It was appropriate, as Black History Month got underway, that one name surfaced among the many notables that I found in my mother’s address book following her death last week at 90: Sidney Poitier.

Not because the first Black actor to win an Oscar was a friend of hers, though I’m sure she would have relished adding him to a group that ranged from Mel Brooks to Henry Kissinger, according to the contacts list on her Galaxy smartphone. It was more prosaic: Poitier, unwittingly, added a punctuation mark to a life that stretched from fleeing Nazi-occupied Norway as Jewish refugee, to a career as a photojournalist in Southeast Asia during the 1960s, founder of an acclaimed textile and design firm and matriarch of a blended family that produced 14 grandchildren and five great-grandkids.

It was Poitier, though, who proved the impetus for a con artist named David Hampton to stumble into his most audacious scam, a story that took New York City by storm in 1983 – and prompted playwright John Guare to write the play “Six Degrees of Separation” (later a film of the same name, starring a very young Will Smith).

In brief, it’s the story of a purported college classmate of my sisters who showed up at my parents’ Upper East Side apartment claiming that he’d just been mugged and had nowhere to stay until his father, Sidney Poitier, arrived in town to film “Dreamgirls.”

My mother and stepfather, Inger McCabe Elliott and Osborn Elliott, charmed by David’s erudition and awed by his supposed family ties, took him in for the night, putting him up in a spare bedroom. They awoke the next morning to discover that Hampton had hosted an uninvited male friend, whom he identified as “Malcolm Forbes’ nephew.” On his way out, led by my stepfather by the scruff of his neck, he asked for $50 “to send flowers to Inger.”

It was a story born for the tabloids, a pair of wealthy, liberal New Yorkers undone by a cunning young con artist who, it turned out, had played his trick on others of that ilk, including the head of WNET. Poitier, it turned out, had six daughters and no sons. While no great sums of money changed hands, Hampton was eventually arrested and served time in prison before dying at the age of 39.

All this came to mind while recounting the story to a New York Times reporter who was writing my mom’s obituary. The reporter was upfront about the Times’ interest: Yes, my mother had lived a notable life, but really, it was the “Six Degrees” connection that would land her an obituary in the New York Times.

My sisters howled in protest. Mom was an acclaimed photojournalist, they said (true). She published three books (true). She founded China Seas, a textile and design firm so acclaimed that the renowned architect I.M. Pei ended up with a set of her batik napkins (also true). The Times reporter, to his credit, explained that he wouldn’t omit that information, of course – just that the headline and first few paragraphs would focus on that episode.

When I thought about that conversation, though, I realized that it reflected the essential point of “Six Degrees” – that each of us are six socially connected people away from anyone else.

Through that lens, it makes sense that one person, in this case my mother, would spawn a web of social connections carved from such a big swath of late 20th-Century U.S. history: Yes, Kissinger is on her list, but so is the writer Calvin Trillin, composer and conductor Lukas Foss and his wife Cornelia, and Morely and Jane Safer – all of whom reliably attended our annual Christmas Eve party in New York.

In my own considerably less glamorous history, I chanced to meet a German trekker from Berlin on a Chinese mountaintop in 1987 – a link that led to pan-European and cross-Asian and U.S. friendships that have endured to this day. So, if you have a moment, it’s worth taking a look at your own social circle and wondering how many potential friendships are lurking just six people away.

— Alec D.B. McCabe