"It does get old to have to always be a gorilla in a zoo. I don't know what it's like any more to be anonymous" ~ Happy FRISKY Friday ~ stock photo

~ Kevin Bacon ~ This Gorilla was a swinging dude on his gym set at the Ft. Worth Zoo ~ Please view on the LARGER sizes ~ Kevin Bacon Wikipedia~ Kevin Norwood Bacon (born July 8, 1958) is an American film and theater actor whose notable roles include Footloose, Flatliners, A Few Good Men, Apollo 13, Mystic River, The Woodsman, Friday the 13th and Tremors. Bacon, the youngest of six children, was born and raised in a close-knit family in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. A former Park Avenue debutante[citation needed], his mother, Ruth Hilda (née Holmes; 1916–1991), taught elementary school and was a liberal activist, while his father, Edmund Bacon, was a well-respected architect. At 16, Bacon attended the Pennsylvania Governors School for the Arts, an invaluable state-funded 5 week arts program which helped solidify Bacon's passion for the arts. From there, Bacon left home at age 17 to pursue a theater career in New York, where he was one of the youngest students ever admitted, and the youngest student to appear in a production at the Circle in the Square Theater School. "I wanted life, man, the real thing", he later recalled to Nancy Mills of Cosmopolitan. "The message I got was 'The arts are it. Business is the devil's work. Art and creative expression are next to godliness.' Combine that with an immense ego and you wind up with an actor." Bacon's decision to become an actor did not come without pressures. Describing his father to Mills as a "city-planning superstar", he set very high goals for himself because he "felt nothing less than stardom would be enough." However, his movie debut in the fraternity comedy Animal House in 1978 did not lead to the instant fame for which he had hoped, and Bacon returned to waiting tables and auditioning for small roles in theater. He did a couple of stints on television soap operas Search For Tomorrow (1979) and The Guiding Light (1980–81) in New York while waiting for larger roles to come along. He refused an offer of a television series based on Animal House to be filmed in California in order to remain close to the New York stage. Some of his early stage work included Getting Out performed at New York's Phoenix Theater, and Flux which he did at Second Stage Theatre during their 1981–1982 season. His motivation to remain in New York still has resonance for Bacon. "I think my decision had a lot to do with just being afraid" he explained to Chase in Cosmopolitan. "L.A. scared me. I call it the city of fear. I get scared when I land, and I live in fear there, and I think a lot of people do. I mean, I've had a hard time in New York City too, but aesthetically and spiritually, I'm an East Coast person." With the support of his wife, actress Kyra Sedgwick, Bacon believes that he has come to terms with his qualms about Los Angeles, thus strengthening his commitment to acting. "Our lives are still crazy, we still spend a ton of time out [in L.A.], and I've finally admitted that the movie business means a lot to me", he told Chase. "I used to say, it's okay, I can do it, but it isn't that important, and then I realized I was out of my mind; this is what I do for a living." In 1995 Bacon formed a band called The Bacon Brothers with his brother, Michael. The duo has released six albums.