A friend and I are meeting for a mid-afternoon lunch in Beverly Hills at Coupa Café on Canon Drive, a favorite Venezuelan restaurant with great coffees and arepas and a terrific selection of Chilean and Argentine wines.

As I walked around the corner to Canon Drive, I was startled to see the sidewalk blocked by a group of 15 to 20 paparazzi with expensive zoom lens cameras and videocams strapped around their necks and shoulders, many of them with several kinds of equipment for any occasion. A few minutes later the waiters at Coupa Café informed me that the photographers are staked out across the street from Porta Via, an Italian restaurant where Jessica Alba is reported to be having lunch!

Felix is the older brother of Nicolas, our Director for Pan American Dreams. Theirs is an interesting family. Their late father was Swiss. Their mother Mercedes is Uruguayan, born to a distinguished family with a legacy of diplomats and high government officials among their members. Nico and Felix were born in Uruguay but moved to Argentina as very young children. They think of themselves as completely Argentine, which they are.

The entire multi-lingual family is involved in creative pursuits. Mercedes is a published novelist. Nico runs a successful video production company in Buenos Aires and is our Director. But Felix is a special case, a larger than life creative phenomenon. He paints, acts, writes and directs. He has been living in London for the past eight years or so, working as a stage actor mainly, but also painting and writing with a bit of TV and movie work in the mix.

Although I'd heard a great deal about him, I did not meet Felix during my nine months in Argentina because he was in London the entire time. We had exchanged emails, but nothing more. In early February, I received an unexpected email from him announcing that he was in Los Angeles.

Although Ray was born in Mexico City, his father was a prominent medical doctor in the southern U.S., and Ray lived with his family through high school in the Carolinas. He stayed in the South to get his undergraduate degree in biology from the University of Kentucky.

As a small town southern boy, one of the local traits that Ray picked up that continues to define him as an adult is storytelling, at which traditional Southerners in the U.S. often excel.

Today Ray told me about the blue people of Kentucky.

I was in Fresno in California's great Central Valley this weekend to visit friends, talk to prospective sponsors and do a small screening of our Pablo and Virginia go to Luján movie. Fermin and I are discussing production options for a new Pan American Dreams project called Central Valley Stories because he produces fotonovellas and telenovellas for public education and political campaigns.

Ray (from our Board) and Claudia put me up in their lakeside home. We had a wonderful weekend that ended with a Sunday morning brunch screening of Pablo and Virginia, which my largely bi-lingual audience loved. They understood the movie in ways I wouldn't have anticipated, even reveling in the Argentine accents and jokingly imitating their pronunciation.

Friday night there was a going away party for a friend of Claudia's. At the end of the night, I found myself in a small group with Fermin, and he shared his own incredibly colorful Central Valley Story with me.