PARAGRAPH: EIGHT

Three Steps 

Last weekend, we watched a movie directed by Clint Eastwood. I don’t suppose that in itself is all that incredible. I’m sure that lots of people did much the same thing, and, to be honest, Clint Eastwood has directed so many fine movies it must be an even more common thing to do than I thought it was when I first mentioned it, but it’s not the actual “watching” of the film that I am thinking about today, it’s the connection I suddenly made in my head whilst I was suffering from a bout of insomnia a few nights later. Now, if the truth is being told, I don’t know all that many people. In the great social scheme of things, I barely trouble the scorers, but nevertheless, playing a small but significant role in this film was an actor who once attended the same wedding as I did. We didn’t talk or anything, which is probably just as well as I have a tendency to gush terribly and become ever so ridiculously “over impressed” whenever I meet someone who’s face I recognise, and because he did have a small part in the “Beiderbecke Trilogy” (which is a personal favourite), I suspect that I might very well have done precisely that, no doubt to great mutual embarrassment, if we had actually had a moment to talk. Mind you, I do think that one of our “bathroom breaks” coincided at one point, and one of us held the door open to let the other one in or something like that. This was, however, as close as we got. Anyway, putting all of that aside, the thought that struck me was this: Despite not knowing hardly anyone, we have friends who we consider to be intimate enough that they invited us to their wedding, and they also have a friend (or perhaps even a relative) who has been in a Clint Eastwood film which means that, if you want to play the “six degrees of separation” game, I am only three steps (friend + friend + Clint) from Clint flippin’ Eastwood, and the links to the great and the good that this connection brings suddenly makes me feel (in a terribly small way) like I could be a “player”, even though I’m palpably not one. Not only that, because Matt Damon is also in the film, I’m only four steps from George Clooney, which might have at one time rather impressed that girl who once dumped me via answerphone one long-ago Saturday afternoon, and who, I seem to remember, had a picture of George hanging in her kitchen for her to... drool over, I suppose. Certainly, in comparison, I seemed to give her little to drool about, but I digress, and it was hardly George’s fault that I didn’t measure up to him. The reason I’m telling you all of this is not to brag about the fact that I know someone who knows someone who knows Clint Eastwood, because that would be a patently ridiculous thing to do, although it does actually amaze me now that I think about it because I’m still the same obscure little nobody I’ve always been and show no signs of ceasing to be so, but to point out that there might very well actually be something in this “six degrees” mularkey after all. After all, if an antisocial smudge on the landscape like me can be connected, however obliquely, to the great and the good, maybe we really are more fundamentally connected as a society that I was prepared to believe, and perhaps, when more of us come to realise this, we might just start to learn to live together and try to make a better world. There is, it would seem, and despite my many doubts, hope for us all after all.