Serendipity: Does It Happen To You? #MishMashMonday #trivia #inspiration

I’ve got to love social media and the Internet these days because I learn the most interesting things! So much information just a click away is like crack to an information junkie like me. But this time, the discovery was one of those serendipitous things when I learned the answer to a question I’d had since I was a child.

It started with a clip on Facebook of Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore winning an award for the Dick Van Dyke Show. The woman announcer was an actress from a show I’d been wanting to know the name of for years! It was a show that came on at my bedtime but my mother always let me stay up and watch the beginning because I found the woman so beautiful and fascinating. She was dressed in black (or it looked like black on a black-and-white TV), had a mole on her cheek and some sort of big cat she was petting (which was, I discovered today, an Ocelot). I asked my mother about it years later, but she never could place what show I was talking about.

But as I was writing Trust No One and Edge of Trust, this woman was the image I had in mind for Tasha.

Turns out the actress’s name was Anne Francis and the show she starred in was called Honey West, a show about a woman private detective. Private detective (Honey West) . . . spy/mercenary (Tasha Shivko) . . .  close enough!

Here’s the link to the clip of Dick Van Dyke that gave me Anne’s name. (And they say you can’t learn anything on Facebook!)

Facebook Clip of Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore award.

And know what? Honey West is out on DVD at Amazon. Guess what I’m going to buy to binge watch?

So . . . how about you, have you ever finally found the answer decades after you asked the question? Or have you experienced serendipity in another way?