Everyone loves a good summer read filled with famous names, Byzantine plots, mystery and romance — and so here's my contribution.
My premise is that Santa Barbara is at the center of the universe — there always seems to be a connection between people in the news and the Santa Barbara area — the most famous Prince in the entire world abdicates his royal lineage and chooses to live in … okay, not quite next door to us but, metaphorically, just down the street.
In fact, I believe that the famous people who live among us simply highlight how connected we are to everything. If you follow the threads of their stories you can connect anybody who lives here to almost anyone you can think of in culture and history. To test my theory, I selected a celebrated resident in the area and then chose a well-known name from history or popular culture and tried to connect the dots between the two names. Here are my results: