Shatner Rules (3 page)

RULES FOR TURNING
80

T
his year, 2011, marks my eightieth year. Throughout this book, I will offer up special rules that you will need to follow if you plan on becoming an octogenarian—one with grace, wit, and swagger (fake hip permitting).

Elizabeth and I were at the airport recently, getting ready for our trip to Australia, where I was to appear in a one-man show titled
Kirk, Crane and Beyond: William Shatner Live
. Or at least “semi-live,” depending on how bad the jet lag was going to hit me.

Australia would be one of my favorite places on Earth, if not for the fact that it's located all the way the hell in Australia. Seriously, it takes about a day to get there, and you usually “lose” a day in the process. And whenever I travel there, some passenger invariably makes some crack to me about warp speed or something, so on the flight I like to keep my nose buried in as many time-consuming activities as possible. Time does not fly when flying to Australia.

I went to the terminal's newspaper/candy/souvenir shop to browse the selection of hour-erasing magazines, crossword puzzles, playing cards, books, and “natural” sleep aids, most of which prefer the advertising power of the word “natural” over “ineffective.”

After having stuffed several magazines and Sudoku collections under my arms, I proceeded to the gentleman behind the counter, who rang up my items. I scoured the celebrity magazines, hoping to maybe see a celebrity. Weren't Kardashians something I used to fight?

The clerk calculated the total, and I plopped down a credit card. He looked at the name on the card, looked at me, back at the card, and at me again. I was wearing a wide-brimmed, floppy hat.

“Is this you?” he asked.

“Uh huh,” I responded.

“Seriously?”

“Yes, I am always serious about me.”

He took a look at the card again, and peered into my visage, and said, “My. How time flies.”

I've been told—I don't remember it—that when I turned forty, I stayed in bed for three days. And not three days in bed in a good way. Getting old is not easy, especially when you're someone whose face is accessible to so many at all times. But . . .

I just smiled at this clerk. When you're an actor, as long as they still recognize the face, that's an achievement. Life is good, career is good, love is good. That's all that matters to me.

Time
does
fly, and it's all good as long as your attitude is flying first class.

(I can probably find you a good deal on the first-class ticket, by the way.)

E
lizabeth and I recently pulled into our driveway after a weeklong drive from our home in Kentucky, with a stop in her home state of Indiana, and then on to Los Angeles. I shut off the car, and she turned to me and said, “Let's turn around and get lost again.”

And I would have too, if not for the stringent deadlines of a certain fifty-thousand-word rule book/memoir. (We are right now at word 6,471. God knows where we'd be if I'd listened to my wife!)

We traveled nearly four thousand miles and had such a joyous time that we never even once turned on the radio. We just sat beside one another and talked, and shared, and experienced. And if we got lonely for our typical American radio, Elizabeth and I took turns saying bombastic things about the president and giving one another birthday shout-outs!

If you learn anything from
Shatner Rules
, it's that my career has been an adventure, full of unexpected stops, starts, twists, and turns, and my undying allegiance to “yes” and the unexpected. This also extends to my time spent traveling and adventuring.

I love traveling, and I love getting lost. I have a GPS in all my cars, but they are usually switched off. (By the way, isn't it time that
I
became a GPS voice? You can download Gary Busey, KITT from
Knight Rider
, and Flavor Flav. There has to be a market for William Shatner giving you directions! Let's talk, GPS manufacturers. And unlike the sexy lady voice on most units, I can actually pronounce “Sepulveda Boulevard” properly.)

Getting lost in America, one of my favorite hobbies, is something I first did in college. A buddy of mine from McGill University and I set out to see America in 1948. We were armed with only our backpacks, our youthful exuberance, and two cardboard signs.

What did the signs say?

Remember Burma-Shave? If you are younger than me, you probably don't, and you probably don't shave as much as you should either. Seriously, kids, when did beards become popular again? Last time I attended a Star Trek convention, I thought I was addressing a pack of Civil War reenactors. (Then again, it might have been a Civil War convention. I do a lot of conventions.)

Well, Burma-Shave had a unique and wonderful way of advertising its product. They would line the highways of America with a set of sequential signs, each sign having the line of a poem on it. The entire nation was covered with the terrific little stanzas promoting the clean shave of Burma-Shave brushless shaving cream.

A few examples:

Does your husband / Misbehave / Grunt and grumble / Rant and rave / Shoot the brute some / Burma-Shave

Your shaving brush / Has had its day / So why not / Shave the modern way / With / Burma-Shave

A peach / Looks good / With lots of fuzz / But man's no peach / And never wuz / Burma-Shave

Great, funny, memorable advertisements. Had they not folded in 1963, taking their signs with them, I would have loved to have worked with them and endorsed their fine product!

Anyway, my college buddy and I held two pieces of cardboard, like the Burma-Shave signs, which read:

 

T
WO
M
C
G
ILL
S
TUDENTS
/ S
EEING THE
US.

And we would stand a distance from one another along the road, thumbs out, and get picked up by strangers and driven across this strange land.

Unfortunately, about two weeks into our adventure, my buddy bailed on me, leaving me with the sign
TWO MCGILL STUDENTS
. People weren't sure if I was advertising a sale of two McGill students, or if I wanted two McGill students, or if I was traveling to the city of Two McGill Students in search of employment and/or adventure. Either way, the sign no longer had its Burma-Shave appeal, and I started relying solely on my thumb and youthful good looks.

Now, in this day and age, it is irresponsible for me to suggest that my readers just throw away the map and hop into a car with strangers. Sure, I survived it, but just barely.

I mean, at one point I was picked up by a farmer in a decrepit pickup truck who had a long ponytail. This was 1948. People didn't have long ponytails. But this one did. Part of the adventure—see strange places, meet new people!

He also had fairly progressive views on sexual freedom. Meaning, he felt he had the freedom to explore my sexual bits. His advances were not the kind I was expecting from a resident of America's Corn Belt, but he went straight for my buckle. Needless to say, unlike my voyages with Elizabeth, I suggested that we turn on the radio, play the license plate game—anything to rebuff his amorous advances.

After a while, I thanked him for the ride and got out—as soon as he slowed down to about twenty miles per hour.

(NOTE: If you do a tuck and roll at twenty miles per hour, you will most likely crush your cardboard
TWO MCGILL STUDENTS
sign.)

Perhaps the most memorable leg of my maiden walk across the nation started in Pennsylvania, when an elderly rabbi and his wife picked me up. It was midday on a Wednesday, and the elderly Talmudist told me that he needed to get to Chicago by sundown Friday. I could get a lift from them, but I would be the one driving their car.

Easy, you say? Those of you with your GPS systems and interstate highways.

This was 1948. Dwight D. Eisenhower's Federal Aid Highway Act, which provided a road map for our nation's highways, wasn't signed until 1956. There weren't many highways then, only byways. If I was going to make it to Chicago in forty-eight hours, I was going to need to step on it. Warp speed!

With a sleeping ancient rabbi in the backseat. Who would wake up every time I hit a bump in the road, which were plentiful in the days before the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956. The old man would pop out of the stupor, fix a rabbinical eye on me, and say, “Go slow, boy, go slow.” And then his head would fall to his wife's shoulder and I'd continue driving into the night.

Thanks to my precious elderly cargo, I was going much more slowly than I would have preferred when I hit the city limits of Chicago, and the panic set it.

At around 6
P.M.
, I was zipping around the streets of a strange city, chauffeuring an increasingly panicked rabbi in the backseat, who was looking at his watch and lamenting the setting sun, which was now vanishing behind the tall buildings.

“The sun is down!” he wailed. “You promised! We have taken you across country and you have broken your promise to a rabbi!”

The William Shatner seated at his computer now would have shrugged off such lamentations, but the William Shatner in this story was a seventeen-year-old Jewish kid from Montreal raised by Conservative parents. This wasn't a narcoleptic octogenarian scolding me; God was scolding me.

And when faced with the word of God, there is no better time for the emergence of The Negotiator.

Yes, this may have been the first time my personage was taken over by the spirit of The Negotiator, but as I clutched the steering wheel, one eye on the road, the other scanning the buildings for the address of this temple, I began to debate the old man on what exactly “sundown” meant.

I mean, were we talking God's sundown? Or man's sundown?

The rabbi was perplexed. “What is the difference?” he asked.

“Well, God's sundown,” I vamped, “is determined by God's hills, God's forests, God's horizon line on the sea. I see none of these, and therefore CANNOT determine the exact time of God's sundown.”

“Go on,” he said, as his wife pulled his watch from his pocket.

“The sun has set behind the buildings. That is true. But who made these buildings?”

“Man,” he answered. The teacher was engaging his student, despite our potential violation of the Sabbath.

“Will you allow man to decide when the sun sets?”

“No,” he answered, smiling.

“And besides, how much of the sun needs to vanish before it has technically set? Ten percent? Twenty? Seventy-five?”

His wife leaned forward and said, “Okay, sonny—we get it.” It was the only thing I remember her saying for the entire journey.

And I squealed to a halt in front of the temple, as the last worshipers were filing in. As the rabbi and his wife exited, he announced his hopes that I would one day enter rabbinical school, and we said our goodbyes.

I was then a seventeen-year-old, alone in the city of Chicago for the first time, with no ride. Needless to say, my thoughts turned away from the theological and I went to explore.

Where did I end up in the Windy City? Who knows? I've always avoided the traditional signposts.

Throw away the map!

When I first went to Broadway in 1956 with
Tamburlaine the Great
, starring Anthony Quayle and directed by my mentor, Tyrone Guthrie, I made a beeline for Forty-second and Broadway. It wasn't what I thought it would be. I did not find my dreams there. My dreams would come true a few blocks away in Schubert Alley, a few blocks north at the Winter Garden Theater, a few blocks over at the Broadhurst, down at the Booth on Forty-fifth.

When I first made the trip to Hollywood in 1958, I decided to take a car. (My first wife wouldn't have appreciated the Burma-Shave thumb method.) And we drove straight to Hollywood and Vine. It was another spot on the map that led to disappointment. It was seedy, grimy. Was this where my Hollywood dreams were to come true?

No, there were no studios at Hollywood and Vine, and I didn't see any dancing girls at Forty-second and Broadway. We are led to believe these are such glamorous crossroads, and they are anything but. If you have to use a map, move away from the pinpoints and allow yourself a little more compass room, provided you haven't thrown away your compass. The journey must be taken in individual moments. Enjoy the ride for the ride.

What am I trying to say? Perhaps I should grab a marker and some pieces of cardboard.

As you travel / Over hill and dale / Go get lost / But watch out for the ponytail!