Friday, Sept 24th, 1976

Quick day in school. Absence excused. Designed debates in first and played chess (not me) in third.

Caught the Eastern bus over on Greenup into town to pick up dinner and three books. Missed one book and a sold out calendar.

Got a refund in the mail on that first bootleg I ordered along with a catalog of hundreds more!

Felt really awkward about the STAR TREK event tonight as Terry invited a couple of people along that I had never even heard about. Again! Didn't even ask. I enjoyed it all immensely though, in spite of the guests. In fact, they may have even added to the enjoyment!

They picked us up down at the telephone company at 7. The girl was quite beautiful but she smoked way too much. The man was a professor type. Terry never did tell me where he met him or what he does.

He parked down on the public landing by the Delta Queen and we had to walk up a huge spiral staircase to get to the Coliseum only to arrive just exactly as they opened the doors. Although the colder temps kept me from wearing my Trek shirt (I wore my leisure suit) but I saw that many others had my same idea.

We got fairly good seats down on the Coliseum floor but as usual the show started late. Why do shows always start late?

Some time after 8, the Klingons and the Feds who had been on stage at the mike were replaced by...RODDENBERRY! Yay! I enjoyed those best but missed the chance to see them again after the show. They included lots of scenes of break-ups and running into doors. Starting with the regular theme interspliced with cats and ending with the real NBC emblem, in between was lots of cussing (Yvonne Craig twice!), a little nudity, jokes, flubs, etc, Just hilarious!! I missed the jokes because the entire place was laughing so hard!

Roddenberry talked about TREK, his own career before and since, TV censors, religion. Vulcan sex lives, bionics, the future, the upcoming movie, the Space Shuttle and the fact that all three networks have already said they want STAR TREK back if the movie is a success.

The unseen pilot was shown. It was a black and white print print (illegible) by the fans and was run completely uncut! The most interesting thing about it to me was the title and the credits. It was entertaining but I'm glad they switched what they did for the actual series!

We never saw anyone selling programs but I bought a still, a poster and a couple of buttons. In order to avoid some traffic, we left about 10:45, not staying for the bloopers again. In all the big crowd as we were leaving, I accidentally brushed up against our lovely companion's behind. She's probably about 22. That was actually a highlight of the trip even with all the other neat stuff on stage and onscreen!

They got me home in time to watch the last of MAGNUM FORCE on TV. Doubt if I'm going to get to sleep tonight. A very big day topped off by my first piece of ass! What a way to end this section, though! Whew!

NOTES: Technically the show was called THE WORLD OF STAR TREK and was immortalized in part on an LP not long after this. Gene Roddenberry had become a guru to all of us who discovered STAR TREK more through the reruns than we had in the original run so it really was like seeing a rock star for all of us geeks that night.

To this day, I'm not sure who Terry's friends were or where he knew them from. The girl was much younger than the man and was either his daughter or his sister. It says volumes I guess when I wrote that copping an accidental feel was a highlight of this uber-nerd night! Sigh. I was so naive. Never saw her again. Terry would go on to invite "the Professor" along to various other events he and I had planned on attending together including, ultimately, the first time I attended a strip club five years later! (I presumed at the time it was the first time for Terry also but he says now it was not.)

Synchronicity being what it is, also in the crowd that night at Cincinnati's Riverfront Coliseum was a young woman named Rene King who was 15 years old and attending Conner High School in the next county. I wouldn't meet her until eleven years later but her love of STAR TREK was just one of many great qualities that led to our marriage in 1991. (Between the TREK event and our eventual meeting there would be one more bizarre, TWILIGHT ZONE-like incident that pointed toward our meeting. Read about it here.)