Shatner puts his stamp on Calgary Expo while waxing philosophical
Captain who?
In what could very well be a first in fan expo history, William Shatner managed to make it through almost his entire talk at the Stampede Coral Friday without mentioning Star Trek’s swashbuckling Captain James T. Kirk. Yes, at Calgary Expo. In a room presumably chock-full of devoted Trekkies.
Oddly, Boston Legal, the quirky lawyer drama-comedy series in which he played Denny Crane for four years, got considerably more discussion, despite it having considerably less geek cachet. Odder still, much of this was in response to questions from the audience.
It wasn’t until the very end of an audience Q&A that Shatner directly mentioned his most famous role, after a woman confessed to falling in love with Kirk when she was 11. She wanted to know how much of Shatner is in Kirk? How much Shatner was in Denny Crane?
“How much of me is in Captain Kirk and Denny Crane?” he said, flashing that famous James T. Kirk-like smile. “All of me is in Captain Kirk and, several years later — I don’t even want to say how many — all of me is in Denny Crane. But it’s an aspect of me which I hoped you would, at 11 years old, fall in love with, and some years later, fall in love with the old guy. But I didn’t know that until just this moment.”
Still, hopefully the Trekkies got their Kirk fix right up front. Only a few minutes into Shatner’s appearance, a representative from Canada Post marched in to present the actor with a framed memento of a new stamp bearing his picture as Captain Kirk. It was the climax of a month-long campaign from Canada Post to introduce a series of Star Trek-related stamps to celebrate the original series’ 50th anniversary.
Shatner gamely played along and seemed delighted with the Captain Kirk original series stamp, but decided to talk about more down-to-earth topics during his 45-minute talk.
He told stories about the perils of tranquillized, and non-tranquillized, horses on parade routes, a nod to his 2014 stint as parade marshal for the Calgary Stampede. He talked about riding a motorcycle that he designed from Chicago to Los Angeles recently, done to raise money for the American Legion and to provide fodder for an upcoming documentary Shatner is directing.
He talked about his concerns over the environment: the plight of the cod fisheries and his unwelcome introduction to the politics of commercial salmon farms when shooting an episode of Boston Legal in northern British Columbia. He talked about drinking champagne from the Stanley Cup, which also sprang from an episode of Boston Legal, and confirmed that the booze he drank at the end of each Boston Legal episode with James Spader was actually good Canadian black tea.
The most heartwarming moment came when he plugged his new book, Leonard: My 50-year Friendship with a Remarkable Man, his tribute to Trek co-star Leonard Nimoy who died in early 2015. That included outlining the reasons he chose to attend a Red Cross charity function rather than his friend’s funeral, a decision that earned him some flak at the time.
“All our names, all the things we do, no matter how popular and monumental your reputation is at some point in time, it all fades so quickly,” he said. “Whether it’s a day or a month or a year, in terms of time, it’s over. Nobody is remembered. Nobody. But what is remembered is the good deeds that we do.
“A good deed reverberates through lifetimes.”
It wasn’t the only time the 85-year-old got philosophical. The aforementioned trek on motorcycle — an experience he described as spending 12-hours-a-day for eight days feeling like “my life was in jeopardy.”
The result was a heightened attention to his surroundings.
“It was a beautiful, beautiful experience that made me so aware of how precious every moment is,” he said. “Living in the moment, you can do nothing about the past and I don’t know what car is coming up to hit me in the future. But right now, right at that moment, the sensation of living was overwhelming and reminded me again of how important it is to stay in the moment.”