Hello Cleveland!

So what did I do this past weekend?  Oh, not much, I worked around the year, went for a walk, attended a meeting of my writers' group, saw a movie at the inaugural film festival in Montclair, New Jersey, met a supermodel . . .

Yes! I met another high-profile fashion model! And not just any model.  

Okay, let me back up a bit.  The Montclair Film Festival had, among its many movies being screened, a documentary about famous fashion models and how their careers evolved.  The film, About Face, was an enjoyable movie for anyone who's into haute couture or who just likes beautiful women. ;-)  And one of the models interviewed in the movie was a guest for the screening, along with the film's director, Timothy Greenfield-Sanders.

The model in question? Pat Cleveland. :-)

At the mention of that name, anyone who knows a thing about fashion knows how awesome that is.  For the rest of you, let me explain: Pat Cleveland is a fashion model of mixed race who worked in Paris in the early seventies and caused a sensation on every runway she ever walked on, especially at a famous show in 1973 at Versailles when she and other American models of color showed up their French counterparts.  But to call Pat Cleveland a model and leave it at that would be like calling St. Peter's Basilica a neighborhood church in Rome, so great and majestic is her reputation.  She is an unbridled force of nature, a woman whose personality fills an entire room and a woman who easily takes up all the oxygen in the room.  If she did not exist already, she would have to be invented.  She is that much larger than life.  After the screening, she and Timothy Greenfield-Sanders took questions from the audience, and all of the energy and attention in the theater clearly gravitated toward her.

I got to meet Miss Cleveland after the screening let out, and, for all of her iconic stature - did I happen to mention that she's very tall? - she is a lovely and wonderfully modest and gracious person, and she was very pleased to meet me.  She gave me a sound bit of advice - to take advantage of every opportunity in life and to take the time to meet new people. After all, she took the time to meet me.

And, she happily posed with me for a picture, taken by her husband, Paul Van Ravenstein, who happens to be a a photographer.

Okay, my smile looks a little goofy, but let's be honest: How are you going to be able to stand next to a beautiful woman like Pat Cleveland and look cool?  Maybe I wasn't cool, but the experience certainly was.

Attentive readers of my blog will know that I've connected with several models on Facebook, and that I also met Nancy Donahue in person.  I still have to pinch myself over all these incredible connections I've made, and that includes a Facebook connection with Miss Cleveland (another story).  If you had told me four years ago that I'd be meeting connecting to all of these beautiful women through Facebook (which I joined in 2008) because a couple of them noticed my sister blog devoted to pictures of beautiful women, and if you had told me also that Pat Cleveland's husband would be a fan of my picture blog,  I would have asked you to  take a sobriety test.  I would never have believed you.  And if you were to ask me what I'd say now, it would be this:

I love social media! :-)

The movie was very entertaining, as many of the women interviewed were from the eighties - I don't know how much I can thank them for making that decade palatable for me (hey, it was the decade of Ronald Reagan and MTV!) - but I regret that that Nancy Donahue only appeared for more than a few seconds.  Pat Cleveland, of course, was fascinating. :-)