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Facebook. It is so ubiquitous these days even your mother has an account. Social networking is red-hot and, despite the Jazz community's Luddite reputation, almost every musician I know now has a Facebook account.

This sucks for me.

Don't get me wrong, I love Facebook. I have been using it for years and years, to stay in touch with my close personal friends. The problem is now I have security leaks that need plugging up. I have taken the usual celebrity precautions, such as not using my stage name for my personal account, but there are always new leaks.

For example, I would love to let "friends of friends" have access to my information, but after a while I notice that certain friends of mine now have over 2,000 friends! I decide to tighten up my security to give information out to only "friends" instead of "unfriending" my musician friends who are Facebook Whores. (Get a Facebook Fan page why don't you!)

This was working fine until I sent out invites for my annual Scorpio Birthday Bash last month via Facebook. I quickly begin to realize that my privacy controls are so tight that I have to ease them up in order to let my friends invite other friends. That means I have to unfriend friends who are security leaks, but on the upside, I am able to friend a lot of friends who have not been able to find me before.

Everything is going great until I notice that one of my musician friends has invited Django Reinhardt and John Coltrane to my party. I call him up irate and yell, "What's wrong with you?"

He answers that he didn't think it was a problem because they wouldn't show up. "They're dead!" he explains.

"Yes, but the cuckoo who started that page isn't and now they have all of my personal information including my home address and phone number. Last thing I need is for my laptop or jewelry to disappear because my birthday party was infiltrated by a stranger."

"Oh, I never thought about that," he replies.

Of course you didn't, because some people need a little green Gazoo on their shoulder to figure out when they are being a dum-dum.

Soon after I uninvited Coltrane and Django, I start getting bombarded with friend requests from casual acquaintances. If I get a friend request from someone I don't know, I just ignore it. But if you send me a message and I do know you, I reply. I try to politely direct casual acquaintances to my fan page, explaining that this account is private, but I can tell they are miffed. They don't want my fan page and they don't want to be on my mailing list; they want to be my friend. After all, we have mutual friends in common and of course everyone's Facebook profile is private.

How can I explain? Isn't it obvious? Between being a well-known singer and owning Jazz at Pearl's, I am friends with thousands of musicians in the Bay Area alone. I have to draw the line somewhere between my public and private personae, and exchanging photos of my honeymoon with thousands of work colleagues is not what I consider private.

Besides you don't really want to be my Facebook friend, especially if you have a corporate job and have friended your boss or other work colleagues. I will embarrass and poke you incessantly to answer risque stupid questions about what you would do if you were transformed into the opposite sex. I will draw comic strips re-enacting the night when you came to my show on a date and the two other girls you were also dating showed up because you always bring your first dates to my show.

Trust me: you would rather get the cool videos and free mp3s downloads available on my fan page. After all, you don't want your mother asking, "Who is that weird friend of yours on Facebook?""