My evening with a Nobel Laureate

This afternoon one of my co-workers offered her tickets to the distinguished speakers presentation this evening. These tickets are hard to come by and members must buy the entire season to have these tickets. Tonight's presenter happened to be Mikhail Gorbachev.
Before the presentation, audience members could fill out a small index card with any questions that they would like Gorbachev to answer during the Q&A. They only pick ten questions out of the entire audience so I thought there was little chance that I would be chosen.
The start of his speech was a little unnerving as there was a translator that spoke right over his words. It took me quite a while to be comfortable with that, but it was such an interesting speech. I am now very interested in Gorbachev's environmental organization, Green Cross International.
It was also really refreshing to hear someone's take on US and International Politics that is not swayed by the media.
At Q&A time, out of the many questions that were submitted...MINE was one of them. I had the only non-political question and I could definitely tell that Gorbachev was refreshed to have a different question. I asked, "Growing up, what was your greatest aspiration?", to which he replied that all he wanted to do while growing up was learn, because his parents were peasants with no education and he grew up in an environment that was poor and not encouraging to in-depth study. After this evenings interesting speech, I believe that I would like to have tea with Gorbachev (and his translator). He handled the questions very well, especially when he was asked to compare the present Bush and the former Bush...the audience moaned at this question...Gorbachev calmly said, "I will leave that to the American public to compare, but I do know they have one relation...they are father and son. Oh, that Mikhail, he sure is funny.