On coincidence (or the lack thereof)

I’ve often said that I’m the victim of one in a million coincidences about once a week. But in reality I know that it’s basically just a matter of noticing the few coincidences that do happen while not picking up on any of the multitude of other instances in which coincidence could have happened but didn’t. I’ve noticed that the last two times I’ve gone inside the bank there’s been no one in line when I first walked in, but multiple customers came in behind me and got in line in front of me during the brief time in which I was filling out my deposit slip. What I want to observe is that “this keeps happening to me” but what I’ve ended up admitting is “this has happened twice out of the past hundred times I’ve gone to the bank.”

A more striking example of apparent coincidence began the other day when I discovered a musician named Brandi Carlile who was performing on Conan O’Brien. Actually, “discover” would be the wrong word choice here; when your first introduction to a musician is on a stage as big as Conan, the only thing you’ve “discovered” is that you’re a little late to that particular party, but I digress (who knew Grey’s Anatomy could turn a musician into a star? The times we live in).

If you’ve ever heard me speak on how to do interviews then you know that the research begins the minute after you first put in the interview request, on the chance that they call you right back and ask if you’d like to do the interview later that same day (this happened to me last month). So the request to SonyBMG went in late Monday morning and by lunchtime I was digging around to learn what I needed to just in case. I watched the video for her current single and momentarily thought I recognized the theater the video was shot in as being the Warfield in San Francisco (where the iProng Staff attended the Incubus concert in January) but quickly realized it wasn’t, based on the seat layout. Later in the video they show the marquee and it turns out it’s actually the Orpheum Theater.

Monday night I find myself checking to see who’s going to be on Conan, and the description says that this week’s episodes will be coming from (you saw this coming) the Orpheum Theater in San Francisco. So there’s my one in a million coincidence: a theater I’ve never heard of in thirty years of being on this planet had completely and randomly found its way into my life twice in the same day from two unrelated sources. Actually, the fact that watching Conan is what led me to end up watching the music video in the first place just made the whole thing a little creepier.

But then I get curious, so I end up googling for “Orpheum Theater” and sure enough, according to Wikipedia (and you know they’re always right), there are no fewer than thirteen different Orpheum Theaters around the world. Apparently they’re part of a chain or something. In other words, these theaters are all over the place and it’s unlikely that the video was even shot in the same Orpheum Theater that Conan is coming from. So much for my big coincidence. Here I thought I’d encountered two Empire State Buildings in the same day, and in reality it’s more akin to driving past two Starbucks.

It’s still something of a coincidence that the theater chain would pop up on my radar twice in the same day, but the odds of it are a little more worldly that I had first assumed. Things are not always as they seem. I do wonder, though, which Orpheum Theater was used for the filming of Brandi Carlile’s video. Maybe I’ll have to ask her.