I love random acts, and I love making connections, so I thought: what would happen if I combine the two?
To find out, I craft a plan.
In a public place, a stranger chooses a cardinal direction, rolls a dice three times (each roll is a distance in miles) and draws two slips of paper — marked “left,” “right,” or “straight” — from a baggie. I map out a route with the results and chat with someone on the other end about life. Oh, and each person offers a message to the other to bring the venture full circle.
For my inaugural excursion, I start my search at Park Avenue’s Cafe Sasso.
The first woman I approach quickly agrees to play along. She’s Emily Bulmahn, a 24-year-old pharmacy technician who lives in the neighborhood and comes here often.
Five minutes later, I have my directions: Go east six miles, turn right. Drive two miles, then turn right again. Drive another five miles and look to your left. That’s where to find the person to interview.
Before leaving, I ask Bulmahn for a message to deliver.
“I hope you’re having a good time with someone you’re close with,” she said.
In the car, I feel a surge of excitement that the person at the other end of this doesn’t know I’m on my way.
The ride ends at Chase Bank on Monroe Avenue in Brighton. A woman walking to her car is game to talk until she realizes a deep dive isn’t for her and politely declines to continue. The only customer inside said, “I don’t want anyone knowin’ my business.” With the manager on the phone and the teller helping someone in the drive-thru, it’s obvious the destination is a dud.
Reason to panic? Not yet. I prepared for this. Before leaving Cafe Sasso, I asked Bulmahn for a number between one and five, in case I ran into an issue and needed to find an alternative spot. She chose the number three.
I count three buildings over and enter a nail salon. None of the women working or getting pampered were interested, so I turned to the last bit of information I requested from Bulmahn in case of an emergency — a color. She chose purple, so I continue driving in the same direction until I see the sign — outlined in purple — for Lucky Folk Tattoo.
Inside, Benton Sillick, 39, is giving a woman a right-thigh tattoo of a frog eating olives inside a martini glass. Sillick is eager to participate and, with English rock group Little Barrie playing in the background, takes me back to when he was in grad school studying to be a music teacher. He’d played the trumpet since fifth grade and knew the career would come with job security and set him up for a decent retirement.
“It felt like a safe and conventional life,” he said. “And on paper it seemed a noble thing to do, to be a teacher, but it wasn’t in my heart.”
So Sillick dropped out, though the decision felt like a mistake at the time and wasn’t without consequences.
“It was confusing and scary,” he said, not to mention others had expectations he wouldn’t be fulfilling. “But after it all shook out, it was one of the best things that ever happened to me.”
Sillick turned from one art to another — music gave way to food, and he landed a cooking job at a farm-to-table restaurant in New York City. He appreciated working with a seasonal menu, with every ingredient sourced from within 300 miles. And he found out he was skilled in the kitchen as well.
“There was an element of creativity to it that was exciting, and a little more expressive,” he said.
So when Sillick moved back to Rochester, where he’d grown up, he found another job as a cook. Then the pandemic hit, and restaurants shut down. It was time to reconsider things yet again. For inspiration, he thought about how he handled the months after leaving grad school, when he began feeling open to possibility and fairly fearless.
“I realized that no matter what I did, as long as I kept going, I’d be all right,” he said.
In the meantime, Sillick, who had dozens of tattoos, kept adding more. (He now has nearly 100.)
“Quietly, in the back of my head, I was thinking, ‘This is something I’m really falling in love with.’”
He has worked at Lucky Folk for two years, and finally feels he has found his calling.
“We only have one life,” he said. “We’ve got to try to make the most of it.”
Sillick’s tip for others?
“Everyone and everything is connected, so stop thinking about yourself so much.”
And his message back to Bulmahn:
“You have your whole life ahead of you at 24. It sounds corny, but figure out what you really love and go for it.”
Robin L. Flanigan is a national award-winning freelance journalist and author of five books, most recently “Secret Rochester: A Guide to the Weird, Wonderful, and Obscure.” She embraces her weirdness, tries her best to be wonderful and works hard to avoid obscurity.
