Author: Wil

Imagine if you can that it’s the summer of 1988. Not too hard, what with the terrible economy, deficit spending and incompetent president.
Still with me?
So it’s 1988, and a little show called Star Trek: The Next Generation is in it’s second season. It’s struggling a little bit, experiencing the typical sophomore slump of any new series, and a writer’s strike is not helping very much.
In the summer of 1988, I turned 16 years old, and, just like the Corey’s, I got a License to Drive!
It’s well documented within the Star Trek community that Patrick Stewart and I bought almost the same car, a 1989 Honda Prelude…the, uh, only problem is, I bought a model that was just slightly cooler than his. (He got the si, and I got the si4WS, baby.) Patrick has really had fun over the years, teasing me about how, since then, he’s always had cooler cars than I do, to which I reply something about his driver.
What’s not well documented, however, is this thing that happened, in the summer of 1988, in the parking garage at Paramount, where we all parked our cars.
We were all working late one night, probably shooting blue screen on the bridge, so we were all wrapped at the same time (a rarity). I excitedly walked to the parking garage with Jonathan Frakes, who I was already looking up to.
So we’re walking back to our cars, and we’re talking about something, I can’t quite remember what, and I really feel like Jonathan is treating me like an equal. He’s not treating me like I’m a kid. It really makes me feel good, and I say to him, “You know, Jonathan, I can tell, just from talking to you, that when you were younger? You used to be cool.”
He laughs, and I think to myself that I’ve cemented my position with him as cool contemporary, rather than lame ass kid.
Then he says, “What do you mean, used to be?!”
I realized what I’d said, and how it didn’t match up with what was in my head, which was, “Gee, man. You are so cool now, as an adult, I bet that you were a really cool guy, who I’d like to hang out with, when you were my age.”
He knew what I meant, I could tell, and he really tortured me about that, for years. Every time I see him nowadays, he turns to a person nearby, and he says, “You know, Wheaton here told me that I used to be cool.” We laugh about it, and I make the appropriate apologies, and explanations, while Jonathan makes faces and gestures indicating that I am full of shit.
Now, when I was working on Trek, I always wanted to be:

• As good an actor as Patrick,
• As funny as Brent,
• And as cool as Jonathan.

I’m still working on those things, and Jonathan just recently showed me how cool he still is.
Jonathan directed this new movie, called “Clockstoppers“. It’s a movie geared towards kids, but it seems smart enough for their parents to sit through it without dreaming up ways of eviscerating the writer responsible for robbing them of 90 minutes of their weekend, which sets it well apart from most “family” films.
Ryan and Nolan have been talking about how they can’t wait to see this movie, and I mentioned to them last week that I was friends with the director, and I had heard that it was going to be really cool, and I was pretty sure that I could get us into a screening.
So I called up Jonathan’s office, and asked if I could get some tickets to a screening, so I could take the kids, and be a hero to them. Jonathan’s assistant said that it would be no problem, and I’d hear from someone at Nickelodeon about the screening.
The next day, the phone rings, and it’s totally Jonathan himself, calling me back, telling me how happy he is that I want to take my step-kids to see his movie, and that he’s really happy to get me into the screening on Saturday.
See, the thing is, Jonathan is what we in Hollywood call A Big Deal(tm), and usually people who become A Big Deal(tm) don’t usually talk to people who aren’t also A Big Deal(tm).
But Jonathan is not only A Big Deal(tm), he’s also A Really Great Guy(tm), and he didn’t need to call me back, personally. Actually, I really didn’t expect him to.
But he did, and that proves that he is now, and always has been, cool. Despite my fumbled proclamations as a 16 year old dorkus.

I woke up this morning to find my entire dining room table covered in cat pee.
Goddamn Felix. He won’t use the cat box, and I guess he didn’t get to go out early enough last night…so he decided to use the grocery bag on the table. Little bastard even got some on my cool G4 hat.
Why do I bring this up? To show, by example, why I haven’t written anything in 2 days.
I got nothin’, man. Nada. Zero. I got UPN ratings for ideas to write about, my friends.
I think it has to do with my cooler-than-me, funnier-than-me, better-looking-than-me wife’s previous entry. I haven’t had anything that could top that, except for the final installment of SpongeBob Vega$Pants, but I haven’t had time to write that up…and it’s killing me, believe me!
Oh, and I’ve been printing out all your comments, and giving them to her. You guys have all made her feel really, really happy, and I want to thank you, sincerely, for being so cool. Maybe we can talk her into coming and playing with us sometime again, in six months or so. 🙂
So I sit here this morning, constantly refreshing the traffic map, waiting for a break, so I can leave for work, sipping this Chai mate tea that I just got, lamenting my lack of inspiration.
Oh! The cat pee reminds me of something funny that happened when I was doing the “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Sunday Show” show at ACME last year. My friend Kate had written this really funny sketch, that was a take off on PBS’s “Great Performances”, where a bunch of us wore all black, and performed 80s pop-tunes as dramatic spoken word pieces. It was hellafunny, and it was one of my favorite sketches in the show. For my costume, I wore black jeans, socks and shoes, and a black shirt, that was sort of a “hipster” shirt, that I got at Hot Topic. It was polyester, short-sleeved, and had this pseudo-shiny stuff up the center. Boy, that description really makes it sound gay, doesn’t it? Trust me, it was fairly cool.
So we’re all changing backstage, getting ready for “Great Performances”. I can hear the audience dying, cracking up to “Let’s Swap”, we’re all talking a bunch of shit to each other, because that’s what actors do, as we’re changing.
I pull my shirt over my head, and sit down on the couch to tie my shoes…and I am overwhelmed with this terrible, terrible smell. So I ask Maz if he smells it. He does not. Dara doesn’t smell it, either, nor do Chris or Kevin. But Cynthia is sitting next to me, and she smells it, and we both realize that it’s my shirt, but we can’t quite place the horrible smell…it’s not just cat pee…it’s something more, probably because of the chemical interaction between polyester and cat pee. Dammit, I wish DATA were here. He’d know what it was.
What?
So I realize that I have a pretty serious problem: we are on in less than a minute, and I smell like something you’d find in a back alley in Hell’s Kitchen, right after Republican budget cuts have forced the closure of another homeless shelter.
So what do I do? I suck it up, and I go out there, like a man. A cat-pee-stinkin’ man, and I do my bit in the sketch, and I make the audience laugh, while making Dan Fester, who is standing next to me, nearly gag.
Why?
Because the show must go on, Virginia. The show must go on.