Still Just a Geek, page 48
* This is a thing I chose to believe, despite any supporting evidence from the Universe that (1) The idea of “the Universe” as a being existed at all, and (2) This imagined thing cared enough about me to get involved in my life.
I like the idea of the Balance, as a philosophy, but as a supernatural event, it’s hokum.
* Aunt Val showed me what it meant to love and be loved unconditionally. I spent most weekends at her house when I was growing up, and she made me feel accepted, supported, valued, and loved in ways that my parents chose not to.
Her loss still lives in me. I was suffering so much, from undiagnosed mental illness, from financial difficulties, from my floundering career, but most of all because of the dysfunctional relationship I had with my mother and father. When I went to Aunt Val’s house, I wasn’t just with her, I was away from them, and I could breathe. I could be myself and could feel the way all children should be allowed to feel: loved and protected.
If you are lucky enough to have an Aunt Val, may I suggest you take a second to walk away from this book, and give them a call?
* The editor hates birds.
* And time.
Or maybe it’s just British people.
* I’ve spent more time thinking about this than anyone ever should have, and I’ve concluded that Wesley never got past being an idea, for most of the writers. Of course it was more fun to write for the android. Of course it was more interesting for an adult to write for another adult. Kids are tough in television, especially when the depth of the character design doesn’t quite exceed “he’s real smart.” If anyone had talked to me about being a kid around adults all the time, I could have shared what my experiences were, and they could have used them to make the character more interesting and multidimensional.
But that obviously didn’t happen, and I think the end product reflects that.
* This sense of being a child all over again persisted well into my forties. It was never anything the cast did or didn’t do; it was the emotional baggage from my childhood I was carrying around, and when I was finally able to confront and deal with it, something in me fundamentally changed. I didn’t feel embarrassed or ashamed around them. Over the course of about a year, I had conversations with each of them, individually and as a group, where I got to share with them the reality of my childhood, which I’d kept hidden out of shame and fear. I was able to thank them for being the family I didn’t have at home, and ever since, I’ve been able to have a loving, nurturing, healthy relationship with my space family.
* The Father, the Son, and the Robot Spirit.
* When Ryan was eighteen, he was home for a visit from college. I had this laser star projector thing, and we were laying on the floor in the living room, watching these little green stars drift across the ceiling.
“I’ve been thinking,” he said, “that I am who I am because of you. Everything I love, everything that matters to me, I got from you. You’ve been more of a dad to me than my dad, and I was wondering if you’d like to make it official, and adopt me?”
Once I stopped crying, I said yes.
A couple of years later, Nolan asked me to adopt him. They both changed their names, and we finally made it official in the eyes of the law what had been unofficial in our lives for years: I was their dad.
When this was written, though, they were my stepkids, and even though their biological father is a monster, it was important to me that I respect whatever relationship they chose to have with him. As it turned out, they chose a very limited relationship with him, based on healthy boundaries they set for themselves. I sometimes wonder if wasting their childhood and his relationship with them in an effort to hurt Anne was worth it for him.
* Might have been easier if I just had to wear a gown and glass slippers.
* Editor: Sooooo cool.
Me: Shut up!
* The whole trick to improvising is to trust your instincts, say “yes, and” to everything, and exist in the moment. To warm up for this, improvisers do simple games before shows that focus our imaginations, get us loose and comfortable in our bodies, and ready to go onstage together.
You may notice I’m saying “we” here, because improvisers don’t usually work alone. On this day, I didn’t have any of my fellow performers with me, so I improvised entire scenes by myself, playing all the roles, while I drove to the GalaxyCon.
I’m very talented and not weird at all, you know.
I’m also not going to say I was playing with myself in my car, because that’s a cheap joke. On the other hand, maybe it’s a little bit of a callback to a few chapters ago, so I tell you what: if you laughed, leave it in. If you rolled your eyes, go ahead and strike this paragraph with a black pen. This is your book, now, so you can mark it up however you want.
* I honestly don’t know if this is my issue, of if this is something common among actors who aren’t working. Whenever someone asks “How are you doing?” it is translated into “How much are you working?,” which is never what the person asking the question wants to know.
* At the time, I thought that if I kept saying “really fun,” it would somehow become true.
* I might have asked this with the carrots still in my mouth. But that’s between me and Jonny, so let us have this private moment.
* If you haven’t heard this line, or just haven’t heard it in a while, it’s worth hitting up YouTube to find it.
* I’m about to turn forty-nine. My son Ryan will be thirty-two this year. My son Nolan will be thirty. Hey, if I have to deal with that information, so do you.
* Or done a spit take. Nothing like a good spit take.
* Fun facts: We all call him Data from time to time. We all call Michael Dorn “Worf” from time to time. Some of them still call me “Teen Idol.”
God, I love these people so much.
* In a row?
* This is what IMDB is for, but if you want to know my favorite moment from him, it’s either the dinner scene in Beetlejuice or the “Robert Goulet’s Cajun Christmas” promo from Scrooged.
* I am not the only former Trek actor to do a movie nobody remembers. (Love you, Brent!)
* I was looking for family. I was looking for acceptance and approval.
* Kickball is an activity kids used to play before there were PlayStations and iPhones. It’s like baseball, but with your feet.
Baseball is an activity . . .
* The director and writer, respectively.
* I’m getting ahead of myself a little bit, but this is before I got to work on Nemesis for a day. At this moment, hearing that TNG was really, truly wrapped after Nemesis, I felt like any chance I would have to experience TNG and being part of its cast—without a ton of emotional baggage—was gone forever.
I didn’t feel sad because I wouldn’t get to be Wesley again. Rather, I felt sad because I had spent years trying to run away from Star Trek, trying to prove things that didn’t need to be proved to anyone, and I wanted (needed) to go back, just once, and love every second of it.
Little did I know . . .
* Oh, sure, when SIR PATRICK STEWART says it, it’s fine. Whatever.
Editor: Exactly.
* The part of me that cares about stagecraft thinks this is “bad show,” letting the audience see the cast before they are on the stage. This particular event was just so casual, so intimate, it wasn’t out of place to do it this way.
And I’m glad it happened this way, because I get to remember hearing these things as we passed people who were excited to see us. This one gets to be a stand-out memory, among the blur of utility corridors we usually use to get to the stage at a convention.
* In the early 2000s, this was a huge crowd for an event that wasn’t even a full-on convention. The Galaxy Ball was more of a one-day celebration of Star Trek, and one of the very rare times a whole bunch of us, from multiple different series, were all in the same place at the same time.
This audience filled the room, and it felt like playing a stadium.
* And yes, I realized I was actually on a TV show with them. But this somehow felt different.
* You know how, in baseball, when he just misses the tag at second, and they show it from a dozen angles in slow motion with graphics and commentary until it’s analyzed to death and you just wish they’d get on with the game, already? That’s how my brain handles every mistake I make.
* Okay, I’m deliberately underselling this.
This was amazing. This was not what I expected, at all. I went to this thing because I could sign some autographs and sell some pictures, and we desperately needed the money. When I found out it was going to be those guys and me, I felt like there was some mistake, or I was being set up. I mean, fandom had been so cruel to me, Rick Berman had been so cruel to me, and I believed I was “less than” the rest of the cast in every way that mattered, and I was *especially* less than these three men. To share the stage with them, to hold my own with them as an entertainer, to be recognized as an equal part of Star Trek, and to feel like what I was doing with my life was worthy . . . all of that caught me totally by surprise.
I almost talked myself out of attending the Galaxy Ball, and I am so glad I didn’t. It ended up being such a wonderful, special, validating and meaningful experience. It was so uplifting and reassuring! This was about more than my ego; this was about my entire identity. When I wrote Just a Geek, I don’t think I was ready to say all of THAT (weird, because I wasn’t uncomfortable saying pretty much everything else) and when I wrote “it felt good,” it really was the best I could do at the time, even though it clearly undersells the significance of the day.
* This may sound unkind, but it really wasn’t, and I didn’t perceive it that way. Remember, Patrick hadn’t seen me for ten or so years at this point, and the last time he’d seen me, I’d been an angsty teen on the set.
Making Patrick laugh, and being praised by him felt so good, so validating, so reassuring.
* Milt was my half of the comedy duo Brent and I pretended to be part of when we sat next to each other on the Bridge. We’d do characters that were ancient New York Jews who had a lot of aches. I haven’t thought about that in years, but it just made me laugh as hard as it ever did.
* I am so grateful that this is no longer true.
* It wasn’t true, but it felt that way at the time, and it breaks my heart I believed the cast of TNG judged me and loved me conditionally, the way my parents did. Nobody in the cast cared what I did with my career. They loved (and love) me because I exist. It took me way too long to accept that, but boy am I glad I did.
Remember: There is always family somewhere—sometimes you just have to look and work kinda hard to find it.
* I wasn’t. This is really important for me to say out loud, if only so I internalize it: I was never a black sheep in my Star Trek family the way I was a scapegoat in the family that raised me.
This feeling of being the black sheep, and all the baggage and bullshit that went along with it, was entirely inside my own head, and the voice that expressed that belief belonged to the man who was my father.
* “Nice weather we’re having, right?”
* Wil: Hang on. U2 is okay here, but not in the other place? What the fuck?
Editor: Good call. Redacted!
Wil: Dammit!
* Based on literally everything Rick Berman ever did, from sabotaging my role in Valmont to ignoring me at big Trek events, I felt pretty confident in my assessment of Berman’s feelings toward me.
* Scripts and sides are now e-mailed as encrypted, password-protected, watermarked PDFs.
We save a lot of paper, which is great, but I’m not going to lie and say I don’t miss the excitement of tearing open an envelope and carrying a script around the house while I read it for the first time.
* This is me thinking, not my dialogue. Give the writers more credit than that.
* It was this weird Data versus Worf dance-battle that really didn’t fit, but was clearly written to shoehorn in a new Britney Spears song.
Like I said, they fixed it.
* Except it really didn’t turn out that way, did it?
* WELP.
* Which CBS climbed through, triumphantly, with Picard.
* I just hate that I felt this way. It wasn’t true, and I didn’t need to live my life as if it were true.
* I’m not going to bother explaining cassettes to you.
* She knows who she is.
I hope.
* Still going to tease you for now . . .
* My phone has rung maybe five times this year (it’s November 2020 as I write this) and every time, it’s been a spammer. Today, few things make me as instantly suspicious as my cell phone ringing. In 2001, the ratio of calls I actually wanted to take was much better.
* Editor: It actually doesn’t go without saying.
Me: Cool.
Editor: Touché.
* Editor: . . .
Me: Don’t say it!
* I’m not sure why they didn’t make me wear a muscle suit. I was still as skinny as I had ever been.
* Boingo was massively popular in Southern California, long before Weird Science broke them into alternative radio all over the country. So many of the bands I love and loved—the Go-Gos, X, Black Flag, Adolescents, the Minutemen, the Vandals—are all from Los Angeles, and are all successful punk bands. But Boingo always filled me with a sense of civic pride, like they were the hometown heroes who blew up and made us all proud.
* Editor says this has to be cut, because he hates nice things.
If you want to know what he sang, you’ll need to listen to the entire Depeche Mode catalog to find it.
Or Google. You can probably Google it.
* I regret not playing it off like I’d gotten married and started a family while I was still on TNG.
Teen Idol, indeed!
* They are a living, breathing dynasty, and they deserve every bit of their generational success. Mike’s brother, Monty, did makeup on Stand by Me.
* I will belabor this point. Feeling included was so important to me, I would have done this all for free. Don’t tell Paramount. I’m not giving back my SAG scale. I spent it on annotation.
* You never forget your first pair of Star Trek sideburns.
* It was cool. So eat a bag of dicks, editor.
* We actors are good at hugging and kissing and not messing up our hair or makeup.
* I don’t know if the lot was officially divided into “TV” and “Film” stages, but the audience shows were all on the west side of the lot, and most of the features I recalled being shot when I worked there (Coming to America, Soapdish, The Hunt for Red October) were all in stages on the east side of the lot. So this is a distinction I made in my mind that is maybe not technically correct.
* Solid Gold was a dance music program that picked up where American Bandstand and Soul Train left off. They taped lip-synched performances every Friday, and Tina Yothers, who worked on Family Ties and was my friend, would take me over there to see the fanciest pop stars of the moment.
I have racked my memory like crazy trying to figure out if we shot Nemesis on the old Solid Gold stage. You would think that I would remember, but I just don’t. It’s one of those memories that inadvertently got written over at some point along the way.
* To be clear, it’s usually about three, maybe four if it’s a particularly big day with lots of background performers.
* I am still not entirely sure how I feel about this. I’ve seen Rick once in the last decade, and he was warm and kind, almost grandfatherly to me. But this was some disingenuous shit I gobbled down at the time because I needed it.
* This guy was such a dick to everyone, I’m not surprised he never directed after this picture.
At one point, he wanted one of the actors to do something that would have conflicted with decades of canon. The actor told him “that’s not how we do it on Star Trek,” and the director screamed “I don’t fucking care how you do it on Star Trek! In my movie, we do it my way!”
Always a good attitude to have when you’re helming the final installment of The Next Generation franchise.
