Originally published in The Chronotype.
I was sitting in the manicurist’s chair—yes, guys do get mani/pedis, and they should—and her TV was showing a talk show. The guest was actor Kevin Bacon. That perked my interest because Bacon is a fine actor, and he was talking about his new show. Also, because I’m connected to him. You might be, too.
Bacon turns 67 this summer. His breakthrough movie role was in Footloose back in 1984, playing the big-city kid who gets a rural high school dancing. Since then, he’s been in a number of films, married actress Kyra Sedgwick and started a family. He won a Golden Globe for his starring role in the 2010 movie Taking Chance, playing a real-life USMC officer who escorted the remains of a Marine killed in Iraq to his home in Wyoming for burial. I highly recommend this one but have some Kleenex ready.
Along the way, Bacon somehow got mixed up in the idea that virtually anyone can get connected to him with only six degrees of separation, at most. First there was a trivia game, which Bacon initially didn’t care for. Later, realizing there was no stopping it, he embraced the concept, using it to form SixDegrees.org, helping link people with charities.
Like so much else these days, the whole thing has threatened to get out of hand. There is now actually something called a Bacon Number. In the original game, players would name an actor and see if they could somehow connect him or her to Bacon through the various movies, TV shows and plays they were in. You know, “I met this guy, and he knows this other guy…” Weird Al Yankovic even did a song which features the lyric, “I know a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy who knows Kevin Bacon.”
Bacon’s latest work is The Bondsman, a series on Amazon Prime Video. He plays Hub, a bail bondsman in rural Georgia who is killed by the man he’s hunting…but doesn’t die. The devil, it seems, wants Hub to hunt down some demons who’ve escaped from hell. When they’re all put down for good, then Hub has to start serving his own eternal sentence down there. It takes a few episodes before we learn why Hub was condemned in the first place, but he’s hopeful that he’ll find redemption somehow when he completes his grisly assignment.
As we got into the series, I wondered…do I have a Bacon Number? How in the world would I ever find out? I’ve never met Bacon. But there is, of course, a website for just this sort of thing. On the Oracle of Bacon site, you can plug in any name and see if it’s somehow connected to Bacon. If you’re not a celebrity yourself, the odds are probably slim. I’ve met a few, thanks to my radio career, so I started there. But which one? I chose Kenny Rogers, whom I met when he performed in La Crosse back in the mid-80s.
Bingo.
Rogers appeared in Christmas in America with Sean McCann, who was in The Air Up There with, you guessed it, Kevin Bacon. Rogers therefore has a Bacon Number of 2, since it took two movie collaborations to connect them. Well, I’ve never been in a movie, so I guess I can’t have an official Bacon Number, but right there on the computer screen, I could count the degrees of separation between me and Kevin Bacon. It takes only three steps to get from me to him.
Even my lovely bride is connected to Kevin Bacon. Some years back, Sue met the singer Pam Tillis, who appeared in The Thing Called Love with Sandra Bullock, who was in Loverboy with…drum roll…Kevin Bacon. Sue also has only three degrees of separation from Bacon. I found that rather amusing, but since it didn’t help her with the church accounting she was doing as I told her, she was not quite as amused.
It occurred to me, though, that literally everyone who knows me is only four degrees away from Kevin Bacon. I’m sure my brothers will be excited when I tell them. Things are kind of dull for them in the NFL off-season.
A Strenuous Writer's Life 