Mothers

This isn't my coincidence, but I witnessed it. I've changed the names, including that of the famous actor in the story. We had a party. Two guests were Adriana and Ruthie. Adriana is my wife's friend and Ruthie is a former high-school classmate of mine. They had never met, but started talking. Ruthie started asking Adriana questions that revealed quite a bit of private knowledge about Adriana and her family, eventually asking, "Didn't you have a great-aunt who married Gregory Peck?" It turned out that she had, and Adriana turned pale (which tough for an Armenian) and almost started shaking. Adriana asked "Who... who are you!!!???" I confess that Ruthie kind of enjoyed playing the clairvoyant, but she eventually told Adriana that some years before, while visiting her mother at the old-age home where she lived, she met another woman who was visiting her own mother. The mothers were room-mates.The two girls started chatting, and learned quite a bit about each others' families. At the party, Ruthie thought at first that Adriana was the other girl, because she looked so much like her and had the same accent. Eventually, though, she guessed that Adriana was instead the other girl's sister, and based on this, she strung Adriana along for quite a while before revealing how she knew what she knew. But it's still a pretty coincidence that they met this way at a party, considering that my wife and Adriana are from Lebanon and Ruthie and I are from the Bronx, and their only connections were the fact that their mothers had been room-mates and that they both knew us.