A special thank you!

We arrived today in Almaty and we were able to experience one of those warm fuzzy moments that, honestly, we cannot take credit for. First it requires a little backstory…

Terri’s former mother-in-law is Priscillia Condra, who owns a talent and modeling agency in San Antonio, Texas. Terri and Priscillia have maintained a good friendship and have lunch on occasion when Priscillia, who now lives in the LA area, is in San Antonio for business. I had the pleasure of meeting and befriending Priscillia during our involvement on the board of the Communications Arts Society of San Antonio. It is a situation that could have been quite awkward but I always felt I had a very good relationship with Priscillia and enjoy the opportunity to see her. Given this, Terri knows Priscillia’s daughter Julie who is an actress out in Hollywood. Julie is married to Mark Dacascos also an actor. Bear with me, this is going to be like six degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon, without Kevin Bacon being involved. Mark has been in a number of cool films (visit his website www.dacascos.com) one of my absolute favorites was Le Pacte des Loups (Brotherhood of the Wolf), a French film that if I remember correctly he played an Iroquois Indian from the period of the French-Indian War. In this film he was an absolute badass. This was a film I really enjoyed and only found out later the connection between Julie, Priscilla and eventually on to us. Priscilla, when she found out we were adopting, immediately became very supportive of our endeavor. As it turns out Mark had just made a film here in Kazakhstan which translates to The Nomad. The film was financed by the government of Kaz with Mark having a starring role. When he and Julie heard we were adopting from Kaz they immediately offered to lend any support to us we needed. They were willing to call people they knew in Kaz if we ran into any problems. Mark carries a lot of clout here and I am not sure that he and Julie knew how much it meant to us to have that kind of support in our corner. Mark and Julie, if you are reading this—we can’t thank you enough. I must confess, I wanted someone to screw with us just to be able to roll out the heavy artillery! But in the end nothing really has happened to warrant taking them up on their offer, but Mark ended up helping us in a way that meant much more to Terri and myself.

While we were over here we wanted to look for a copy of the movie The Nomad. Eventually there are plans for it to be released in the States but we wanted the old school version of the film and asked about it in hopes of finding a copy. Embarrassingly, I must say that this gave us a certain popularity as we had a quasi-relationship with Mark.

We would be asked: “You know Mark Dacascos?!?”

“Well, kinda, yeah, we don’t go drinking together or anything, but…”

“That is so cool!”

“Well, you know…”

It went on like this with a few different people; drivers, translators and coordinators, explaining our relationship but we could never find the DVD anywhere we went (in both Ust and Almaty) But on the last day of our first trip, as we were going to the airport in Almaty, our coordinator, Bulgin, brought us a copy. It turns out that her 9 year-old brother, Zhanibek, is a huge fan of Mark’s, and he gave us his copy of the movie which I am sure was no easy decision on his part. We thanked Bulgin and told her to tell her brother we really appreciated it. When we got back home we ended up emailing Priscilla and asking her if Mark wouldn’t mind autographing a photo to take back to Bulgin’s brother. He was more than happy to. In no time at all he sent us a package via UPS. Inside were no less than five different photos that he had personally signed. For a kid, this was going to be a gold mine. He now had carte blanche to fabricate any story about his relationship with Mark! He was going to the top of the playground food chain. Before we left, we had them framed.

So coming back around to a short story made very long, we gave Bulgin the photos last night (this morning) at the airport. She was absolutely overwhelmed and tickled to death. She said her brother was going to love them. After a few fitful hours of sleep we saw her later in the day and she said her brother could not believe it. He was going to take all of them to school on Monday to show all of his friends. I think there may be a little gloating going on! But it is funny, you spend 10 hours on a plane, depart said plane in a cold, pouring rain and pick up your equally cold, soggy luggage…what is it I am going to remember that night?—The warm fuzzy I got for being able to make a kid’s day. Not to bad when you think of it.

So this is a thank you to Priscilla, Julie and Mark, for all your offers of help during this process. And an extra special thanks to Mark who did more than was asked of him —he even sent us a note wanting to meet our boys and has promised to send Aidan and Liam their own copies of signed prints. It is always the little things that mean so much to us and you will always be greatly appreciated by us. In fact, when the time comes that my life is immortalized in film (and it will happen) I am now going to insist that Mark plays me, which I am sure will be truly heroic character in some sort of mundane way—besides, the physical resemblance is uncanny, well, except for the part where he is in shape…and maybe a bit more handsome…yes, he is a badass, too. But besides that, we are a lot alike.

And on an it-could-only-happen-to-Steve-and-Terri note: We arrived in Almaty during a cold rain. Apparently the day had been quite pleasant. Bulgin joked that we had brought the rainy weather. So I asked if any cold or snowy weather was expected—she assured me that that wasn’t the case. So we went to bed with the calming sound of rain soon to be replaced by silence. I woke up this morning and pulled back the curtains…

You guessed it, snow.

I guess that’s what we get for sunny weather in London.