six degrees

On Saturday I was having my first manicure. It was my friend Melanie's birthday and she wanted to have us all go do mani/pedis to celebrate. While I was sitting there under the lamp waiting for them to dry the lady across from me started chatting to me.
She showed off her nails because they had USA with red, white, and blue on them because her daughter is on the US freestyle aerial ski team and they are heading to Vancouver this weekend.
I had heard that a couple of the women from the US Ski team had posed for Sports Illustrated for their swimsuit issue. One of them is Lacy Schnoor. So I looked her up on the US Ski team website. It says she is from Draper, UT and her Mom is a nurse. Bingo, this is the same lady from the nail salon.
On the US Ski team bio it states, "A recreational skier at 6, the ex-gymnast was recruited to freestyle when an Olympic out-reach program came to her middle school before the 2002 Winter Games. "They asked me to go to an aerials camp and I just kept going ... I like the rush when you go off the jumps," she explained." Right after I graduated with my Bachelor's degree I worked for the Salt Lake Olympic Committee in Youth Programs and my program was called Short Sport. We were the only department getting any positive press back then after the scandal. Basically there were five of us travelling around Utah going to all the jr high and middle schools (there were some schools that had K-12 in the small towns so we did all the grades) demonstrating short versions of winter sports. One of the sports was freestyle aerial ski jumping. Lacy must have been one of the kids that came through our program. Honestly we did hundreds of kids a day in the Salt Lake Valley, so I wouldn't be able to pick her out from all the other kids that I worked with 10 years ago. I will say my favorite school we went to was Fillmore Jr High. They were some really fun kids.
I guess you can do the six degrees of separation with anyone.