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My Dinner with a Professor, an Ex-Prisoner, and Sister Helen Prejean
I meet many famous and infamous people as part of my work.
I don’t share much about these encounters, because I try to keep a level of professionalism in place at all times. However, there are a few memorable encounters with people that I do share. These are moments that have made a profound impact on me.
One of those moments involved Sister Helen Prejean, the author of Dead Man Walking and a fervent anti-death penalty activist, my first political science professor and a man named J.T.
This is a story of the night we went to dinner.
Meeting Sister Helen
At the events center where I work, it was a typical day. Another well-known person was coming into speak. This time is it was the nun that was played by Susan Sarandon in that movie.
Too busy to care about the content of the event, I was going through the motions of making sure things were in place when I received a text. It was from my first political science professor in college. We have remained friends for over 30 years.
Are you going to be at the Sister Helen Prejean event tonight? She asked via text.
I wrote back that I would be there, and she told me she was coming and bringing a…