It is a William Shatner World

Born, I dunno, sometime in the 20^th century, somewhere way up north, like Canada or Alaska or Santa’s Workshop, the man known to the world as William Barack Shatner has, improbably, become an American icon. And while it is debatable if the previous sentence is a run-on, it cannot be denied that I shouldn’t have started this sentence with “and.”

William Shatner started his career as a cabinet maker in Saskatoon. In the early 1960’s, he found fame throughout the Northwest Territories for his amazingly smooth sanding ability. In fact, not a single report of anyone getting a splinter from one of his custom cabinets has ever surfaced. No one knew the secret of his amazing sanding skills until he shook the hand of a lumberjack, Charles LeFleur, who recoiled in disgust, yanked his hand out of Shatner’s, and exclaimed “that’s gross, man! You’ve got six fingers!” Yes, it was that sixth finger of his right hand which allowed him the extra-accurate, pinpoint control over any piece of sandpaper and thus made his cabinets so beloved. And smooth.

Shatner changed careers when a freak accident in an Ontario nightclub caused him to lose the extra digit. Finding that the decreased manual dexterity caused him to make inferior cabinets, he quit the business altogether rather than put out low quality products. He decided to become an actor. At this time he also allowed doctors to remove the extra thumb on his left hand as it might make film roles difficult to come by.

From there, his rise to fame has been well documented in every school child’s textbook. We all know his famous roles, as Dr. Robert Hansen in Kingdom of the Spiders, as Mark Preston in The Devil’s Rain, as Tony Gold in Li’l Pimp, and the role that made him famous,  the murderous Fielding Chase in the 1993 Columbo TV movie Butterfly in Shades of Grey.

Therefore it shouldn’t have come as a surprise to me when, in professional settings, he came up in three unrelated conversations with three unrelated people (yes, none of them were from the same family) in one week.

On Monday, I was having a conversation with an English teacher about all the books we own. This teacher is an older woman of 55 or so. (That’s older than me so yes, she’s an older woman. Don’t bug me about how 55 isn’t old.) As we spoke she said that she had just moved all of her Star Trek novels to the attic. Her husband wanted them thrown out “but,” she said, “he’s not as big a William Shatner fan as I am.” We’d talked about Edgar Allan Poe collections, about old copies of To Kill a Mockingbird she donated, we discussed Stephen King, but it was Shatner she idolized the most. I can’t blame her. Seen his wig lately? He has a better head of hair than she does.

On Thursday I was at CSI with a group of English teachers and we were discussing authors when a very quiet teacher, who usually didn’t add much to the conversations weighed in. “I really liked the first two TekWar novels, but I think Shatner’s new stuff isn’t as good.” He was serious.

On Friday I took a small class to the computer room. Taking advantage of the empty computers, a teacher sat down and surfed the net. I soon heard a bad midi version of the Star Trek theme wafting around the room like smog and saw a bad fan painting of William Shatner on her screen. She was on a William Shatner fan site. God, I hope she wasn’t running it.

Three times in educational settings William Shatner reared his head. Not literally but you get the idea. William Shatner has infiltrated the highest levels of our educational system. How long until you buy Shatner O’s Cereal at the grocery store? Use Shat Paper in your bathroom? Even Captain Kirk Condoms? Mark my words. It is a William Shatner world and we are just living in it.