Cast Your Fate to the Wind

So I'm boarding someone on a flight to Las Vegas today, and she has the last name "Guaraldi."

"Ah, like Vince Guaraldi," I mention.

"Yes, I'm his daughter," she says.

Good lord! I bent her ear for 10 minutes about how much I enjoyed her father's music. She was gracious and soaked it all up, and was suitably impressed when I told her I had 23 of his CDs. (And as jpinsd, animbear and redbeardedblond know, "Linus and Lucy" is my personal theme song.)

She even took my address and said she was going to send me a copy of a documentary the late Ralph Gleason (one of the founders of Rolling Stone) did about her father. The whole incident reminded me of how sweet Henry Mancini's widow was, when I met her and told her how much her late husband's music meant to me.

Close relatives of famous people -- in a way they're even more fun to meet than the famous people themselves.