Thank you for the (too) kind comments everyone. Sunday night I realized it was the 55th anniversary and I’d been so overwhelmed with work I almost missed it entirely. This was a hasty effort that was planned out in only a few hours--definitely not my best work but I hope everyone knows my heart was in the right place.
Magnificent.
Make love to me like you made that ship make love to me.
I think you just about exactly captured how I feel about the
Enterprise. 49 years ago this week, my mom suggested to eight-year-old me that I might like this show called
Star Trek that was going to be on in the afternoons on Channel 6. The episode that they showed first was "By Any Other Name", and I was instantly hooked.
And yes, I loved (and love) the iconic characters and the grown-up stories that were very different fare from the silliness of
Lost in Space or the weirdness of
UFO. But...
That Ship.
That wonderful, beautiful, mesmerizing starship. A
starship! The USS
Enterprise and her gallant crew were utterly captivating to that scrawny second-grader. Watching that show also made me face some uncomfortable truths at a very young age--that I lived in a deeply ignorant town and that I needed to get the hell out of there as soon as possible. And ten years later, I did! I now pursue a successful career in the sciences, and I'm not sure I would have started on that path without the inspiration that I drew from a certain science fiction show. A show flying on an aircraft carrier-sized starship into our living room five afternoons a week.
So thank you Gene Roddenberry for
Star Trek, and thank you Matt Jefferies for giving a little boy the metaphorical vehicle that captured his heart and carried him away to a better future than he ever could have imagined.
Looking forward to seeing the beautiful lady this evening. 
