Is love lost when a star goes undercover? Can generations find intersection? Are we all six degrees of one man? Today is his birthday, so let’s find out!
For those who do not know who Kevin Bacon is, here is the quick run down. He’s an actor who has been in many beloved classics like Footloose, National Lampoon’s Animal House, Diner, JFK, A Few Good Men, Apollo 13, Mystic River, Frost/Nixon, Friday the 13th, Tremors, The River Wild, The Woodsman, Crazy, Stupid, Love, X-Men: First Class, and Patriots Day.
This Golden Globe and Screen Actor’s Guild Award winner has been in so many movies and televisions shows crossing so many genres he has been the subject of interconnectedness studies with an exercise many know as a trivia game “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon“. Here is an example. In the 80s I had a scene in a made for tv movie with Mister T. Mister T was in Spy Hard with Marcia Gay Harden who was in Mystic River with Kevin Bacon! This makes me 3 degrees of separation of Kevin Bacon.
Kevin Bacon’s star rose in the 80s and his breakout role as Ren in Footloose was a defining Gen X Movie. But Kevin Bacon is known by The Silent Generation, Boomers, X , Millennial, Z and is already on the radar of older Gen Alpha. 6 generations and his legacy is one of mutual love and symbiosis with Gen Z that is hard to deny.
Loveless Anonymity
On July 3rd, Vanity Fair released an interview with Kevin Bacon that is going viral over his being in disguise for a day. Since the 80’s Kevin Bacon is not anonymous. He is distinctly recognizable. In the interview he said that a hat and sunglasses can only take him so far. So he had a make up artist design some prosthetics for him to walk about in public unrecognizable.
He went to one of the busiest malls in LA and at first enjoyed not being recognized. He then found that life as one of us is not always fun. People were often rude and pushy. But there was one aspect that was fascinating and bittersweet.
“Nobody said, ‘I love you.’ “
Most of us go about our day walking about malls, stores and other public spaces never hearing that. What is common for us was uncommon for him that day and it stuck out. He did not say no one told me my movies are great, you are sexy, or other ego driven things. No one said they loved him.
Considering some of the things Kevin Bacon has done for those that I love, if I were to have a moment with him, I would say those words to him. In reflection of his reflection, a world where a day no one said I love you while we are out and about should be unusual as opposed to the default for all of us.
Kevin is intentional on giving love to others.
Kevin Gives Love With Six Degrees.org
Six Degrees.org is a 501 c3 Charity that Kevin Bacon and his wife, Kyra Sedgwick, co-founded. For anyone who wants to help make the world a better place, it is one of the easiest charities to take part in and sign up for as a volunteer that even the busiest, least confident, or non able bodied can join and feel truly a part of!
Based on the idea that all of us are 6 degrees or less of connectedness to everyone else, their primary focus areas are Youth Empowerment, Equality and Justice, Sustainability, and Emergent Issues important to underserved communities.
The youth empowerment is the one that gets at my heartstrings. He and his organization create safe spaces for young people to be heard, and then served with what they need to have a fighting chance in this life. This is queer kids, minorities, children with various disabilities and more. How many queer kids like my child have found safe harbor, justice, and opportunity? When I was a teenager I had a deaf friend named Jenny. She had friends like me and others to help her fight for reasonable accommodations as a young deaf woman with dreams of becoming a working model. Jenny did not have many spaces where her story could be told and she could be given an opportunity to make her own life and difference. Six Degrees offers resources to people like people I love. And they are in Gen Z and Gen Alpha!
Any and all tips from this article will go to fund six degree’s essential resource kits! In celebration of the 40th anniversary of Footloose they are in a year long drive to get 40 essential resource kits out to people in need in communities across America.
These kits include:
-hygiene products
-clean socks
-journals
-books
-toys
-shelf stable snacks
-& more!
Gen Z Gives Kevin Bacon Love!
In April of this year Kevin Bacon joined the students of Payson High School in Utah on their last prom day. Payson High was the school where his breakout role in Footloose was filmed. The school is being relocated this fall to a new campus.
The students spent months running a #BacontoPayson social media campaign. It was aggressive and whimsical! It included a commitment by the students to improve their own community and others by taking part in the Six Degrees.org charity in a significant way. They finally wore him down and warmed his heart and he agreed to go and ended his announcement to them with his famous line from Footloose, “Let’s dance!”.
His appearance at Payson High was covered in depth by the Today Show. There were heartwarming moments of seeing the students preparing kits for the Six Degrees Charity and giving Kevin Bacon a tour of the school which included the locker he used in the movie that is now decorated with memorabilia from the movie. A funny moment was a student telling him that his Gen X grandpa was a student at the high school when the movie was filmed.
But there was a story that Kevin Bacon told that really stuck a sweet chord of a good moment from my generation.
Before filming of the movie started he enrolled as a student at Peyton High to go undercover. Could he, as a 24 year old, be a convincing high schooler? Named Ren, like his Footloose character, he found himself feeling scared and intimidated as an undercover student.
“I lost all of my bravado. I just became you know, kind of terrified,” he said. “And then, just like the movie, one kid sort of took me under his wing and said, ‘I’ll show you around. Come on, you’re with me.’ It was straight out of the movie.”
Giving Love and Getting Love
Kevin Bacon receives love almost every day. But he gives love almost every day. Almost every day we have a choice to give love to the generations after us. And if we give that love consistently and authentically, it will come back to us. Just like us and Kevin Bacon, the younger ones know what it is like to go without love and it is in our power to make sure knowing love is the default for all of us.
But someone has to go first. Someone has to set the example. That is the example we need to set to create the baseline of daily love.
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