Six Degrees? Prove It!

Rashida Stewart? Are you out there?

Think you know Rashida? Or, do you know someone who knows someone who frequented The Estate in Chicago, or is an actor in the Windy City?

The premise of Columbia University's Small World Project is to prove that Six Degrees of Separation really do connect the world.  They have taken on what seems to be a massive research project, inviting people like me and you to find entirely random people around the globe - via email.

After seeing the story on ABC's PrimeTime on Weds., December 13th - I'm hooked.  I registered, to seek and be sought... and, ironically, it assigned me to track down a Chicagoan, Ms. Stewart, in six steps or less.

I will detail what happens next inside the 'Hat Rack in coming weeks.  Ms. Stewart, who now lives in Tinley Park on the south side, is an actress and bartender who attended Proviso East in the early 90s and Triton College after.  I'm starting with Trent S., a former co-worker of mine in Chicago, who knows the South Side, and Chicago bars as well as anyone.  Plus, I'm betting he knows people in the acting industry, either through his employer's corporate support, through his gregarious wife, or just because he can talk to literally anyone in a bar, all night long (but he can't eat AND drink alcohol at the same time - one or the other, he always said.)

Tonight's Prime Time episode detailed well-to-do Manhattanites trying to establish 6 degrees to a boxer in Bedford-Stuyvessant, which they managed fairly easily.  On the flip side, he found a connection to a Broadway dancer just as quickly, refuting my first instinct that it will always be more difficult for someone lower on the social status ladder to move up, than it will be for someone to find someone of a lower status.  I guess time will tell.

I bragged to Ms. Hat Rack that I thought I could get to the boxer in 5 steps... through friends in the sporting community, an amateur boxer I know in Chicago or through folks like Carlo C. in NYC who meet and befriend strangers regularly.

But I get ahead of myself... Plus, I hit a wrong button on the Columbia site and was assigned a guy in Peru to track down as well.  Maybe I'll try him after I find Rashida.

Paging Rashida to the white phone by the 'Hat Rack...