Shatner Rules

now.
    He was gripping my arm. This guy made contact with me. He crossed the line. It was time for . . .
    The Thumb.
    I don’t know where I got this self-defense technique from—it’s nothing Kirk ever employed—but I jabbed my thumb into his neck. Hard. Boom, he went down like a sack of swagmans.
    “Stay down!” I ordered, keeping him—literally—under my thumb. He seemed surprised that I had detained him with only one digit, and sat there in his shock while the police officer came over and handcuffed him.
    Handcuffs? Seems a little
easy
, don’t you think, copper?
RULE: Make Fun of Australian Police Officers Only
after
You’ve Left Australia
    I did have some personal, intimate contact with locals during my trip that I
did
appreciate, however. It was during my stop in Auckland, New Zealand. The show was going to run just like the Australian shows—without the seven-minute-long standoff with a drunk and his buddy Farkus—but with the inclusion of a new song called “Welcome Home,” which I was to perform with Kiwi singer Dave Dobbyn and performer Whirimako Black.
    Dobbyn is a very popular performer in his native New Zealand, and in 2002 he became an officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for his talent and contributions to the music world there. Whirimako Black is Maori and a popular singer who often performs in the traditional language over traditional melodies. She too, is a member of the New Zealand Order of Merit. The organizers of this show were clearly pulling out the heavy guns for my performance. It was a little intimidating.
    Before the show, Dobbyn and Black came backstage to meet me and go over the song a bit. Ms. Black’s face was lined with the traditional
ta moko
Maori tattoo, an important and striking cultural symbol of the indigenous peoples. She had a request.
    “Mr. Shatner. My mother loved you when she was alive. May I hug you for her? My mother would have loved to have held you.”
    I was more than willing to oblige such a wonderful and meaningful request. Sure beats your average, run-of-the-mill “Can I have your autograph?”
    And it was a long hug, a silent hug, and one that she was doing so that the spirit of her departed mother could experience it. People were in my dressing room, watching us, but they all receded far, far away into the background. The only thing I could hear was my breath, her breath, and perhaps the breath of her lost mother.
    Soon, I began to cry, and so did she. By the end of our hug, I was sobbing.
    “Welcome home,” indeed.
    And if my drunken Australian friend is reading this—
that’s
how you handle a William Shatner meet and greet!

QUIZ
    Which one of these is an Australian slang word, and which is a character once played on a TV show by William Shatner?
    A. Bascom
    B. Kovalik
    C. Gronke
    D. Manoshma
    E. Bodosh
    F. Rawhide MacGregor

Actually, they are
all
the names of characters I’ve played in such TV shows or TV movies as
TekWar, The Horror at 37,000 Feet
,
Sole Survivor
, and
Route
66.
    The answer for option F is “both.” I once played the character Rawhide MacGregor in the TV movie
North Beach and Rawhide,
and in Australia, a “Rawhide MacGregor” is a condition suffered by outback sheepherders when they’ve been sitting in the saddle for too long.

CHAPTER 23
RULE: Dying Is Easy. Dying on Stage While Doing Comedy Is Easy, Too.
    F or many years in Hollywood, when an agent got a comedy script tossed onto his or her desk, the first phone call they made usually wasn’t to William Shatner.
    If they needed a crusading district attorney, a race-baiting zealot, noted Roman statesman Marc Antony, a honeymooner who becomes enslaved by a fortune-telling machine, a Swedish farmer squaring off with Lee Van Cleef, a brother named Karamazov, a young sailor named Billy Budd—you gave William Shatner a call. You didn’t call him if you needed a clown.
    Heck, I was even hired to play a Burmese sailor named Maung Tun on an episode of the old police show
Naked City.
But I just couldn’t book comedy. (Although someone in the casting department at
Naked City
clearly had a sense of humor, booking a Canadian as a Burmese sailor.)
    This is ironic because I spent most of my time in college and in repertory acting in comedies, like
The Seven Year Itch
. But once I landed on the New York stage, started doing television, and then films, I could not be taken seriously as a clown.
    This is too bad, because I love comedy, and love performing comedy. And