this is not a one-liner !
Fairy tale ...
A long, long time ago,
when I still went to school (I attended the Antwerp atheneum)
the Belgian king came to visit our school.
We were all lined up in the playground.
When the king passed me, he stopped and said :
“Hi Frank, how are you?” and we chatted for a while before he went on...
The next day, I was called to the headmaster’s office.
He asked me what that conversation had been all about
and I told him I just happened to know the king.
He did not believe me, so I said
“this is nothing, I even know the pope”
“Now, I don’t believe that, but we will find out. Next year we have our schooltrip to Rome with the final-year students, and the two of us will go to the vatican and we’ll see whether you are lying or not.”
..
The next year, we went to Rome, and surely the headmaster took me to the vatican.
When we asked for an audience with the pope, the Swiss guard answered curtly that there were no audiences now and that the pope was about to appear on the terrace to give his blessing to the congregation in the Piazza di San Pietro.
I said to the guard, “just go and tell him it’s Frank from Belgium!”
Five minutes later, the guard came running back and told me I could go right through,
but the headmaster had to wait outside in the Piazza.
I joined the pope as he went on the terrace, and overlooked the crowd.
The headmaster was standing next to a Chinese, and suddenly I saw him faint.
I hurried downstairs and helped the headmaster up.
“What happened” I asked
“oh” he said “I was standing next to this Chinese guy, and you know what he said”
“Hey, who is that man standing next to Frank?”
......
