Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: two weeks ago my wife Anne and I drove two hours southeast from Indianapolis to attend our fourth Cincinnati Comic Expo. Their fun lineup of guests from pop culture works past and present included two actors from the world of Star Trek whom we’d met before but had reasons to seek out for encores. Longtime MCC readers are well aware Trek is a mutual interest of ours, though Anne outdoes me in numerous ways on this front (and many others). Among her various Trek-related collections and hobbyist accomplishments, over the course of 30+ years of convention-going she’s met every major Trek captain who served prior to 2017.

For those of you doing the math: yes, that illustrious roster includes Sir Patrick Stewart, who hasn’t attended a Midwest convention in over a decade. Anne had the pleasure of seeing him twice in person at shows prior to this website’s existence. On March 21, 1993, before she and I ever shared a relationship status, she watched him onstage at a con where interpersonal interaction wasn’t an option. Her second chance came at Wizard World Chicago on August 13, 2011, which the two of us attended together but were split up for a few hours because there were so, so many stars we each wanted to meet. I was off at some other booth when she obtained his autograph and got to exchange pleasantries with him, in a little anecdote I like to call “That Time Anne Nearly Made Patrick Stewart Cry”. It’s a long story that isn’t mine to tell here, but she’ll tell you if you ever run into us at a con and if you’re nice about it.

Fast-forward to today: the beloved British actor who’s played Jean-Luc Picard, Professor Charles Xavier, countless Shakespeare characters, literally every single speaking part in A Christmas Carol, Captain Ahab, the skinhead gang leader from Green Room, the poop emoji in The Emoji Movie, and more more more has just written his first book, a memoir titled Making It So. As soon as his U.S. speaking tour was announced, Anne was on top of it within minutes and found his closest stop to our house was Cincinnati. Back to the Queen City we’d go, so I could see him live for once. And third time’d surely be the charm for her.

At first she was taken aback by the price, which seemed way off. Stewart’s Cincinnati appearance was overseen by Joseph-Beth Booksellers, an independent merchant with two locations (the other one’s in Lexington, KY) that seems to specialize in live author appearances. (Their recent guests have included award-winning SF author John Scalzi, whom we had the pleasure of meeting two years ago at Dragon Con. Also coming soon: Ree Drummond, TV’s Pioneer Woman!) Whereas ringleaders at Stewart’s other stops were offering tiered admission levels with different perks and extravagances, Joseph-Beth was only charging the book’s cover price. That’s it, no surcharges above or beyond, no VIP privileged admissions, no meet-and-greet special for one-percenters. We’d get an entire new book and an hour of the esteemed thespian’s time for one low price. Granted, the book wasn’t autographed, but that’s less than half what I paid to see Neil Gaiman here in Indy last year, when I was not given a book, or for that matter a lousy T-shirt.

Anne pulled the trigger only after ensuring there was no catch to the bargain. We didn’t have to sell our souls. We’d get an actual book, not a coupon for fifty cents off a copy. We’d indeed be entertained by Stewart himself, not Barney Gumble in a bald cap. The most disappointing condition: no photos or videos would be permitted during the entire show. We thrive on photographing our experiences for posterity, but it was their game and their rules. Regardless, as you can imagine, the Cincy event sold out really quickly.

DATELINE: FRIDAY, OCTOBER 6, 2023 – Rather than cram all several hundred attendees into a single bookstore, Joseph-Beth hosted the affair at the beautiful facility of the School for Creative and Performing Arts, a magnet school that was once the subject of a 2009 MTV reality series called Taking the Stage. Doors were scheduled to open at 5:00; the show would start at 7. Being and knowing Trek fans, we walked up shortly after 4:30.

Waiting is all in the game. Fans had come from as far away as Texas and Germany to be here. We expected no less. The doors opened several minutes after 5, leading us through an efficient security checkpoint and toward the check-in staff who were stationed in a veritable castle built from copies of Making It So. A side table offered still more copies for sale in case anyone wanted extra, along with the 16-CD audiobook version read by Stewart himself (nearly 19 hours in all), a souvenir event poster, and Brent Spiner’s quasi-memoir Fan Fiction.

Past the stacks, we lined up (again) along both sides of the school hallway outside the theater. Some fans chatted with each other. Given the lousy phone reception in that hall, some began reading their books. If nothing else, that’d give them a chance to catch up with all the news sites that have already been doing the reflex celeb-autobio clickbait-harvest practice of finding short passages that could be inflated into entire slow-news-day articles. Recent examples include Variety turning 2½ paragraphs from page 380 into “Young Tom Hardy Was Standoffish” (though omitting the best part, where Stewart names his favorite Tom Hardy film) and Bleeding Cool turning a single paragraph on page 321 into “Young Wil Wheaton Seemed Cocky“. Memoir-mining is my least favorite entertainment-news sub-subgenre.

(I wonder how many hundreds of words I could churn out regarding the single sentence on page 382 that mentions costarring in Conspiracy Theory with Mel Gibson and Julia Roberts, but otherwise says absolutely nothing else about either of them. Which would draw me more attention: “Patrick Stewart Confesses to Working With Mel Gibson” or “Patrick Stewart Has Nothing Nice to Say About Julia Roberts”?)

At 5:45 we were ushered into the theater and asked to fill every seat, no skipping, so the entire sold-out crowd could fit inside. As music played overhead, we reached our fourth-row seats to the tune of “Morning Mood” from Grieg’s Peer Gynt. Other tunes heard throughout the next 80 minutes included Elvis Costello’s “Alison”, Randy Newman’s “Birmingham”, and a disproportionate number of Paul Simon tunes, with and without Art Garfunkel. I counted at least six, but my wavering attention may have missed some. I alternated between chatting with Anne, checking my phone (which had much better reception in the theater than it had in the hallway), and chatting with the lady on my right, who’d driven with her mom all the way from northwest Illinois.

At 6:38 the man-in-charge from Joseph-Beth came onstage and recapped the rules, especially the No Photos or Videos mandate. We were informed we could begin taking photos at the exact moment when Stewart begins walking offstage and waves to us. Both conditions had to be met. He also reconfirmed no autographs would be signed whatsoever. This last reminder came on the heels of someone trying to sneak a Funko Pop to Stewart backstage in hopes of an exception. The shenanigan was kindly yet firmly not welcomed.

At 7:06 out came host Lucy May, a reporter who hosts the radio show Cincinnati Edition for local NPR station WVXU. She in turn introduced Our Hero, the renowned starship captain who was promoted to admiral at some point between Star Trek: Nemesis and his Paramount+ Picard series. Stewart wore a plain T-shirt, casual gray jacket, blue slacks, striped socks, white-soled pink loafers, and large black-rimmed glasses. His stylish appearance confirmed he is in reality none of the characters he plays.

Stewart never planned to write a memoir and presumed he’d never have time to contemplate such a task. Then COVID cleared his schedule, much as it did for many an artist across every artform ever, and so he began, yadda yadda yadda, here he was now on his fourth book-tour stop in five days. He called the book “the only thing of substance I have ever written.” The 19-hour audiobook was recorded over 41 exhausting sessions, which he insisted on doing in conversational tones as if chatting with the listener in person, as opposed to the typical approach of reading the text straight and sounding as stiff as someone who’s reading straight text.

For the first 45 minutes, Lucy May conversed with him on a number of questions, with Stewart replying precisely as you’d imagine him doing — i.e., in those familiar stage-ready tones of his, for as long as he felt like. Not Shatner-level hour-long answers, mind you, but I doubt she got through her entire list. Among the topics covered and tidbits dropped, many of which are most likely covered in the book:

• Front and center was his lower-class upbringing with an abusive father, a decorated WWII veteran who became a weekend alcoholic later in the ’40s and suffered from what at the time was called “shell shock”.
• His childhood home contained exactly four books.
• A teacher handed out The Merchant of Venice to his entire class and changed his life at age 12.
• As a teen actor he came to prefer acting with adults to hanging around peers.
• He liked being Head Boy in school once, but had an unrequited crush on the Head Girl.
• At 15 he worked at a newspaper during the day and loved mingling with graduates from Oxford and Cambridge, but kept acting at night. Trying to hold two jobs eventually went poorly for him.
• He was once a furniture salesman for a year and was rather good at it.
• Eventually he received a scholarship so he could afford to go to school for acting without moonlighting. He feels sorry for actors who can barely afford to break into the business today. (His sentiment echoed a debate we heard last month at Dragon Con during the Schmigadoon! panel.)
• In a green room he once encountered Dame Peggy Ashcroft, who nearly talked him out of playing Leontes in The Winter’s Tale because she didn’t think he was ready for such a dark, disturbing part.
• Some of the best things in his life happened after telling himself, “Shut up, Patrick!”
• He learned a lot of family history from his 2012 episode of Who Do You Think You Are?
• He’d just visited the White House the other day. He was allowed inside the Cabinet Room, but could only peer through the window of the Oval Office. Virtually all the security detail on duty were Trek fans.
• This was his first visit to Cincinnati, which he found “lovely” and “so clean“, contrasting his experiences in New York City and parts of L.A.
• Naturally the topic of the SAG-AFTRA strike came up. As a former deputy of the British Actors’ Equity, he landed exactly on the side you’d expect. His protesting roots go back to childhood and are captured in chapter 1.

His best anecdote, told at May’s request, regarded a dog that once costarred with him in The Two Gentlemen of Verona. That moderately bawdy tale is on pages 242-247; it’s hilarious and touching.

He retold the old story about his initial concerns when offered the role of Captain Picard, but his agent figured Star Trek: The Next Generation wouldn’t last more than a season, and then he could return to the London stage. He went through four auditions in all, including a seven-minute visit to Gene Roddenberry’s house.

If you’re in search of prime Patrick Stewart clickbait material from this night, what drew the loudest audience response was his announcement that Patrick Stewart Would Love to Do One Final Picard Movie. He envisions it as a coda to his three-season series and a true swan song for the character. He knows exactly which director and writer(s) he’d love to work with, and of course wants the entire Next Generation cast involved. He remains proud of the series, “especially season 3.” The applause swelled higher at that last clause.

The final minutes of the evening were devoted to audience questions, which had to be submitted to Joseph-Beth online in advance. After their wise vetting, the lightning round produced the following:

• His favorite character from his one-man A Christmas Carol production is Mrs. Cratchit, but he committed to keeping the focus on Scrooge’s transformation.
• His advice to any of the school’s students in the audience (a few piped up, in the way back and on our right) was to value and develop “courage” in what they do. What helps him before every performance is, right before he begins, he self-encourages by telling himself, “I don’t give a damn.”
• If he could have dinner with anyone in history: Charles Dickens, naturally Shakespeare, “and Paul Simon.” (Some of us may have laughed too hard as he said this with a great big smile.)
• What can Shakespeare’s works teach us today? “EVERYTHING.” So many lives, backgrounds, insights, etc.
• His all-time favorite theater role was Macbeth. He once performed it for 365 days straight, then was utterly distraught when it closed.

…and when traveling, his favorite way to settle in is to have some Yorkshire Gold tea (again: he is not Picard), some “chocolate digestive biscuits”, and a book — not mail, email, newspapers or TV, but rather a book-book.

May asks gently, “…and NPR?” We laughed, but Stewart confirms he is indeed an NPR fan because it reminds him of BBC Radio from his childhood.

Thus the evening drew to a close. Stewart and the Joseph-Beth rep had a few photos taken of themselves with us the audience behind them. We were told those would be posted online at some point. We’ve seen nothing on either the bookstore’s or Stewart’s feeds yet as of this writing. Updates as they occur.

As Stewart thanked the audience during our long round of closing applause, a few folks may have taken pics at that moment, a slight violation of the established rules. At the long-awaited moment when he departed and waved to us, he was about ten feet from the curtains and far from photogenic.

Regardless, we have our memories of that evening for now, this recount of the affair from my scratchy notes, and two copies of our new book, which Anne will easily finish reading long before I do because she outdoes me on reading free time. Nevertheless, at least now I can say I’ve seen him in person, too. Also, despite some of the tragic life circumstances he discussed onstage, this time nobody made him cry.