Smile!

Itzhak Perlman performed today at the Performing Arts Center where I work. For those of you who don’t know, he’s just a world-renown violinist, no big deal.

People were running around like absolute chickens with their heads cut off.

Imagine those girls that you see in old video reel of The Beatles concerts—the ones that are reaching towards the stage and screaming and practically crying—that’s basically how all of our patrons and our students today were acting. It was actually quite humorous.

Mr. Perlman was gracious enough to allow sixty lucky music students at UGA sit on stage. In order to get these students on the stage, there was an elaborate scheme and routine they had to follow, but I digress. Before the students were able to enter on to the stage they had to pick up their ticket, show their student ID, and check everything they had on their person at the coat check. This is where I was.

The students were allowed onto the stage early and their coat check was just sort of chilling in the lobby. We couldn’t move the coat check rack across the lobby with the other 1000 people who weren’t students still waiting to go inside, so I was regaled to sit in a chair by the elevators with the students coats and wallets and phones to keep them safe until the performance started and we could move them across the lobby and into the box office.

So for the next forty-five minutes or so, I sat there and mainly played on my phone (thank goodness for technology, right?). Occasionally, a frazzled and lost student wondering how to get backstage or a grumpy old man looking for the bathroom would interrupt my Angry Birds rampage and I’d direct them in the right direction, but for the most part, it was pretty slow.

Then, this older woman—probably in her seventies—and her husband walked by, laughing about something and I heard the word “elevator”. Since I was sitting by the elevator I kind of grinned at her, she smiled back, and I went back to Angry Birds.

Then suddenly, I felt a tap on my shoulder.

I looked up and the elevator woman was standing beside me with this huge grin on her face. “Thank you,” she says.

I smile, what on earth is she thanking me for? I wonder.

“Thank you,” she repeats. “for your big, friendly smile. I just love it when people smile and are friendly to strangers, and they so very rarely are anymore. So thank you.” And with that she patted my shoulder in that old woman way, hopped on the elevator with her husband, off to enjoy the dulcet tones of Itzhak Perlman (the aforementioned tones were dulcet and breathtaking and beautiful; I may have snuck in for a few minutes of listening when I got off work).

That woman’s words really got me thinking. I’m a happy and friendly person; I don’t think twice about smiling at strangers (and maybe that’s simply a by-product of being raised in the South?). But she’s right! People don’t simply smile at strangers anymore. As soon as our conversation was over I texted a friend who lives in a different region of the country and told him about it. He immediately laughed and replied with “If you’d done that here, the old lady would have been Russian and asked what you were so happy about.” which made me laugh, but also kind of made me sad.

I don’t know . . . it just got me thinking . . . it shouldn’t be such a shocking thing to be on the receiving end of a smile. But it is. And it’s a strange society we live in. I think I really (inadvertently) made that woman’s day today, simply by smiling at her.

But what she doesn’t know is that she also made mine by talking and smiling back.