Serendipity and a Small Surprise

So there I was last night, lounging around in front of the TV, watching my third night and umpteenth hour of "Build it Bigger" or "National Geographic Predators" or whatever the current incarnation of their animal program is called, and this was after my second viewing of the "Blue Planet" episode on coral, when I decided it was over. He's been watching TV with me these past few nights and has decided to assert himself. So it's been construction, carnivores, construction, carnivores, ad infinitum.

Me, I like documentaries, but they've been pretty boring lately. And he's not particularly fond of crime programs. Won't really watch "Sensing Murder" and absolutely hates "Monk." After wrestling the remote control away, I'm surfing when I discover "Cold Case." It's one of those programs I discover when they sell their reruns to the channels I troll. There's nothing as calming or reassuring as hitting one of those marathons of "Monk," "Law and Order: Criminal Intent," or one of the CSIs. This week I discovered "Mystery Woman" in the wee hours of the night.

So "Cold Case" is a fairly new discovery, but it's still on network TV. That is the episode I caught last night. The lead detective on the series is a toothsome young woman, but one of these detectives is a very cute young man. A woman calls a young man cute at two points in her life. When she is young, cute is synonymous with hot. Much later, cute becomes a motherly apellation, denoting a pleasant and sweet look.

You can imagine my surprise when in an episode about a young Amish man run amok (not one of their more riveting), the young detective tells the young man about being Cuban, about how his father came to this country at age 15 and also faced an unknown world, how you never really belong. Then he goes into the "Next year in Cuba" toast. It was pretty stilted as it always is when they try to inject the quasi political into these things. Still, for the first time there was a TV show on the side of the angels.

Turns out the young actor, Danny Pino, is one of those Miami Cuban boys made good. I shoulda known. And if you're an IMDB member- it's free- you can read the message boards where everybody knows his mother, brother, cousin, son. It's a pip. Small world.