After working with medium-clairvoyant Lisa Williams for several years, I have come to the conclusion that nothing is coincidence – nothing happens “by chance” – everything that happens is supposed to happen. If “all the world’s a stage”, then we’re just actors reciting lines that have already been written. Here’s one of many recent examples from the past few years.

In 2006, I was working for a company with a huge archive of talk show footage from the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s. I needed to get some old footage for a show I was working on, so I drove out to a place in West L.A. where the tapes were stored – aisles and aisles of tapes stacked floor to ceiling in a climate-controlled, subterranean environment. A librarian was there to help find the footage I was looking for. I began to wander off down an aisle (or was I drawn to that aisle?) and was just randomly looking at the tape labels to see who the guests stars were for each of the shows on the tapes. I came across two tapes with the labels “Guest Star: Charlene“. What a surprise.

Charlene was a one-hit wonder in the late ’70’s with the song “I’ve Never Been To Me“. I happened to hear the album at the store I worked at then in high school, a department store where I ran the Cameras & Records department. I bought the LP (for you youngsters, an LP means “Long Play” and it is a wax round disc with grooves in it that would play through a needle on a “record player”). I became a huge fan of Charlene because I loved her voice and because her songwriting team wrote some deep, gut-wrenchingly honest lyrics, similar to the hit she was known for. Though she hasn’t released any records in decades, she is still a favorite artist of mine.

So there I am, pleasantly surprised that there are some archival TV shows featuring Charlene performing. I snapped up the 2-inch tapes and asked the librarian to make me DVD dubs so I could watch them later. The next day, the dubs arrived in my office. I was excited to watch them but decided to put it off ’til I got home.

When I arrived home, I went to my laptop to check my email. The DVD dubs were in my briefcase. Among all the spam and office e-mails was one that caught my attention immediately. In the “from” column was the name “Charlene”.

“No way”, I thought. “This has to be a joke.”

I opened the e-mail. It was, in fact, from THE Charlene. What???

I read on. Charlene mentioned that she was a singer and had a hit in the ’70’s and performed the song on lots of talk shows. She saw on-line that I worked for a company involved in one of those old shows and she’d like to see if I could get copies of her appearances on that show…

Thirty years after the shows aired – the day I received copies of those exact shows – she e-mails. There were too many coincidence at work there. It was all supposed to happen. There is no other explanation.

Charlene got her dubs, I got an autograph! And I’m still astounded over how the whole thing went down.