I’m sitting in the El-al 747-400 airplane in flight 315 to London, and writing using Lee’s lew laptop which arrived just on time !!!
My parents, God bless them, went and picked up the laptop for us while we were in the Leonard Nimoy lecture.
All this past month had timing like clockworks. With the convention, hitchhiker screening, star wars, Nimoy, the laptop, and our flight.
Perfect timing also applied to our arrival to the airport and our shopping spree there. We bought shoes, a MP3 cd-radio and speakers for my car, alcohol, and chocolates, and made it to the gate at the exact last minute of boarding.
I’m now hungry. And by now I mean 11:10. Waking up at 6:30 am, and not eating since, Soon they’ll serve food on the plane… I can imagine Lee must be FAMISHED ! she’s used to eating breakfast, and like myself haven’t had anything to eat. Ohhh. There’s already the smell of microwave heated airline food ! mmm… Aireline food… Yeah right, it’s not that exciting… but I imagine all the good british food, I’m going to enjoy real soon and it makes me more hungry ! All that fat, meaty, greacy, yummy food which I’m going to regret eating afterwards but enjoy every moment of while I’m eating it…
Oh here it is…
(15 minutes later)
I don’t get why stand up comedians complain so much about airline food. Our breatfast was really good ! fresh bread, Blinches, cream cheese, strawberry jam.. Yummy !
Our encounter with Leonard Nimoy yesterday could have not been any better !
For the technical part, there were some issues but at the end they played out to our advantage. His visit was initiated and organized by the “Tel-Aviv – Los Angeles Partnership” which I’ve never heard of before in my life prior to this event. This ment that they were in charge of the whole deal. This has a few disadvantages, like they’re dictating of term. I’m not sure if it was Nimoy himself who ask for this or the partnership, but they told us that Nimoy wanted this event to be a small and intimate event, with no trekkies, and no costumes. So we abide by their rules. It didn’t stop us from asking a lot of star trek related questions, despite the fact that it seemed that the host of the event didn’t want Nimoy to even talk about Star trek, but only his directing in the two non trek films he made: “The man and a baby” and “Good mother” which they showed s few clips of both.
The actual event’s name was: Leonard Nimoy – Directing the stars, and it was aimed at film students who gets the chance of meeting famous jewish directors. I wouldn’t describe Nimoy as a director off the hand, and probably wouldn’t have invited him to Israel as such. But they manager to bring him as a “master director” which probably was the reason which he arrived and didn’t charge the outrages sum he usually wants for a convention…
Gila Almagor introduced him. I really don’t like Gila Almagor. I Always disliked her. Ever since I saw her one man show “Avia’s summer” and was utterly disgusted by it, and ever since I was once, when I was 10 or something auditioned for a small tiny role in a movie saw was in the production of (I think it was also Avia’s summer), and got a bit ridiculed and rejected. I always though she was pompous and arrogant, and after hearing her giving the introduction to Nimoy I thinks she’s even worse. At last straw of her long and boring talk was after she listed most of Nimoy’s work other then Star Trek, and then said that in the sixties he also was in “Star Wars” there was a large out roar in the crowd, and when someone tried explaining her the utter mistake she made, she looked like she didn’t unerstand why it’s so wrong… Nimoy politely laughed.
Nimoy when on stage and commented that Gila’s Hebrew was very good. Nimoy himself was very joyful, kept laughing and joking, and seemed like he had fun coming here.
Most of the event was about Nimoy’s other work, and very little about Star Trek, but when the event did get to star trek is was very enlightening. I got to ask Nimoy a couple of questions, About Star Trek of course, I asked about the fact that he was both Directing and acting at the same time, and he said it was hard. I kinda already knew the answer to that, but I wanted to ask something and I hoped he’s have some funny anecdote to add..
In my opinion the best part of the day was that we managed to get in the press conference with him prior to the main event. I sat literally 1 meter away from him, and kicked in the first question : What is you stand about the cancellation of Enterprise. He said that so far Star trek survived for 40 years even though the original series was cancled. I asked him if he thinks it’ll survive another for, He jokes that he doesn’t have permission to tell me that…
All in all I think we were very, even extremely lucky to have had Nimoy come visit, and for those who managed to get into the event and press conference, the fact that it was a small intimate audience made it much more nice and effective for those of us who wanted to ask questions and interact with Nimoy. And in no other convention in the world I could have gotten a better experience then it.
I also used my Israelly Hutzpa and got me and Lee an autograph before the press conference started…
After the event ended, Nimoy left quickly through the backdoor and that was it.