitting on barstools.

There are entire eras waiting at the next table.

And increasingly, I think one of the most valuable questions a person can ask another human being is simply:

Tell me your story.

Then shut up.

And listen.

Because every once in a while, a stranger stops being a stranger.

And an ordinary evening opens a door into another world.

Tonight, that stranger was Julie Stewart.

And somewhere behind her stood this remarkable woman from Mississippi named Delia.

A dancer.

A teacher.

A mother.

A builder of people.

A woman whose physical history is now being preserved in archives, but whose real history still lives inside the people who knew her.

I didn't know any of that when the conversation started.

Now I do.

And that, increasingly, feels like one of life's great little miracles:

You never know who you're sitting next to.

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Rich Washburn is a technologist, strategist, and Founder & Chief AI Architect of ARIA AI Labs, working at the intersection of AI, infrastructure, communications, and capital. He also serves as Managing Partner and Chief AI Officer at Eliakim Capital.