Coincidence theory

My husband, who knows about such things, says it is mathematically improbable that every time we go for a drive in the country, we pass a vehicle traveling in the opposite direction at the same time we are passing a pedestrian. Yet he concedes that it happens. We call this phenomenon “Jim’s Theory of Coincidence” because he is the one who noticed it first.

It turns out there are many theories of coincidence, mathematical and otherwise, which a quick Google search will unearth. Many are used to debunk conspiracy theories, but those are not the ones that interest me. The mathematical ones elude me. I stopped understanding things like “f, g: X } Y” in 10th grade.

The theories I like have to do with Jungian psychology and twins separated at birth who go on to marry people with the same names.

Recently, I experienced a coincidental meeting at an Off-Broadway show in the city. A woman seated in the front row was familiar to me, and I introduced myself. She remembered me and also recalled that I was scheduled to attend an Arts Weekend at the Lake Conference Center in Narrowsburg, where she was leading an acting workshop. Knowing my interest in acting, she wondered why I had signed up for Digital Photography instead of Acting.

I had to think twice before remembering that I had a conflict that weekend and could not attend the Sunday session, when the acting workshop usually presents its work. She offered to consider rearranging the schedule to accommodate my conflict.

The conflict was a performance of poetry that my writers group, the Upper Delaware Writers Collective, was giving at Grey Towers in Milford, PA. I was so convinced of the date of the performance that, without checking, I put it on the website as such and invited friends and family to attend.

I had been looking forward to this reading for a long time. It was scheduled to coincide with the publication of our new poetry collection, “PoeTree,” and the venue, Grey Towers, is a magnificent outdoor performance space with stone terraces and a portico draped with ancient wisteria vines.

As it turned out, the acting teacher, Barbara Spiegel, rescheduled her workshop to allow me to work at an accelerated pace in order to present our work on Saturday night and give me Sunday free for the reading.

Our “workshop” turned into a Master Class consisting of me and the instructor. Barbara Spiegel is a member of The Actor’s Studio, an accomplished actor with credits on Broadway and on television and film. “Law and Order” fans know her as Judge Doremus, a role she played for 15 years until recently.

As an actor with the Sullivan County Dramatic Workshop, I usually struggle to learn my lines before the dress rehearsal. She works intensely on a role for months, delving deeply into textual analysis and character history. I remembered some of this work from my days in acting school, and was keen to revisit it.

After 15 hours of physically and emotionally exhausting work on Friday, I came home to find a message alerting me to the fact that my poetry reading was, and always had been, scheduled for Saturday. In order to do it I would have to leave the acting class mid-morning and return in the evening, without a break. I would also have to look like an idiot who couldn’t keep her dates straight in front of a woman I already respected enormously.

In the end, I did both the reading and the workshop performance. Without the misunderstanding about the dates and the “coincidental” meeting in the theater, I would have missed the most valuable three days of work I have ever experienced, and missed forming a relationship with a talented professional actor who believes in my ability.

About that theorem...

- Cass Collins