Gratitude and Pasta: The Secret Sauce for Human Connection

By Chris Schembra and Sara Stibitz

The epidemic of loneliness and depression among CEOs, executives, and founders is rampant, and yet, we continue to create and foster relationships in the same way we always have – with boring networking events that leave us more disconnected than ever. Born of author Chris Schembra’s own disillusionment with success and his i

• Language: English
• Publisher: 7:47
• Release date: Apr 7, 2020
• ISBN: 9780578604954

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Gratitude and Pasta

The Secret Sauce for Human Connection

Chris Schembra

with Sara Stibitz

Copyright © 2019 by Chris Schembra

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any manner without written permission of the copyright owner except for the use of quotations in a book review. For more information, address: [e-mail].

First hardback edition published April 2020.

Book design by DiztriX

Interior design by Olivier Darbonville

Illustrations by Sonia Corredor

Author Portrait by Maurizio Babaldi

ISBN 9780578604947 (hardback)

ISBN 9780578604954 (ebook)

www.747club.org

www.gratitudeandpasta.com

Contents

Introduction

1. You Don’t Have to Be Alone to Be Lonely

2. Setting the Table for Gratitude

3. The Secret to the Sauce: Gratitude, Empathy, and Connection

4. The Elements of the Dinner

Act I

6. Planning Your Dinner

7. The Day of the Dinner

Act II

8. Let the Games Begin

9. Creating Connection with Gratitude

10. What People Say Around the Dinner Table

Act III

11. Closing Out the Dinner

12. Planning Your Future Dinners

Conclusion

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Endnotes

To Molly, Phil, Carol, and Leonardo.

Introduction

It was the Summer of 2015, and I was living in New York City as a successful theater producer, running a production company for a wonderful man named Tony Lo Bianco. We were fixtures on the charity circuit, traveling all over the world, achieving tremendous things, entertaining audiences of all kinds and ages. By that point, I had been working in show business for five years; and while everything appeared tremendously successful on the outside, on the inside, I felt the complete opposite.

The low point came in July of that year. We had just returned to New York City after producing a Broadway play in Italy. Italy was amazing. Tony, his new wife Alyse, and I had spent weeks wandering the ancient streets of Rome, touring the vineyards in Tuscany, and becoming fluent in Italian. I became ingrained in la dolce vita – the sweet life. I was exposed to cuisine, culture, and connection like I had never dreamed of.

However, upon our return to New York City, I found myself alone, in my 350-square -foot apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and realized I felt four things: insecure, lonely, disconnected, and unfulfilled. I had just broken up with my girlfriend at the time, and I was living in my shoebox of an apartment by myself. And Tony, who I had spent the last five years working with side-by-side for many hours a day, had just gotten married. We started to disagree on fundamental issues. We drifted apart, and no longer was I his first choice to accompany him to every night’s charity function, which meant I was suddenly eating nearly every dinner alone for the first time in years. It was New York City Pizza, bagels and omelets for dinner, or when I was too lazy, a whey-protein shake; a far cry from the Italian Riviera.

I started to feel like maybe there was more to life than this. I wondered what I was capable of and whether there was more that I could be doing. I was finally becoming aware of the dissatisfaction I felt deep down and had been feeling for months.

I started questioning every area of my life – who I was, what I stood for, and what I wanted most out of life. At that time, I found myself thinking back to what I loved most about my time in Italy – the food. I started spending a lot of time in my kitchen, experimenting with the recipes I had enjoyed most. I perfected an amaretto recipe, a negroni recipe, and a recipe for gelato. The food was so delicious that I practically inhaled every dish. Furthermore, the time it took to make these recipes filled the space between coming home from work and going to bed. My routine became work, shop, cook, sleep, repeat. Cooking was feeding my sense of creativity.

During my time with Tony, he and his wife hosted many dinners in their home overlooking Central Park. Even though they were hosting celebrities and philanthropists, the meal had been simple and home-made – pasta with a spicy puttanesca sauce that everyone loved. As I thought about what I wanted out of life, I began to take inspiration from Tony’s famous sauce and the way they had fed me and their guests over the years. The comfort they created around their dinner table had always been inspiring, but I had not yet attempted to recreate it.

So, one night, I tried inventing my own sauce. And much to my delight, the recipe I came up with worked on the first try.

I had my very own pasta sauce.

I thought my sauce was devastatingly delicious, but who was I to judge. I figured I should probably feed it to people to see if it was good or not, so I decided I would invite fifteen of my friends over to try the sauce. At the time, not many of those friends knew each other; I had invited fifteen people from different areas of my life.

On July 15, 2015, those fifteen of my friends arrived. The cocktails began at 6:30 p.m. SHARP. Because I was a lazy fella, I invited them into the kitchen and delegated eleven tasks to my attendees, and a ritual began. At the time, I didn’t know there was a secret sauce to having people work together to serve each other. I just wanted a little help in the kitchen. At 7:47 p.m., we put the pasta in the pot; by 8:00 p.m. we sat down to eat our meal. By working together, we created a safe space for each of us to open up, serve each other, and that gave us permission for deep conversation.

At that very first dinner, after nearly two hours of dining, I posed a simple question to the group: "If you could give credit or thanks to one person in your life that you don’t give enough credit or thanks to, who would that be?" And to my delight and surprise, many of them, through these hours of working together to create the meal, felt so comfortable and so safe that they actually opened up and became vulnerable. They told beautiful stories of people from their past, and a few of them cried as they shared.

And of course, they liked my new pasta sauce.

Oh, the things I had to do in order to prepare for their arrival. I borrowed tables and chairs, folded my murphy bed into the wall, made sure the bathroom was cleaned. There were fifteen of us crammed into a 350-square-foot studio apartment – it was intimate, to say the least; but I loved the feeling of hosting! Whether it was standing to the side watching the joy the dinner table provided my guests or feeling the thrill of being the linchpin for so much vulnerability and real authenticity. It gave me a visceral thrill of being not only the actor, but the director, writer, AND producer I had watched Tony be for so many years.

Before the dinner was over, I looked at my calendar and said, I’m free next Thursday. Y’all want to do this again? They were in, and I told them that for the next dinner, they could each invite one friend.

The dinners continued week after week with no underlying intention, other than to serve the people who have been there for me and to help build community once a week, for free, in my home. The rules stayed the same: Everyone brings their own bottle of wine and shows up at 6:30 p.m. SHARP. The first time someone was invited, they came alone. The second time, they could bring a friend. After that, they were eligible to nominate someone to come to dinner in their place.

Unsurprisingly, my network rapidly grew. I was becoming known for creating safe spaces that facilitate deep human connection. After a year, I had done fifty-four dinners, feeding 808 people, for free, in my home. Along the way, I met a very special lady, Molly Victoria Sovran. After we were introduced by a cousin of mine, Molly started attending these dinners, and I rapidly fell in love with her. She was the first to arrive and the last to leave every dinner, soon filling the void that appeared once my home emptied for the night. She became my co-host for these dinners, greeting and entertaining our guests as I manned the kitchen. We watched so many people leave our events and take life-changing action. Some would quit jobs to pursue a life of passion, some would team up with each other to co-create business opportunities, and some even came out of the closet to live an uninhibited life.

The tipping point was an early Monday morning in February of 2016. I woke up in my bed at 2 am, bawling, realizing for the first time in my life that I’d found a little bit of joy. I was starting to rid myself of insecurity. I felt less lonely than I ever had in my life, and I was finally beginning to feel a sense of purpose.

My greatest insecurity as a child was that I was always the last one invited to the party, despite the fact that even when I was younger I was seen as one of the most well-connected people in my world. Sometimes the most connected people are actually the most disconnected people – I call it the catalyst’s dilemma. If you are the connector, the linchpin, the broker, the person between all of these people – people have a tendency to forget about you. My invite was always somehow lost in the mail, whether it was a casual Friday night at a friend’s house or a big party. This led to me feeling as if I was always the one waiting on an invitation, always out of place.

This feeling of a lack of connection and community plagued me from high school into college, and it followed me