There are a lot of Star Trek shows now. For those of you who were “cool” in high school, Star Trek is the “beam me up” one, not the lightsabers one. Anyhow, the original, the one with Spock and Captain Kirk, still my favorite. The best music, the simplest stories, all about the future, written way in the past but entirely relevant, even now, in the actual future.
Ok, well, I’m a nerd (which was a good candy, I wonder if they still make that?). I was absolutely NOT cool in high school… I was “different”. And I just figured out why, and while it doesn’t really have a lot to do with Star Trek, that’s where the story starts.
This week, in my quest to make sure my daughter doesn’t miss anything that she might be able to use later, I sat her down in front of an original Star Trek episode that’s kind of an interstellar Lord of the Flies thing. Ok, she was only watching it with me because the noodles were cooking for lunch, and of course she’s seen Star Trek before.
So when the away team beamed down to the strange planet looking for whoever sent the distress signal, she said, “I’m the yellow one.”
“Well you definitely don’t want to be a red one!” I said.
See, she was referring to the Enterprise crew and their uniform colors (which I used to think were arranged by rank, but now I think it might be department). Anyway, all the hands-on folks wear red, and famously on away missions it is they who every creature, plant, and energy blob find most immediately delicious. “So”, I asked her, “you’d be Captain Kirk?”
“No no no…” she said, “But I’m a yellow one.” And then she stopped talking.
Because she didn’t want to be Captain Kirk, she wanted to be Captain Her. And that’s kind of what I did when I was a kid.
In 5th grade I remember my best friend coming over to my house to play. This was kind of a deal, because he lived in a huge house in a really nice neighborhood, but his dad (who was super progressive) drove him to the ghetto (or, well, ghetto-lite, really) for a play date. We had sandwiches and watched cartoons and ran around the house making up games, but the one I remember best was “Starsky and Hutch”, our take on the popular ‘70’s police show which answered the unnecessary question, “What if Hall and Oates were cops?”
“Ok,” my friend said, “You’re Starsky.”
Everybody wanted to be Hutch. I mean, Starsky owned the car, which was this amazing Gran Torino that he never walked around, but kind of jump-slid across the hood of to get to the other side. But still.
“Why do I have to be Starsky?”
“Because you’ve got dark hair!” my friend explained. And this was true: his golden locks matched the cornfield colored mop on Hutch’s head, while my upsettingly non-spherical Afro approximated most closely the curls of his counterpart.
Now before anybody thinks this was profiling in any way, you have to understand that this show did have an African American star, but his name was “Huggy Bear”, and he wasn’t a bear. So the Starsky thing was a kindness.
But that was the last game when I pretended to be other people; instead I started being me in their worlds. I was Spider-Man’s friend, Chewbacca’s veterinarian (who was also a Jedi), or the kid whose amazing new powers caught the attention of the Bionic Woman (who asked me to help her trap Bigfoot again).
But even in fantasy worlds, there was only so far I could go. The world was restrictive in a way that felt like science, so even in make believe I didn’t make the jump my daughter did. When I thought about being in Star Trek, I imagined the years of study and training it would take to get through the Academy, then how long it would take me in officer school to get my own commission. I was 12, and my fantasy life already had student loans in it.
My daughter chose yellow not because she wanted to pretend to be a leader but because she’s been working at being one, every day, in real life, since she was little. Little-er. She chose yellow because in a world of Avengers, detectives, or Pegacorns she always brings herself, because that’s cool enough. She has no illusions about ever fitting in, so she’s not trying to be the same, and that’s what makes her different. Which I think, she might have gotten, from her parents. Of which, y’know, I’m one of.
No matter how complicated the real world gets, it is in no way limiting her imagination. That’s a good thing, right? Honestly, I’m trying to be more like her.
I showed her Starsky and Hutch once and told her that story and asked which one she would like to be. “I don’t want to be either of them,” she told me. Then, after watching a little bit more,
“…but I definitely want that car.”
©2022 Jd Michaels / CabsEverywhere Productions
Choosing Yellow.