Audie, this is gonna be long:
I first heard of this rule right after college, when I was still in Nashville. My brother and sister-in-law were staying with me because my SIL's cousin was getting married. My brother came back from the rehearsal dinner and said, "I heard the strangest thing at work this week, and I thought it was ridiculous until tonight. Have you ever heard of the six degrees of separation?"
I told him I hadn't and he proceeded to explain it. He said, "It sounded stupid until I sat down at dinner next to the best man. Guess who it was."
Not Kevin Bacon, but one of my best friends from college. Turns out the groom was someone I sort of knew from school. We had a nice laugh over it.
The next night I took my brother to the church so he could help set up for the wedding. With the exception of the groom's parents, I knew every single person who walked into the church. The bride's family was, of course, my SIL's family, and her friends were people I knew. The groom didn't have a lot of family, and I knew all of his friends. All the musicians, the caterer, everyone.
At that point, I turned to my brother and said, "That six-degrees thing is way too big. I don't think we need more than two, or three at the outside. In fact, I'm pretty sure that there are only 200 people in the world. Think about it--can you comprehend more than 200 people at one time? You can't focus on that many when you look into a crowd, and if you start to name them individually, by the time you get to 201 you've long forgotten the first ones."
For the sake of time (I'm late for my nap) I'm leaving out 12 years of "6 degrees" stories between me and my brother (as well as how I know Reese Witherspoon, Shooter Jennings, and Amy Grant--that last one is pretty embarrassing...) I don't know how many times we've swapped stories of who we've seen on the other end of the world--he once boarded a flight in San Francisco on his way to Tokyo and was seated beside a kid he knew in elementary school. All of the conversations end with, "But, after all, there are only 200 people in the world."
On New Year's Day, 2005 my brother called to wake me up early in the morning because he was reading the Jimmy Buffett book I gave him for Christmas, A Salty Piece of Land. He said, "I'm reading from page 44, where it says, and I quote, 'If you subscribe to the theory that there are only about two hundred people in the world, and everywhere you travel, you're bound to run into somebody you know or somebody who knows somebody you know...'"
Obviously, he read that to me because I not only subscribe to that theory, but as far as we knew I actually came up with that theory, down to the last digit. He also read it to me because he knew that fifteen years earlier I sold a pair of shoes to Jimmy Buffett. (I didn't know it was him until he was signing the credit card slip.) Not only that, but a week or so after he read that to me, I found out that his first cousin on his mother's side, Norman Peets, is a dentist here in Gainesville.
Six degrees. Ha. That's four or five degrees too many.
...they just don't know me......
Thus three degrees from Leo DiCaprio and Jim Carrey. 
I'm like, five degrees from that. At least. :roll:
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