I have been and always shall be
Sometime in my forties, I vaguely realized that my gender role when I was a teenager had been, not a girl (funny-looking by the standards of the time, hated makeup and girl clothing), nor a tomboy (clumsy, hated sports), nor a nerd or geek (bad at math after geometry, bad at physics, see above, clumsy), but rather, an intellectual. I imagine that I must have been pretty annoying, but if you give people a few very ill-thought-out, badly designed but very well-made boxes to cram themselves into, it serves you right if they instead construct weird lumpy things out of stone knives and bearskins and bump into your shins with them afterwards.
Anyway, I was not a geek or a nerd, but both of my best friends in high school were. I never called them names or made fun of their eschewing of ordinary feelings; in fact, having read quite a lot of science fiction by then, I held them in considerable awe. We all watched the original "Star Trek". They both identified strongly with Spock. I felt that I could never live up to Spock's standards, and might possibly have a talent or two that he did not. I was certainly not able to identify with Kirk, whom I tried to love because Spock and McCoy did. Among the women Uhura (whom I adored) was intimidatingly feminine, Chapel very ill-served by the few scripts that featured her, everyone else mostly just a prop, except for the guest stars, who, well. The one thing I never, ever forgave Gene Roddenberry was his extremely twisted notions of what women were like and where they fitted into stories. But watching McCoy learn to love Spock, as I loved my friends, had a profound and lasting impact on me.
I did not follow Leonard Nimoy assiduously in his career outside of "Star Trek." I do recall reading that he had performed the part of the psychiatrist in a production of "Equus." I had seen the play in London when I was in college, and eerily, when I read this tidbit of news, I could hear Nimoy's voice saying some of the lines that had stayed with me from the play. Much, much later, just last year, Raphael and I watched all of "Fringe." Nimoy's character in that show is a marvel, appealing and appalling at once, a thinker and inventor who never grew up, both in the good sense of having an unlimited zest for life and for any situation in which he found himself, and in the bad sense of having no clear idea that other people (to lift a term from The Just City, where I most recently encountered it) have equal significance.
I loved knowing that he was there, that Spock, in some sense, was there. And now he is gone.
Pamela
Anyway, I was not a geek or a nerd, but both of my best friends in high school were. I never called them names or made fun of their eschewing of ordinary feelings; in fact, having read quite a lot of science fiction by then, I held them in considerable awe. We all watched the original "Star Trek". They both identified strongly with Spock. I felt that I could never live up to Spock's standards, and might possibly have a talent or two that he did not. I was certainly not able to identify with Kirk, whom I tried to love because Spock and McCoy did. Among the women Uhura (whom I adored) was intimidatingly feminine, Chapel very ill-served by the few scripts that featured her, everyone else mostly just a prop, except for the guest stars, who, well. The one thing I never, ever forgave Gene Roddenberry was his extremely twisted notions of what women were like and where they fitted into stories. But watching McCoy learn to love Spock, as I loved my friends, had a profound and lasting impact on me.
I did not follow Leonard Nimoy assiduously in his career outside of "Star Trek." I do recall reading that he had performed the part of the psychiatrist in a production of "Equus." I had seen the play in London when I was in college, and eerily, when I read this tidbit of news, I could hear Nimoy's voice saying some of the lines that had stayed with me from the play. Much, much later, just last year, Raphael and I watched all of "Fringe." Nimoy's character in that show is a marvel, appealing and appalling at once, a thinker and inventor who never grew up, both in the good sense of having an unlimited zest for life and for any situation in which he found himself, and in the bad sense of having no clear idea that other people (to lift a term from The Just City, where I most recently encountered it) have equal significance.
I loved knowing that he was there, that Spock, in some sense, was there. And now he is gone.
Pamela