Continuing our tour of my copious insecurities, we now turn to Star Trek.
When I confessed recently that I had become a humanist in the early Seventies, I credited that conversion to New Wave science fiction. But Star Trek was just as big an influence.
The original series had ended its prime time run a few years before, but when WTTV Indianapolis started airing reruns on Saturday nights, I was all in. I had known what Trek was as a grade school child - but my first exposure to it was the first airing of the second-season episode "Catspaw" in October 1967 - the one that opens with the Macbethian witches? - and it scared the living piss out of me. I literally ran from the room.
Now I'm 11 and I'm seeing "Menagerie, Pt I" and I'm wondering where has this been all my life??? I couldn't have fallen harder.
This wasn't just the coolest thing I'd ever seen; it was also the deepest. This was a world where everyone had value, even big, malevolent lumps of living rock; color and gender and accent were invisible; ideas and their expression and their exploration were placed center stage.
I couldn't get enough. I never missed a rerun! I bought up the James Blish paperbacks and read them over and over. In study hall, I would draw the Enterprise in orbit over this planet or that. In October of 1974, I made my own Spock uniform and build a phaser, a communicator and a tricorder for a halloween party.
Two years later, we are living in Frankfort, and I'm the new kid in school. But this time, I lucked out: I immediately met two other Trekkies, Joe Lee and Jim Wampler - and lifetime friendships fall into place.
I've already overshared about how I have never fit in anywhere. It's not entirely true; there are two exceptions, the international progressive rock community, which gave me pals like Earl Grey and Carl Kirkendall - and Trek, which I share with Pete Wilson and Donna Dahlgren and dozens of others. Fandom is a kind of belonging that seems obsessive and a little desperate to those who don't participate in it, but I have to say, it's a form of community that has benefits over all others. People who bond through fandom have a path to knowing one another that is more intuitive, insightful and long-lasting than most people realize.
So - 1976. No sooner do Joe and Jim and Bob Fields and Susan Rosson and Heidi Myfelt and I all bond over Trek than the Great Bird of the Galaxy himself - Gene Roddenberry! - comes to Louisville, doing his lecture thing.
Jim and I finagle our way aboard Bob Fields's mom's car and we all make the trek to Freedom Hall, for an hour of Roddenberry's unhinged ramblings, a peek at the Blooper Reel, and a screening of the original pilot, "The Cage", in black and white. Afterwards, I get to shake the hand of the man himself and get his autograph.
You have to understand the timing of all of this. The original series was all there was, apart from the cartoon; there wasn't yet a movie, or a Next Generation, or any of the Trek wealth we now enjoy. This was it. We were it.
And yet it was enough. We felt like royalty! We felt like members of a secret club that nobody else knew existed, the coolest club imaginable. We who had never fit in and never belonged suddenly knew how belonging felt.
It gets deeper from there. Three years later, the movies began, and a flood of Trek novels had come out. I began to understand Trek's innate humanist themes more explicitly, having heard Roddenberry speak and having read interviews in which he expounded. In hindsight, I believe he stole his humanist rhetoric from his friend Asimov and shoe-horned lots of it into his Trek song and dance, but that's of no consequence - I embraced it all the same.
The following summer, Joe and Jim and our gang started Spielberging with Super 8 cameras, spray-painting scuba suits into spacesuits and turning Capital Plaza into a spaceport. We actually made the news! This went on and on, and at one point we had almost 30 kids involved.
It's 40 years later, and there are hundreds of Trek paperbacks on the shelves behind me right now. Every Trek show and movie are over there in my DVD collection (though Netflix and CBS All Access render them redundant). Two of my 25 books have Trek themes, and a third is on the way.
But my lifetime Trek takeaway isn't the books or the shows or even the friendships - it's commitment to an idea that I happily traded in my religious faith to embrace, the conviction that everyone is precious, everyone has value, that we will make our own destiny and it can be bright and optimistic and positive. That came straight from Gene, and its roots are still strong within me.
The human adventure is just beginning...
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