Last night, we watched Six Degrees of Separation, a film from the ’90s that we had never seen. In fact, it is possible that we haven’t seen any films from the ’90s. We were busy with other things.

Six Degrees, starring Donald Sutherland, Stockard Channing, and Will Smith, among others, is based on a true story, sort of. And that is how we came to watch it.

I should start at the beginning. The beginning starts in the city of Trondheim, Norway, a city we have never visited. Trondheim, the third largest Norwegian city and the northernmost large city on earth, has long intrigued me.

Our friends Michael and Wendy just got back from a Norwegian cruise which I think visited Trondheim. My cousin Richard in Germany, whom I have never met in person, also just finished a Norwegian cruise. A college classmate moved to Trondheim and may be there still. A Norwegian Facebook friend often writes about Trondheim. And I read something about the small Jewish community there and how, in a climate where sometimes the sun barely sets and sometimes barely rises, they set the time for the beginning of Shabbat.

By coincidence, something about traveling to Trondheim appeared on my Facebook feed Thursday night, leading to my opening up the Trondheim Wikipedia page and, after learning – among other things – that Trondheim has over 50,000 university students living there – I went to the list of “famous people” born there.

I had never heard of any of them, but for obvious reasons, the name David Abrahamsen interested me, and then I looked him up. I discovered that he was a member of an long established Trondheim Jewish family, that he was trained as a medical doctor and psychiatrist, and he moved to the United States, becoming an expert on serial killers. He wrote books on David Berkowitz (“Son of Sam”) and on Jack the Ripper, among other things.

He had a daughter named (after her second marriage) Inger Elliott, who became a well-known expert and importer of Asian textiles, who once told a writer friend of hers, John Guare, about a young Black man named David Hampton, who came to her New York apartment, telling her untruthfully that he was a friend of one of her children and Sidney Poitier’s son, and needed a place to stay for a night, but that he turned to be a conman. She awakened to find him engaged in a sexual liaison with another man in her guest room and called the police, who arrested him.

Her story became the basis for Six Degrees of Separation.

I thought the film was awful, by the way. Dumb, racist, artificial. But I seem to feel that about at least half the films I see.

Six Degrees, by the way, was a play before it became a film. Unfortunately, it was never made into a musical. But if it had been, perhaps it would have been written by Stephen Sondheim.

Had it been, he may have wanted to express his gratitude to Inger Elliott for starting this particular ball rolling and, at the same time, honoring her father David Abrahamsen, for fathering Inger Elliott, by premiering the musical in his home town.

This is just a long way of suggesting that we have  missed the  possibility of hearing Sondheim in Trondheim.

Anyway, (1) Trondheim, (2) Abrahamsen, (3) Elliott, (4) Hampton, (5) Guare, (6) Channing, Sutherland, or Smith [you choose]. Six degrees of separation.

Maybe tomorrow, we will go back to Trump. He grows more evil by the hour.