This boggles my mind:
In September 1979, when I was in charge of the music library at Connecticut College, Mark, a theater major who hung out at the music library, and whose last name I’ll suppress to preserve his privacy, mentioned that just before returning for the fall semester he had spent some time in New Jersey at a summer camp, where he had filmed a walk-on part in a horror movie.
That movie turned out to be Friday the 13th, which was shot in September and October, 1979, and was released in May 1980. (Mark is the guy in the still. He’s uncredited in the movie, where he appears in the pre-titles sequence as one of the campers in the sing-along at the lodge.)
Flash back now to about 1975, when I was working at the public library in Wellesley, Mass. Among my co-workers was an older man who was a theater enthusiast and a fan of the actress Betsy Palmer. Somehow he had managed to become personally acquainted with her (probably by hanging out often enough at the stage door), a fact that he made sure we were aware of. He boasted that he had lunch or dinner with her whenever she was playing in Boston.
If you’ve been living under a rock for the last forty-five years, you may not know that although Betsy Palmer had a legitimate career on stage and film, her fame as an actress now rests on her appearance in Friday the 13th as Mrs. Voorhees — a part she took because she needed the money to buy a car.
Kevin Bacon dies early in Friday the 13th, and undoubtedly never was on the set at the same time as either Mark or Betsy Palmer. Nevertheless, by the rules of “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon”, which don’t require that actors be in the same scene as Kevin Bacon, just in the same movie, I think I can claim a pretty low Bacon number. I not only knew someone who knew Betsy Palmer, but I knew someone who was actually in the movie!
If you don’t know what a Bacon number is, see this Wikipedia article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Degrees_of_Kevin_Bacon
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