bironic | Leonard Nimoy; vignettes from my life; tonight

My first convention was William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy at the Nassau Coliseum on Long Island when I was about 10 years old. My mom won a pair of tickets by answering a radio station trivia question about which two characters Diana Muldaur had played on the original series. My mom and I were super-excited—she'd been a Trekkie since she was a girl, and she'd raised me on it—and my dad and sister less so, but we still bought two more tickets and the whole family went. It was the 25th anniversary of TOS.

I remember the vendors set up along the outer ring of the convention center. I got a TNG insignia pin from one of them. (We are talking about a time when "I got" still meant "my parents bought for me," because $13 was a hefty sum for a kid on a 25-cents-a-week allowance.) It's funny to think back on it now and imagine just how many fangirls (and -boys) and slashers and 'zine publishers and VCR vidders must have been there, and what panels or meetings must have been going on in other rooms. I wasn't connected to any of that. We just walked around and took our seats.

The first two vids I ever saw were screened at the start of that show. I don't know if they were fan-produced or part of the franchise; can't remember details or quality to guess. Doubtless someone on Fanlore or elsewhere could say. But I do remember that one was Kirk-centric and set to Rod Stewart's "Forever Young," while the other was Spock-centric and set to U2's "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For."

Then there was the comedy routine—er, I mean the talks from the two of them—and the Q&A. I'd forgotten most of the content until browsing YouTube just now, when a clip showed up about WS having stolen LN's bicycle. Probably more would swim back up to consciousness if I thought about it for a while. But at the moment, there's just that and one question from a kid that showed up later in a pull quote in a Newsday story about the event. Something about whether Nimoy would go to space if he could. The quote definitely ended: "I've been," Nimoy responded. I kept the clipping in my room for months.

...
Twenty years later
...

Picture this: Leonard Nimoy stands on the bima with his tallit draped over his head and shoulders, bowing and chanting in Hebrew, voice rising every few lines only to fall again (to laughs from the audience), his hands held out in front of him with fingers split in the shape of shin -- also the shape of the Vulcan greeting.

It was, as he told it, a recreation of the "chilling" sight his father had told him not to watch when he was eight years old in their family's synagogue, as the men brought down the blinding light of the feminine aspect of God to the congregation. He relayed the story, familiar to Trekkies, about how he adopted the sign for the Vulcan people when they shot "Amok Time."

So. Leonard Nimoy came to speak at a temple in Maryland tonight for about an hour. I think we all would have listened to him for another hour. Entertaining and moving and personal. Locals, you are all very sorry you didn't want to come.

He started out with a couple of anecdotes about how his life changed after Star Trek started, which surely was designed to satisfy the Trekkies in the audience first thing. And ST came up a number of times afterward, of course. But he also talked about growing up in a tenement immigrant neighborhood in West Boston by MGH; driving then-Senator JFK from one Beverly Hills hotel to another when he (Nimoy) was moonlighting as a taxi driver; his work on a movie about a Holocaust survivor taking on denialists; a trip he took to his parents' village in the Ukraine after he'd been in Moscow to screen The Voyage Home, on the occasion of Russia declaring a moratorium on whaling, and met relatives who'd kept photographs of their far-away cousins' grandchildren in a pristine envelope in a drawer for twenty years. He recited a Yiddish poem and a Hebrew prayer. He wore a kippah.

On pon farr: "It's an event. And one well worth waiting for."

It was wonderful to listen as a Trekkie and just as wonderful to listen as someone who has also been raised a Jew on the East Coast of the U.S., even if half a century later. It felt like a communal experience I'm having trouble articulating -- one layer of knowing that there were some Jewish influences in Spock and in Star Trek as a whole -- another hearing about similar experiences or ways of thinking or cultural awareness or subjects of interest from the man who played Spock, who was standing there 100 feet away. I mean, it wasn't a transcendent moment or anything, it was just -- personal. Unexpectedly. Sharing a culture with someone who seemed so untouchable in his celebrity.

He just turned 80. You could hear him breathing between sentences.

On Star Trek, he asked (rhetorically) why has it stuck? and were there Jewish influences he or others had worked in to the show? His thoughts on the former: That there was hope for the future; that it was multicultural; that there was a chemistry, an idea, that took hold at the right time. That his character embodied the struggle between emotion and reason that rules many people's lives. On the latter: that the show emphasized compassion, the dignity of the individual, the importance of education, and tikkun olam -- what he called the mission of the Enterprise, to bring peace and make planets better places. And other things I'm forgetting already. But it was neat.

Trivia: "Nimoy" means "mute" in Russian, he said.

He said as soon as "Amok Time" aired, children, waiters in restaurants, truck drivers would throw up a hand at him and go, "Eh, Spock!"

He called his younger self "enterprising" when he'd moved from Boston to L.A., and then he stopped, laughed, and said he hadn't meant to do that. Said there are some words in the English language he has had some trouble with for the last 40 years.

Said his first movie was Zombies of the Stratosphere and he's not sure why that didn't catapult him immediately into stardom.

Toward the end, he choked up when he talked about the formation of the state of Israel and what it meant for a people who'd been turned away from Europe, from Cuba, from the U.S. when the war was starting. He cited Frost's line about how there was (is) finally a place for Jews to call home, where they had to (have to) take you in.

(The terrible thought occurs to you that he's an actor. That he might be acting when he stops, throat thick, and puts a hand on his chest as if it's a moment of silence. But that maybe he's not that good an actor. You wonder why he would want to or need to force that kind of emotion.)

Running out of highlights. Was just a great evening.

...
Meanwhile, in New York
...

Seeing RSL in Born Yesterday Saturday night. New Yorkers, speak now or forever hold your peace.

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synn.livejournal.com

in a bit of media irony, the family guy that references tng started as I was reading this. Naturally, this was 100 times better. I wish I could have been there to see him with you - it sounds like a great experience.

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Leonard Nimoy; vignettes from my life; tonight

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