Meeting Smart (and Cute, Too)

There's a common strategy in women's entertainment ("chick flicks" and "chick lit") of having the two leading characters meet for the first time in some kind of unexpected and endearing way.  It's called "meeting cute."  Examples include:

• A handsome cop gives a pretty girl a jaywalking ticket (in an episode of the old TV show "Alice")
• A man and a women who don't know one another happen to be buying pajamas in the same department, and he says "I only need the bottoms" and she says "I only need the top" ("Bluebeard's 8th Wife," a 1938 movie with Claudette Colbert and Gary Cooper)
• The classic may be "You've Got Mail," when Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks have fallen in love by e-mail only to discover face-to-face that they're direct and hated business rivals.

That's so complicated.  In men's entertainment, it's much simpler.  The guy just has to deliver a pizza to the bored housewife.

Anyway, the way I met Nora is one of my favorite stories.  I was at the end of my second year of grad school at UW-Milwaukee, and had just attended the annual conference of our professional society, the Environmental Design Research Association (EDRA) in Chicago.  I always enjoyed that meeting; it was fun to realize that there were hundreds of people interested in similar work rather than just the handful of fellow students and teachers in Milwaukee.

Once we got back home, one of my colleagues, a first-year student named Habib Chaudhury, gave me a copy of a paper from a session he'd attended.  "I really liked this presentation, and it reminded me of the work you're doing."  And he handed me what turned out to be a treasure map, called "Psychic Homelands: From Wilderness to Zionism."

And Habib was right.  It was one of the most remarkable things I'd read in my field.  Intellectually daring, emotionally generous, beautifully written.  The historian of science Thomas Kuhn talked about "normal science" and "paradigmatic science."  In normal science, the field is incrementally moved forward with a little new information at a time.  But sometimes, an idea comes along that changes not only what we know, but how we think.  "Psychic Homelands" was one of those paradigm-changing moments.

I'd vaguely heard of its author, Dr. Nora J. Rubinstein, before that.  She was one of the New York elite, a leader in the field who was well connected with EDRA's powerhouses.  I didn't write to her to tell her how much her work had meant to me, because a) I'm a shy person, and b) I was this midwestern rube grad student and she was a New York intellectual powerhouse.  But I incorporated her ideas into my work, and made remarkable growth in my research life.

The next year, I happened to run into her at the next iteration of EDRA.  If this was a movie, I'd say that it happened while I was talking to friends about how brilliant that paper was, and that Dr. Rubinstein happened to overhear me and introduced herself.  Or that I was giving my (ultimately award-winning) presentation that drew strongly on her work and she happened to be in the audience.  Fact is, though, I don't actually remember how we met at that conference.  I know that we'd already met before I gave my talk, because I was going to refer to her work in my presentation and I asked her whether she pronounced her last name to rhyme with sheen or shine.  (I remember it now because it's pronounced the same way as Einstein.) 

We went out for Mexican food (we were in San Antonio), and then talked together most of the evening at Sue Wiedemann's annual informal party with her hotel room's bathtub full of ice and bottled beer.  That resulted in us creating a conference session together for the following year in Boston in which we brought five people from each of the three generations of EDRA members (the "founders," the "stalwarts," and the "heirs"), all of whom came together really only because she knew them.

So we worked together for years in different ways, writing and consulting together and periodically losing touch and then re-connecting.  And about five years ago, we discovered that we shared far more than we'd ever thought.  The treasure map had led me to a new land of ideas, and the "X" on the map was Dr. Rubinstein herself.

I think that counts as "meeting cute."