Six degrees, I'm telling you

So I was talking to my roommate and somehow mentioned that the name Bryce is usually a girl's name. Sure, I said, I've known two girls named Bryce. There's Bryce Howard, daughter of Ron Howard, star of "The Village," and then there was the girl I went to summer camp with named Bryce ... who had red hair ... and was the daughter of a famous movie mogul...

Oh my God!

I went to summer camp with Bryce Howard!

So I had to go look it up on google with what little I remembered of this girl. I mean, how many daughters of movie moguls with red hair that are my age and named Bryce can there be out there? I remembered that she once told me her middle name was the place she was conceived. And yup, sure enough - there it was. Bryce Dallas Howard, conceived in Dallas.

And I didn't even have a glimmering of recognition when I saw the movie "The Village." Not even a tingle.

She's just three months older than me. We used to call her Rusty. And she had a venus fly trap named Zeus. And her three siblings' middle names are also places of conception. Now she's a movie star and I'm .... here. Shit.

It's not so much that I'm excited that I know someone moderately famous (though knowing someone who kissed Joaquin Phoenix is kind of like kissing him, isn't it?). It's that this has been bugging me for years that I could never remember who the famous movie father of Rusty was. And of course I've gotten a lot of mileage of the place-of-conception-as-a-middle-name story. Now I actually know who it is.

Oh, I have had a strange day. A strange, strange day.