6 degrees of separation

Now that would be a sweet name for an emo band.

But here it is, and I'm hoping that this is one of many volumes:

I drove out to a tiny woodsy neighborhood of cul-de-sacs today off RIO Road (which use to be called Route Ten until people in Charlottesville decided to be retarded...I hope Alexandria doesn't soon spawn people calling our favorite strip-mall-Applebee's corridor RI Road) and started knocking door-to-door to find people to interview for a story I'm working on. This activity was prescribed by my boss, who apparently has not seen the Sexual Predators Map of this area. Anyway, after I chatted it up with a harmless-looking older man listening to headphones, he directed me to the home of an elderly couple who had lived there for 20 years.

The nice old lady got side-tracked, as old people often do, and started bragging about her granddaughter, as all awesome old people always do. Apparently she's a sixteen-year-old who plays drums. She rocks. At least, that's what the drummer for the Dave Mathews Band told her. Seriously, grandma alleges. It happened for real.

But the real talent in the band is the lead singer/guitarist kind (grandpa shakes his head at this. Our granddaughter is the real talent, he says.) But this boy has been away for six months, at sea. At SEA? Well you see, his mother is a professor at the University, and she took her family with her to Semester At Sea...

His mother isn't any old professor. His mother taught me fiction writing. She sent me an anthology of American fiction in the mail to my home in Northern Virginia, for god sakes. Me and Lizzie-girl go WAY back.

So there you have it: I interviewed my teacher's son's bandmate's grandma and grandpa. I guess that's only four degrees. It left me feeling kind of good about life in general and Self, Solitude and Connectedness (but that's another story for another occasion entirely). But it also left me extremely jealous of this sixteen-year-old drummer who has the respect of someone in DMB (whose name I still think is missing a U, but still. Their respect is kind of a big deal). I think grandma could tell, and as I walked out the door she told me I still had time to learn how to play in a band; I was so young.

If she's right, I at least know what to name it.