Three personal Star Trek fandom stories

As the 50th Anniversary winds up …

1. The Fan, Enraged

I was actually alive and sentient (though young) during the original run of TOS. The shift to a later hour in the third season meant I couldn't stay up that late, though.

Apparently one night that restriction caused me to "snap." The previous owners of the house we owned had put a lockable door in the hallway from the front of the house to the back bedrooms. Upon being sent to bed rather than being able to watch my beloved Star Trek …

… I crept back out and closed that door and locked it.

So when my parents decided it was time to head to sleep, they found they couldn't get to use, or to their bedroom.

They knocked, but my brother and I were both fast asleep. They went outside and rapped on the window, and, eventually, woke up my brother, who would have been 4 or 5 at the time.

He finally figured out what they wanted, got something to stand on, and unlocked the door in question.

I don't know what the aftermath of the episode was, but it remains a repeated family anecdote.

2. The Fan, Tongue-Tied

I was a speech nerd in high school, racking up trophies at National Forensics League[1] events, taking long trips to speech tourneys around SoCal, and even up to northern California.

We actually did a field trip one year, to go hear Ronald Reagan speak at an event in downtown Los Angeles. This was in Reagan's "wilderness years" between being governor and being president.

So we traveled to downtown, to some major hotel, and listened to the speech. It was just what one would expect from Reagan: jovial, friendly, ideological, and driven by his constant prop of 3×5 cards onto which he'd noted the speech structure and various anecdotes.

In attendance at this public speech, at a nearby table, was George Takei. Takei was involved in California and Los Angeles Democratic politics in the 1970s, and he was attending this particular event, too.

After the speech, I screwed up my courage and went over to him, determined to speak to him and to tell him …

… um …

… it was not until I was standing at his table that I realized that I had no idea what I really wanted to tell him in this kind of a public setting. So I mumbled something about how much I'd enjoyed his work and then wandered away, feeling like an idiot.

I'm sure I was neither the first nor last person that Takei ever encountered who was so tongue-tied, probably not even that day. But it was an event that warned me off in later years from making a point to go up and say hi to celebrities I admired. I mean, heck, I'd love to sit down and chat with any number of them, but in terms of summing up something coherent and non-fanboyish in a public setting?

Yeah, words fail me.

3. The Fan, Alone

So, working in the Denver area, in downtown, it was hard to avoid this being the season starter day for the NFL — not with the NFL Kickoff Celebration taking over Civic Center Park and the front of the City/County Building, nor with everyone and their brother and sister and distant cousin wearing Orange and/or Blue.

So I thought I'd be cute. I had a staff meeting with my peers this morning, and I said, looking around at all of them wearing something Bronco-related, "I just want to say, as we start this meeting, that this is a very special day, something I'm sure we all want to celebrate … the 50th Anniversary of the first episode of Star Trek."

I was a pilgrim in an unholy land. Around the table, including my boss, there were raised eyebrows of bemusement or general scoffing and eyerolling.

I did get referred to another peer in the department that I should mention this to, and, when I did so later, he was appreciative.

I tried this trick with another group in another meeting. This time it was, "Huh, imagine that," sort of like if I'd mentioned it was the anniversary of Richard Nixon's resignation or something. One guy in the meeting did opine that he had also been alive during the TOS initial run and remembered a few eps from it. I regaled them with Story Number 1 above, and they were appropriately amused.

At last, at the end of the say, I had my own departmental meeting, and sprung this on my two direct reports. They, at least, had the interest (or politeness (or appropriately truckling nature)) to oooh and aaah. So that, at least, felt better.

Happy Anniversary, Star Trek. I appreciate the good times, not to mention the anecdotes for me to carry forward.

—

[1] The official High School Speech Competition organization, not something that the CSI folk belong to. Alas, in the past few years they changed their name to the National Speech & Debate Association, which is more descriptive, but a lot less interesting.

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