Shatner Rules

horses and dogs and loved ones, and that paradise and enlightenment are always within my reach. It’s joy. And you should work on filling all your years with as much joy as possible. Even if you make it all the way to eighty and beyond.
    Although honestly, I wish that wave of perception had come to me on the first night in Tibet. I would have hotfooted it to the nearest resort as soon as possible. Enlightenment can arrive in a hot tub, too.

CHAPTER 22
RULE: If You Go to the Land Down Under, Thumb It!
    I should say that I’m not talking about hitchhiking. Australia is in the middle of nowhere, and it also contains thousands of square miles of nowhere in the middle of it. You do not want to get stuck without a lift in the bush—with or without a cardboard TWO MCGILL STUDENTS sign. A random dingo will gladly eat your baby, you, and whatever spare family members might be hanging around. You’ll be down under, all right—six feet under!
RULE: Get the Australia Jokes out of the Way Early—Everyone’s Heard ’Em Already
    Australia is a rough-and-tumble nation full of wonderful, rough-and-tumble people. Open, loving, friendly, beautiful people. An Australian production company pitched me the idea of a touring night of anecdotes and stories, I agreed, and soon visited the great country in the spring of 2011 with my one-man show,
Kirk, Crane and Beyond: William Shatner Live
. (
$#*! My Dad Says
was also very popular there, but I thought the title
Kirk, Crane, and Other $#*!
might be a little too rough-and-tumble for even Australia.) Elizabeth and I happily made the journey to the faraway land, albeit one that felt slightly longer than my hitchhike across America as a teenager.
    Kirk, Crane and Beyond: William Shatner Live
was a two-hour-long program that featured me, a moderator (usually a local television or radio personality), tons of film clips, audience questions, and questions from the Twitterverse. We did shows in Sydney, Brisbane, and Melbourne, and then swung up to Auckland, New Zealand, to do a show there. In between, I also made it to a couple of Star Trek conventions. They are smaller than the American conventions, but people still come in costume. You can even hear Klingons sizing up one another’s weapons à la Crocodile Dundee:
    “Here—that’s not a bat’leth.
That’s
a bat’leth!”
    Of course, when I perform live nowadays, like I did with
Kirk, Crane and Beyond
, it’s not just jokes and anecdotes and questions answered. It’s also songs!
    And what do you sing when you tour Australia? Well, I know AC/DC heralds from down under, and perhaps on the next trip I will treat the crowd to my cover of “Hell’s Bells,” but during this tour, I performed two Australian classics: “Down Under,” by Men at Work, and the unofficial national anthem, “Waltzing Matilda.”
    “Waltzing Matilda,” in particular, was a real treat. It’s the tale of a man in the bush, making a cup of tea, who poaches a sheep for his supper. When the authorities come to arrest him, he drowns himself in a water hole, and then haunts it for all eternity. (Actually, given its darker themes, perhaps AC/DC should do a cover of that song themselves.)
    We decided to do “Waltzing Matilda” on the last show of the tour. There was no rehearsal, just me, a music stand, and our musical director on piano. He played, I interpreted, and the crowd ate it up. I really played up the drama of the song, and got to wrap my melodious diction around the following Australian words:
     
    Swagman
    Billabong
    Jumbuck
    Coolibah
    I have to say that “billabong” and “coolibah” were my favorites, and I really . . . took . . . my . . . time . . . with . . . them.
    (NOTE TO THE AUSTRALIANS IN THE AUDIENCE: I hope I pronounced all of the above properly, and I hope none of these terms are actually Australian curse words. If so, I’m sorry for all the obscenity.)
    As you might be able to tell from my last-minute interpretation of one of Australia’s most beloved songs about billabongs, there was a great deal of working “without a net” on
Kirk, Crane and Beyond: William Shatner Live
. Improvising and riffing in front of an audience is one of my favorite things to do, and after a season of performing comedy live in front of a studio audience on
$#*! My Dad Says,
it is something I’d grown to relish.
    But when working without a net, you sometimes forget there’s a possibility that you might land on the hard concrete.