Where's the grapevine?

So Rob and I went for beers with a few of his coworkers the other day. One of the women I'd heard a lot about but had never met. She's an immigrant who's been in the community for like 10 years (ages in our super transient population.) She's probably the single most widely respected person working for their organization. Anyway, two funny things happened. The first was that (as I'm ever so good at doing) I stuck my foot in my mouth. Good thing I have small feet. She was telling a story about interviewing someone and how she couldn't understand anything the woman was saying. She then mentioned, "you know, she hasn't been in the country for very long, and her English is really hard to understand."
"Why didn't you just do the interview in Spanish?" I dumbly asked.
"Because she was Russian."
"Ooooh." I said as everyone laughed at me.
"Yeah its ok, racist." She teased as I laughed at myself.

So a little later she told me this story about how she'd gotten an email earlier in the day. The email was less than friendly and said something about hearing XYZ through the grapevine. She had replied, "Well, I don't know where this grapevine is, but ..."

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