Six Degrees From Honest Abe

The past is not as long ago as you think.  That's a subjective statement, I know, but I'm not talking about a first grader's remembrance of last Christmas being perceptually relative to an octogenarian's recollection of the Eisenhower years. 

No, what I mean is this:  If you measure the passage of time using human life as your tailor's tape, Earth's current inhabitants are not that far removed from George Washington, William Shakespeare, Pope Constantine or Jesus.

I developed this concept after playing Six Degrees of Separation with some friends one night.  Six Degrees is a fun little social exercise based on the supposition that every person on the planet is connected to every other by no more than six people. 

Socially connected, that is, like the way you're connected to your neighbors, co-workers, friends and family.  These are people you know, for better or worse.  So if your co-worker's husband's old college roommate is an assistant director on the set of The Office, you're four degrees separated from Emmy-winning actor Steve Carell. 

Pretty cool, huh?  I started off with a bang that night, connecting myself by two degrees to the Beatles.  A friend's father was a well-known promoter who had worked with everyone from Elvis to Bob Dylan to Bob Hope, but it was his association with the Beatles that really impressed me.  Framed photos in his office featured the dad grinning proudly alongside one or another major celebrity, like a fisherman posing with his latest catch.  

So I knew a guy who knew the Beatles and there are my two degrees, simple as pie.

But here in the great sprawling suburbs of the New York metropolitan area, it's hard not to connect yourself by two or three degrees to the famous, the infamous or the influential.  In fact, I'd say that no matter where you reside in the United States, you'd have to live a pretty insular existence to not be connected to at least one well-known individual.  

Now, I know this Six Degrees premise isn't specific to the famous.  It's supposed to apply to every person on the planet.  But who cares about my connection to an Australian rancher or an Iraqi insurgent?  What I want to know is how I'm linked to people of influence; people who've left their mark on history.

And thus did my crowning achievement that night take shape in a flash of unbidden insight. I'd just popped a Coors Light and was raising the can to my lips when I realized that our connections are not limited to the living.  I followed this thread for about forty seconds until…Eureka!  

I laughed aloud at the effortless connection I'd just made to one of the most significant figures in American history: I am separated by six degrees and five score and forty-four years from our nation's sixteenth president, Abraham Lincoln.  

Hard to believe, but true as toast.  There are only five humans between myself and Honest Abe.  All but one is no longer living and Theodore Roosevelt, the twenty-sixth president, is the fourth degree in this chain.  Additionally, the key person in the equation was a member of the Kennedy administration, so JFK is only three degrees away. 

Teddy Roosevelt and JFK notwithstanding, I thought the Lincoln connection was by far the coolest, because how exactly is it possible to connect with a man who died back in 1865?  

Here's how it works:

A friend of mine is the son of an illustrious Washington lawyer.  As a young man, my friend's father was well-acquainted with a granddaughter of Theodore Roosevelt.  This granddaughter fondly remembered her grandpa Teddy, whose first Secretary of State was Mr. John Hay; the very same John Hay who, as a much younger man, had served as personal secretary to Abraham Lincoln.

So I knew my buddy, my buddy knew his dad, his dad knew TR's granddaughter, the granddaughter knew TR, TR knew Hay, and Hay knew Lincoln.

Pretty freaky, I thought, and my friends agreed.

On the way home that night, I began wondering who shared the planet with whom at certain points in history.  Were Leonardo da Vinci and Christopher Columbus alive together?  How about Mozart and George Washington?  From this line of thinking emerged a "did you know?" game that my kids get quite a kick out of.  The facts defy logic until you do the math, but once you do, distant history seems a tad less so.

My grandmother, for instance, was born in 1912.  Anyone forty-seven or older that year had breathed the same air as the living Abraham Lincoln.  And anyone over the age of eighty-six in 1912 had been born when Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, our second and third presidents, still walked the earth.  An elderly woman coddling my infant grandmother could herself have been coddled as an infant by an elderly John Adams.  So if coddling counted as a Six Degrees "connection" and my grandmother held me when I was a baby, then I could conceivably be only three degrees removed from two signers of the Declaration of Independence.

Against that scenario, Lincoln seems positively recent.  When I entered this life in 1961, there were still some people living who'd been born during Lincoln's lifetime.  In fact, the very last of those Lincoln-era humans did not pass from mortal existence until the mid-1970's, having spanned the years between horse-drawn carriages on gas-lit cobblestone and car-radio disco on the LA Freeway.  

I'll bet ol' Abe himself would agree, if he were with us today at the age of two-hundred, that the past is really not as long ago as you think, no matter how many score years you go back.

The Height of Their Fame

I'll keep this one short.  An irresistible pun, but I've always been fascinated by discrepancies between the officially-stated and the actual height of celebrities.  

I'm talking specifically about male film stars.  The ticket-buying public doesn't seem to care if Angelina Jolie is 5'2" or 5'11" but plenty of Terminator fans would love to know if Arnold Schwarzenegger is really 6'2".

That's what his publicist says, but that's what most publicists do for their male clientele.  They add a few inches, in some cases enough so to push the outer limits of fan gullibility.

The web site Celebheights.com is dedicated to learning the truth behind these claims.  User-submitted celebrity sightings and the creator's own personal encounters are combined to provide the best height estimates for Hollywood's biggest (or smallest) names.  The consensus seems to be that Arnold's real height is pretty much in line with his self-proclaimed stature; he's somewhere in the neighborhood of six feet.

But up-close interactions with celebrities can never be completely reliable unless your star happens to be in bare feet.  You could get a good read on Matthew McConaughey, of course, since he never seems to stray too far from the beach, but if you try to gauge men's height at a red-carpet event, beware the combination of heels and "shoe lifts".  While the heels on average dress shoes might add an inch or two at most, interior shoe lifts can put a Tom Cruise on vertical par with Liam Neeson.  Perhaps not so common in today's Hollywood, shoe lifts boosted the public image of many twentieth-century film stars.  

Frank Sinatra was supposedly 5'10".  While not tall, it's at least on the cusp.  His people foisted that statistic upon the public for Frank's entire career but I've never seen a Sinatra movie where I didn't question its accuracy.  My suspicion was confirmed in a book by George Jacobs, Sinatra's valet in the fifties and sixties.  During his twenty years in Frank's service, Jacobs had seen Ol' Blue Eyes in all manner of dress and undress.  While careful to praise Frank's abundant masculine appendage, he swore that his boss was no taller than 5'7" in bare feet.

That means Sinatra was just an inch taller than me.  But at 5'6", I'd have a hard time convincing anyone that I was really three inches taller.  I guess I could pull it off on screen if I surrounded myself with an even-shorter supporting cast, but it would take a Michael J. Fox or a Mickey Rooney to make me look big in contrast. 

Bing Crosby was just about my height, so I've read, but that's not too hard to believe.  Bing was built differently than Sinatra.  He was short-limbed and slightly pudgy, his onscreen belly sometimes reined in by a girdle.  He never looked tall in his films, no matter how many inches his lifts raised him up.  But Frank's bony face and rail-thin physique created an illusion of vertical length, so 5'10" didn't seemed far-fetched. 

Unless, of course, you were his personal valet.

Al Pacino and Dustin Hoffman, to the best of my knowledge, have never claimed to be what they're not.  Massively talented, they're obviously comfortable with their lack of height and they don't seem to mind sharing the screen with women who've got a couple inches on them.

There's a scene in the first Godfather where Michael Corleone reunites with Kay after a long absence.  The black suit and hat make him seem even shorter and as he walks side-by-side with the taller Diane Keaton, he almost looks like a kid.

A kid you'd be crazy to mess with, given what he did to Sollozzo and McCluskey in that Italian restaurant.

Height has also had some measure of significance in national politics over the years.  I can count on two fingers the number of major-party presidential candidates in the last fifty years who were under 5'9".  Michael Dukakis was bested by that long drink of water, George Herbert Walker Bush.  And John McCain saw his dreams of glory crushed by the lean, six-footish Barack Obama.  

Not that it really matters, of course.  One of our nation's most pugnacious presidents was the 5'8" Theodore Roosevelt.  And John Adams, around the same height as Teddy, left enough of a legacy to warrant his own HBO miniseries.

It's silly to claim to be what you're not when anyone with eyes can tell otherwise.  I used to say I was 5'6" and a half, as if that extra half-inch would make me look taller.  But I once knew a guy exactly my height who would verbally add three inches to his.

Louis and I were physical twins--same height and build--yet he'd always tell people he was 5'9".  When I first heard him say this, I did some quick mental calculations.  In official Beatles press releases, Ringo was always said to be 5'9" and the other three lads were 5'11".  When you saw them on screen together, those stats made perfect sense.  

So if Louis was the 5'9" he claimed to be and everything else was relative, then Ringo is actually six feet tall, which puts Sir Paul at a towering 6'2".  Now, I saw McCartney in concert this summer from only fourteen rows away. He isn't short by anyone's definition, but he's certainly not up there with Bush Sr. or Lincoln.

In the end, a star's real height is probably irrelevant, as politicians and despots know only too well.  Anything repeated often enough is eventually accepted as truth.

High School Reunion: No Autographs, Please

For twenty-plus years I resisted attending my Class of '79 high school reunions. The first one occurred a decade after graduation and I opted not to go. In 1999 I was invited again. Again I chose to stay home.

It wasn't indifference that kept me away--my high school years were just fine by me--but to go would've compromised a standard I'd set for myself in my senior year. My goal at graduation was laughably ambitious but not entirely unfeasible: I would become a world famous rock star by the age of twenty-two.

Five, then ten years came and went and by twenty-seven I was still just a part-time musician and famous, perhaps, to a few dozen local rock-club patrons. 

At thirty-seven, my goal was now grossly incongruent with everything else going on in my life. I was a husband, a dad and a first-time homeowner with little spare time to pursue my fading dream. Occasionally, though, when the stress weighed too much, I would dust off that adolescent fantasy and tell myself I still, at my age, had a sliver of a chance. 

So I skipped the first two reunions, determined that I'd either go back to my peers as a massive success or not go back at all. 

Last October my forty-seventh birthday arrived and though I still wasn't famous, my life had turned out okay. This March, I got an email with "Class of '79 Thirty-Year Reunion" in the subject line and I made my decision before the message had finished downloading. I knew, beyond a ghost of a doubt, that the time had come for me to go.

My wife was encouraging and suggested that I'd enjoy myself more if I went solo. So, it was me alone who approached the front entrance of the Holiday Inn that evening, dressed to the nines and amazed that I was actually going through with it. I smoothed my suit, pushed through the doors and strode into the lobby with a racing pulse. 

Who would I recognize? Or who--for that matter--will recognize me?

The first question was answered within moments of my arrival. A throng of forty-somethings crowded the hotel bar and a blondish woman in red looked instantly familiar, even in profile. She faced me as I approached.

"Leslie!" I said cheerily. "How are you?" 

"Claudine," she corrected. 

She turned her back and ignored me the rest of the evening. Claudine had been a mega-popular senior and if I'd punctured her ego, it was an honest mistake. Present-day Claudine really did resemble the overweight Leslie I'd known in high school. 

A Leslie, it turns out, who no longer existed. 

She arrived at eight, an apparent stranger. She must've dropped a pound per year since graduation and now, at forty-eight, she looked incredible. Unlike Claudine, the mature Leslie seemed pleased as punch that her classmates failed to recognize her. They'd look at her name tag and then look at her, eyes wide with disbelief.

The night progressed and I found that despite my appalling lack of fame, my former classmates greeted me with nostalgic delight. We asked each other the same predictable questions and we provided our answers in swift bullet-points: Yes, I still live locally. Married? Almost fifteen years. Kids? Two, nine and ten. Yes, I still play music, occasionally.

More than once I was reminded of something amusing I said or did back in the seventies. It's funny how people from your past remember stuff like that. You may doubt its accuracy but if a second classmate corroborates it, chances are it really happened.

Some people change and some people don't. A girl who had been as shy as a mouse was now a gum-chewing chatterbox and funny, to boot. There were others, though, whose social skills remained as awkward as I remembered them to be. I'd do my part by asking appropriate questions but if the other person won't return the serve, the conversation will sputter and stall like a car on empty. 

I developed a graceful escape strategy, though. If the chit-chat reached an uncomfortable lull, I'd look past my classmate's shoulder and then nod as if someone was beckoning me. 

"Uh-oh! I'd better get over there!" I'd say with sudden urgency, "But hey, it was great seeing you!" 

By the end of the night, most attendees had formed the same social groups that defined them as teens. Since I was remembered as a Rock Musician--an identity acceptable to almost all cliques--I still enjoyed some diplomatic immunity. I flitted smoothly between a balding herd of Jocks, a Nerd who stood alone near the bar and several Heads who were outside smoking at wrought-iron tables. The Heads, more than any other group, defied the passage of time with grey feathered hair and denim vests purchased when Carter was president.

I left at eleven-fifteen that night, immensely glad I'd decided to attend. I'd made it through the night without being famous and no one seemed to mind. 

I'll definitely go to the next one, now that I've rid myself of those ridiculous standards. They're talking about a thirty-five year reunion, tentatively slated for 2013. 

That gives me five more years to get good and famous.

Self-Taught and Proud Of It

Some may disagree, but I think I'm entirely on the mark when I say that music lessons aren't for everyone. 

I speak from personal experience. When I entered high school, I'd been playing piano for a little over two years and I was hooked, plain and simple. I played at home on our living room spinet, I played in the houses of friends and relatives and I played during class while I studied algebra, fingering scales on the wooden desktop.

When I heard there were practice rooms in the music department--each with its own piano--I established a lunchtime routine: I'd wolf down a cheese sandwich in the cafeteria, then make a hasty dash for the music department with its tiny practice rooms and a vacant piano. 

The music department was a ghost town at lunch but I quickly learned that I was trespassing. A red-haired kid informed me of this as he shook the spit from his trumpet valve. Those rooms are for band members only, he said. I sized him up and he seemed harmless, so I lied and told him I was thinking of joining. He shrugged and turned his attention back to the trumpet. 

Weeks passed without incident until one sunny day in early October. Hunched over the piano in Practice Room B, I was pounding out a rousing rendition of Maple Leaf Rag when I became aware of someone standing in the doorway, arms folded.

I stopped mid-passage and turned to see Mrs. Buckholz, one of the music teachers. I braced for the expected reprimand but she just smiled and unfolded her arms.

"You play beautifully," she said. "How long have you been taking lessons?"

"I've never taken lessons," I answered proudly. "I taught myself when I was eleven."

"You never took lessons?" She sounded disgusted. She sighed, refolded her arms and abruptly turned to leave. 

"Such a waste of talent," I heard her mutter, out in the empty hallway. 

Mrs. Buckholz had one more thing to add, right at the end of lunch period. She didn't look up from her desk but she quietly addressed me as I went to leave.

"In the future, please spend your free time elsewhere. Those practice rooms are for school band members only."

I'd been banished from the music department, tried and found guilty of wasting my talent. Boy, did that stick in my craw. Now, I don't dispute that many musicians have benefited from formal training, but how exactly was I wasting my talent by acquiring knowledge on my own? 

I had learned by ear, inspired by an unlikely hit song in the summer of '74. From the movie The Sting, "The Entertainer" had been written before the invention of the airplane. Yet it made its way to #3 on the Billboard charts, ragtime made hip by a Newman/Redford blockbuster. 

It grabbed me, that song, and I had to learn how to play it. I bought the 45 (MP3s were still a quarter century away) and I placed it on the turntable, which now sat atop the piano. For the next two weeks I played that record endlessly, each time discerning a few more notes that sounded more or less correct when I played them on the keyboard. 

Eventually I picked up the sheet music because my rudimentary version didn't sound entirely accurate. The written music would enable me to play the song exactly as it sounded on the record, but first I'd need to teach myself how to read the notes. The process is really just reverse engineering and it's something that everyone does in their youth. Kids learn to talk before they learn to read; the opposite would be impossible. So, if the record was how the song sounded, then the sheet music was how the song looked. And once I made that correlation, the sheet music began to make sense.

My disappointment with Mrs. Buckholz did not last long and by the end of October I could not have cared less. I had started a band with a guy who played drums and it was farewell to ragtime and greetings, rock and roll. No one now could accuse me of wasting my talent. Self-educated rock musicians are by no means unique.  

And if some highbrows dismissed rock as musically inferior because its composers were for the most part unschooled, they might've been surprised to learn that there were precedents in place long before John Lennon was born.

Irving Berlin could not read music and, in fact, he could barely play the piano. He'd plunk out his melodies on the black keys if possible--he found them easier to play--and then hand the tune over to a professional arranger who would spruce it up with some appropriate harmonies. This unsophisticated method spawned timeless classics like "God Bless America" and "White Christmas", the best-selling single of all time until Elton John surpassed it.

Musical knowledge can be useful, of course, but it cannot replace innate talent. I've known trained pianists who could play with breathtaking dexterity, provided their sheet music sat squarely in front of them. But yank away the pages and their fingers would freeze, helpless, in mid-arpeggio. I never understood how they could only play something when they were reading it off a page. Go to a Broadway show and I'll wager there's not a single actor onstage holding a script.

 

Now, I'll admit there are circumstances under which musical training would be an absolute must. If you plied me with enough martinis, I might agree to conduct the New York Philharmonic but I'd be facing the orchestra with an idiot's grin, scratching my scalp as I fumbled at the score.

And of course there are some professions where formal training is demanded by law. To go under the knife with a self-taught surgeon would not be particularly prudent, even if the price was right. And who would board a plane if they knew that the pilot had obtained his license from an online flight school?

But the arts are different, as history shows, and my musical skills have served me well. I've played on albums and radio jingles and performed in theaters and TV studios. I even almost toured with an 80's pop star, but the tour was cancelled when her record sales tanked.

So if Irving Berlin and I could do it then you can, too, if you've got the gift. By all means take lessons if you're so inclined but if you're not, don't let a school music teacher rain on your parade. 

 

A waste of talent, Mrs. Buckholz? The only waste of talent is talent not used.