Elvis and I

The other day in the NY Times Magazine, I was reading about the government’s attempts to map social relationships by modeling the contacts, transactions and links between groups and individuals. They were looking for hidden connections and patterns in large volumes of data such as calls and email traffic. Analysts working for the Army project called Able Danger named the effort “the Kevin Bacon game”.

I’ve always been fascinated by the whole “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” phenomenon but I never understood why or how Kevin Bacon came to be the center of the universe. He’s been in a lot of great movies but he’s certainly not the actor of the millennia.

A sampling of his filmography:

• Mystic River
• Hollow Man
• Sleepers
• Apollo 13
• The River Wild
• A Few Good Men
• JFK
• Flatliners
• Planes, Trains and Automobiles
• Footloose
• Friday the 13^th

He has not only a concept named after him, he has a number!

Bacon Numbers:

The concept is simple, but finding the smallest number of links can be difficult. The way you link an actor with Bacon is like so:

• Pick any film actor.

• Link the actor you've chosen to Kevin Bacon via the movies they've shared with other actors until you end up with Kevin Bacon himself.

Here is an example, using Elvis:

• Elvis Presley was in Change of Habit with Edward Asner

• Edward Asner was in JFK with Kevin Bacon

Therefore Elvis Presley has a Bacon Number of 2.

But it turns out, he’s not really considered as the center of the universe. The concept and number is only a pun on his name. Six Degree’s of Separation (both the play and the movie) and Six Degree’s of Kevin Bacon. A pun. But nonetheless, he has a number and that’s impressive.

And I, like Elvis, am only two degrees from Kevin Bacon. My amazing Bacon Number ranking owes to one event sometime in the early 1990’s when I purchased a piece of art from a studio in NYC. The piece was created by Kevin Bacon’s brother-in-law.