Shatner Rules

San Francisco Film Festival in 1966?
    A. Roman Polanski
    B. Sharon Tate
    C. William Shatner

C, William Shatner. I had something else going on. And judging from the fact that the curse might have extended itself to the people who did attend, I consider myself lucky.

CHAPTER 11
RULE: Balls Are Important, but Stones Are Money
    M y wife and I were in New York to attend a black-tie charity gala a few years ago. We were both dressed to kill, but a sudden, sharp pain in my side felt as if someone were killing me.
    So I wound up in the hospital, in my tuxedo, on a weekend evening. Have you ever been inside an emergency room? In New York City? On a weekend? I don’t remember the name of said hospital, but from the looks of things that night, it was somewhere in the outer borough of Despair.
    The emergency room was so crowded, in fact, that I was not admitted to a proper room with a proper bed, but stuck on a gurney in a dark hallway. The gurney had stirrups, and in my sufferings, I stuck my feet in them to take some of the weight off my nether regions. My eyes were closed tight with the blinding pain, but I remember distinctly at one point a female passing me and saying, “Look, Captain Kirk is having a baby!”
RULE: When Insulting William Shatner, Don’t Be Afraid to Dig a Little Deeper into the Résumé. Even in Great Pain, He Will Appreciate the Effort of a
TekWar
or
Kingdom of the Spiders
Reference.
    Yep, the doctor said I had a kidney stone, and there was nothing to do but wait for it to pass. And take morphine. One, two, three shots of exquisite relief. Feeling no pain, I was now ready to go and hit the gala, but the wife wisely suggested that we stay in, and await the glorious arrival of my tiny bundle of uric acid and/or calcium buildup.
    All things must pass, and my stone was no exception. It left fairly painlessly, we headed back home to Los Angeles, and for a few years my kidneys dutifully sorted waste products from my blood without incident.
    Then, in 2006 . . .
    Denny Crane was bent over Candice Bergen’s desk, in a swirling maelstrom of physical agony.
    (NOTE: This is not a passage from some kind of depraved
Boston Legal
fan fiction one would find on the Internet. Characters I’ve played, for some reason or other, always wind up in the most licentious fantasies of fan fiction authors. For years now, Kirk and Spock have heated up the pages of the fan fiction subgenre known as slash fiction, which deals primarily in gay relationships. Neither of us is homosexual, but if I were to dabble, I would surely avoid any encounter with a creature famed for its Vulcan death grip.)
    (ADDITIONAL NOTE: I have also been informed that there is more than one webpage out there dedicated to Denny Crane/Alan Shore slash fiction. It must have been all the cigar smoking we did. Either way, the fair-haired dazzlement that is James Spader is a bit more appealing than Spock. Sorry, Leonard.)
    (FINAL NOTE: And it has come to my attention that some enterprising web scribes have also published
T.J. Hooker
slash fiction. I guess I had a way with a nightstick.)
    (ADDENDUM TO FINAL NOTE: Please, slash fiction writers, don’t ever write any
Twilight Zone
“Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” stories. (I’d hate to picture myself making love to a gremlin.)
     
    Let us return to a subject slightly more savory: my agony. I was there on the set, collapsed on my costar’s desk, bellowing, writhing, and flailing my arms about. For some, such histrionics are the universal signal that “Shatner’s acting again,” but eventually I was able to convince the crew and the producers that I was in pain and needed medical attention. I was carted off from the set in an ambulance.
    (Keep in mind, in the four seasons of
Boston Legal,
more than twenty different actors were hired to play recurring characters on the show, and many were fired after a season as David E. Kelly tinkered with the program’s formula. Dramatic exits on that set were the norm, but since I didn’t have a cardboard box of my belongings on my belly as I lay on the stretcher, people assumed I would be coming back.)
    My body had manufactured more kidney stones. I was taken to a hospital in Burbank, where I was refused painkillers until the doctor examined me. I was desperate for them, and I pleaded for a doctor, any doctor—Dr. Scholl, Dr. Pepper, anyone—to hit me with that morphine syringe.
    No dice—I had to wait in an agony akin to the kind experienced by the crew of the