Graham Reid: Lie detectors break the ice

We met at dinner in an unusual hotel on the Oregon coast where the rooms were named after famous authors, with corresponding decor.

The Edgar Allen Poe room had a pendulum blade swinging above the bed, the Hemingway had the head of a deer above the bed and the riotously coloured Dr Seuss suite needs to be seen to be appreciated.

It was an eccentric place perched on a cliff and named after Sylvia Beach, the patron of many writers in Paris during the 1930s.

The hotel had no television. Cellphones were banned from the dining area and considered poor form anywhere else. People came to read in silence and to meet over dinner.

The founder and co-owner, Goody, had instituted a custom at the family-style meals where guests shared eight-seater tables and passed around plates of bread and steaming vegetables.

Her ice-breaker was simple and effective. Each guest had to tell two truths and one lie about themselves. The others were allowed to ask three questions each before deciding which had been the lie.

It a good game and by the end of it those at our table all knew a lot about each other. In our number we had a schoolteacher of 32 years standing, a former jet pilot, and a woman who had stolen her dad's car at 15 and spent two years on the roads of America before going home. And Shaun.

His three statements were that he had met the poet Robert Frost, scientist Albert Einstein, and president John F. Kennedy.

We looked at him and did the maths. He was about 60, so the dates worked out. We started our questions.

His answers revealed that his parents had been intellectuals and itinerant professors, his father one of America's greatest classical composers. He had been to school in a dozen places, including Costa Rica.

Frost and Einstein had been friends of his parents - Frost had sat on the end of the bed reading to his sick father and Einstein had played violin - very badly - with his mother. They used to put soap instead of rosin on his bow.

He had met JFK when his parents had been invited by Jackie to a party at the Kennedy's Camelot.

The stories were all believable. And he had been a record company executive who had worked with the Osmonds, Three Dog Night, Shaun Cassidy, Leif Garrett and Barry Manilow. He'd been in a group himself in the 1960s.

After the game was over he and I shared stories about the various egos and insanities we had come across in the music business. Only after we had parted company did I learn he was in the seminal West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band in the 1960s.

Earlier, we had tried to guess his lie.

I thought he hadn't met Frost. But he had.

Others didn't believe the Einstein connection. But it was true.

The lie was about JFK. He hadn't met him although he did remember the White House invitations that came to his house.

Even so, meeting Robert Frost, Albert Einstein, Donny Osmond and Barry Manilow?

That's quite a life.

And it makes for quite a dinner table conversation.