Time for some Feedback!

A former student of mine, who was a software developer for several years after graduation, but has more recently worked his way into the acting profession, was recently selected as the winner of the “reality” program Who wants to be a superhero? In the last episode, we saw him standing in his superhero outfit on the balcony of a hotel at Universal City, arms raised, receiving the applause and cheers of a large crowd of theme-park visitors who were impressed by his neverending fight for justice and fair play. He explained to the crowd that his selection was the achievement of his boyhood dream of becoming a superhero and urged the crowd to follow their dreams.

The surprising thing is that, even though most of the show was ridiculous hokum, transparently scripted and sketchily implemented, my student really did have a long-standing aspiration to become a comic-book superhero. While at Grinnell, he often dressed up as Spider-Man, or occasionally as one of Spider-Man's super-nemeses, and he resumed his costume when he returned for the graduation ceremonies of his friends in subsequent classes.

In one episode of the show, when the candidates were about to head out on a treasure hunt (thinly disguised as the pursuit of a supervillain), my student reminisced about having done similar things in his college days. That's absolutely true. In fact, he devised and staged elaborate plots, involving a dozen or more actors, as surprises for his close friends, obliging them to chase around the college and the town, performing feats of derring-do, as conditions for advancing through the entertainment. These plots were more inventive than anything that the creators of Who wants to be a superhero? came up with.

One of the pleasant consequences of his success as an actor is that I have, at least by some definitions, a Kevin Bacon number! In his senior year, my student made a short film, “The origins of Spider-Man,” in which he played the lead and I portrayed a scientist who stands around doing nothing while Peter Parker is bitten by a radioactive spider. It's true that this film was not released by a major studio, but it was distributed on videotape to many of my student's friends and relations, and I believe that both the Grinnell town library and the college library have copies. So I'm prepared to count it as a release, even though it hasn't yet made it into the Internet Movie Database.

I appeared in this movie with my student, who appears in the movie Young, single & angry (currently in post-production) with Peter Murnik, who appears in the movie Hard rain with Ed Asner, who appears in JFK with Kevin Bacon. So I'm claiming a Kevin Bacon number of 4.