Need to Reach Mark Plotkin? Make Sure the Right One's on Speed Dial

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"Then, out of the blue, they call me. And ask me to speak. It was this dream come true," he continued.

The ethnobotanist chuckled quietly as the story unspooled.

Once he arrived on campus, the commentator recalled, he inhaled the gravitas of the institution and wished his family could see him.

"But nobody showed up to hear me," he said. "They very kindly told me that they'd still pay for the trip, even though no one showed up. But I always wondered why Harvard University singled out such a major peripheral figure like me."

The ethnobotanist laid down his chopsticks.

"It was at a conference in Bellagio, Italy, I met a very attractive Pakistani journalist who was about to go to Harvard as a Neiman Fellow," he said. "She asked me to speak at Harvard while she was there. Then I got these e-mails from her telling me that it was all coming along. But that was the last I heard of it."

The commentator was silent for a minute.

"Oh," he said.

Long pause.

"They wanted you. Not me."

The ethnobotanist merely smiled.

There were times when the globe-trotting PhD was mistaken for the commentator.