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Birthday stranger seeks random acts of conversation

When it comes to meeting a stranger for dinner, there's no way to know if it's going to be a happy hour or not.

ST. LOUIS – Something Tom Bradshaw’s father told him stuck with him.

Everyone is equal.

It doesn’t matter what they look like or sound like. Bradshaw often thinks about that fatherly philosophy on his birthday, February 12.

“I look forward to it tremendously,” said Bradshaw, while driving to his birthday dinner. “It has completely changed my life. It’s really made me feel a connection with everyone I’ve come in contact with. I wasn’t expecting that.”

Who could have predicted seven years ago that Bradshaw would become Birthday Stranger? Every year Bradshaw invites a willing stranger to meet for dinner. This is the 7th year Bradshaw has placed an online ad for his random act of birthday conversation.

Rules?

“You have to be over 18 and you can’t be a serial killer,” he said.

When it comes to meeting a stranger for dinner, there’s no way to know if it’s going to be a happy hour or not.

“I always wonder how it’s going to go but I’ve been lucky that each year there’s a connection with each person that I’ve met and that’s really changed my life and my direction,” said Bradshaw.

The two birthday strangers, Tom Bradshaw and Jay Bushi, met at Dados Café. Like many conversations with strangers, weather and family were early topics.

“You must trust your wife a lot to come meet a stranger,” Bradshaw said to Bushi, whose wife had noticed the Birthday Stranger queries for several years and decided to volunteer her husband.

Bushi’s reaction?

“In most cases I trust her but there is always that reluctance that you go, okay, what am I getting into?” said Bushi, a retired airman from the U.S. Air Force.

The birthday conversation evolved from small talk to candor.

“I suffer from PTSD,” Bushi told Bradshaw. “So, some things that are like this, it’s kind of good for me to get out from that bubble.”

Bradshaw uses his cellphone to record the annual conversations, then blogs about the birthday interactions on his website, birthdaystranger.com.

“The point of this project is to battle the stranger danger that I think exists in our culture, number one,” said Bradshaw. “And number two, that there’s too much of ‘us vs. them’ in our culture and that when we’re too busy trying to prove that we’re right, we’re not listening at all. When we really listen to the other person we actually begin to care for their point of view. I wanted to meet someone else who was different than me and also show others that even though two people may feel like they have nothing in common, that they do.”

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