Shatner Rules

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