Sunday, August 06, 2006

Pop Culture Flashback - What's Your Bacon Factor?

I was talking with a friend today who was trying to determine her Bacon factor. Remember that fun little conversation game in the 90's, six degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon? Kind of an Altman-like association - name an actor and try to link him or her to Kevin Bacon via other actors in as few links as possible. Later, students at the University of Virginia developed an internet Oracle of Bacon at Virginia. At any rate, my friend was trying to determine what her personal Bacon factor was. She'd met some singer in the late 90s and was trying to link him to Bacon. Unfortunately, I couldn't help her much.

Then she asked me. I guessed about 4 or 5. But then, I remembered when I first moved to Houston, my roommate and I were hosts for a visiting lecturer....Timothy Leary. That's a whole other story, but as it turns out, Leary has a Bacon factor of 2. Turns out Leary was in a movie that I saw in an indy theater in the early 90s (and didn't remember him being in), called Roadside Prophets - with John Doe, Arlo Guthrie, Adam Horovitz from the Beastie Boys, Flea, and Don Cheadle, among others. So my bacon factor is a 3.

Only later that day did I realize, while enjoying some VH1's "I Love the 90's", did this subject come up again - which is probably what got my friend thinking about it in the first place.

1 comment:

jkirlin said...

I had to really dig for this but I bumped into Andy Warhol in 1982 at FAO Scwartz in NYC, I was trying to leave while he and his entourage were trying to get in so I am claiming that this brief encounter with a 2 is enough to make me a 3. *whew*