Just curious: Was Woppy Goldberg at any convention as guest?
Whoopi Goldberg is very, very expensive. Most ST conventions couldn't afford her.
The best way to get signed Whoopi Trek merchandise in the 1990s was to attend a convention where Richard Arnold (ST Archivist) was doing a charity auction. I once won an 8x10 Picard and Guinan pic,
signed by both of them. She also co-signed some pics with Nichelle Nichols.
Whoopi Goldberg
has traveled to Sydney, Australia, for live stage performances (she gets knocked out, ie. unconscious, for the entire journey because she's so terrified of flying) at the end of TNG's second season. A group of us booked seats to see her stand-up show -
and she was brilliant! - and I got a brainstorm to organise a single red rose to be delivered to the stage door, on behalf of our ST club. My friend is a florist, so he brought the rose into the city with us. We approached the box office staff and they asked, "Did you want to take it around to her?"
We almost fell over with bottled-up excitement, but suddenly a minder appeared and he took our rose into custody.
A few days later, a hand-addressed A4 envelope appeared, addressed to me, in our club's post office box. It was an 8x10 b/w photo, signed
"To Ian, Thanks!, Whoopi Goldberg". The handwriting on the envelope matched the inscription on the pic; it wasn't signed by a secretary.
During the performance, she said to the audience at one point, "Oh, I
must tell you what I've been doing lately..." (presumably some anecdotes from the TNG set), but she got distracted and ended up on a different tangent.
The next time she came to Sydney, we repeated the experiment. We weren't able to attend the actual show, but we turned up at the box office on opening night with a single rose. There had been a strong rumour that a then-recent, new, exclusive contract with Disney would preclude Whoopi from appearing in any more TNG (in Season Four, IIRC), so I included a little note with the rose, asking her if that was the case.
Sure enough, a few days later, a hand-addressed A4 envelope appeared in our club's post office box again. This time, a different 8x10 b/w photo was signed
"To Ian, Thanks! See you next season, Whoopi Goldberg", which we took as a scoop confirmation for our newsletter!
A year or so later, our club was celebrating its 100th issue of our bimonthly newletter. We sent off letters to every regular TOS and TNG actor, in care of Susan Sackett in Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek Office. Several sent us back little congratulatory messages. The
one actor from TNG who sent back a signed 8x10 for the back cover of our issue was... Whoopi Goldberg.
