Posted by
Ed Lilly on Sunday, July 20, 2008 10:21:14 PM
...you sometimes think of some seemingly very disjointed things. But in the end, you can kind of make sense of them.
For instance, today I found myself thinking about baseball, as I often
do when cutting the grass. As a Cubs fan, now living in between New
York and Philadelphia, I was thinking about the Yankees and their
manager, Joe Girardi. Girardi started out with the Cubs, and I wound
up meeting him and actually sitting next to him on the Cubs bench when
I was asked to serve as the Cubs batboy for the day. That's a long
story perhaps for another time. The point is, I met Girardi, but would
certainly never expect him to remember me.
As it turns out, however, Girardi attended Northwestern University at
the same time as one of my cousins. More importantly, she mentioned at
one time that she knew Girardi from college. I don't know if they were
anything more than casual social acquaintances, if even that, but she
apparently remembered having met him and spoken to him when they were
students at Northwestern.
So I found myself wondering about a potential conversation with Joe
Girard should I ever run into him somewhere. It would be interesting
to see if he in fact remembered my cousin from school, and my guess is
we would have a few laughs about my one game with the Cubs.
But then my mind turned to thinking about how small the world is in
some ways, and how it seems really ridiculous that some middle-aged guy
who grew up in a smallish town in northern Indiana, now cutting his
grass in central New Jersey, has some albeit very thin and tenuous
connection to the manager of the New York Yankees.
Which of course made me think of the idea of Six Degrees of Kevin
Bacon, and whether, through Joe Girardi, I somehow am a short couple of
hops from Kevin Bacon.
Then it struck me that the same cousin who went to school with Girardi
also was an extra in the movie "About Last Night...," with Rob Lowe,
Demi Moore, Jim Belushi and Elizabeth Perkins.
And since Demi Moore was in "A Few Good Men" with Kevin Bacon, and
Elizabeth Perkins was in "He Said, She Said" with Kevin Bacon, I guess
I kind of have a Kevin Bacon Score of 3 through my cousin, as we were
in multiple high school drama productions (and countless family
productions of varying degrees of taste).
Which of course makes the relevant question: What movie did I wind up
falling asleep to last night after everyone else had gone to bed