For Her Price Is Far Above Rubies

I’m in the throes of Dragon Con preparations, and yes, that means I’m a massive nerd. This will be my eleventh year. This would be my twelfth year, but COVID ruined everything in 2020, so I just hung out with friends, and we pretended we were at Dragon Con. No, it wasn’t the same. I’m still recovering.

In 2012, I got to meet Nichelle Nichols, who is a goddess and always has been in my eyes. I stood in line for three hours and was literally the last person at the table paying for the photo-op when it was announced that she was tired and would be taking a break. The guy who was wrangling all the people turned to me and asked how I was at running. I gave him one of those What the fuck? kind of laughs and told him I was okay, and then we took off running down what can only be described as one of those hallways you see in nightmare scenes from horror movies—where the person is running and running and running, trying to get away from whatever terrifying thing that was chasing them, only the hallway keeps stretching and lengthening and the doorway to safety keeps getting farther and farther away, and the poor guy or girl is running out of energy because the monster is getting closer and closer and they’re going to die if they don’t make it to the end of the hallway and open the doorway.

That was me and this guy (who had a fucking ponytail, by the way) running down this hallway to get to Nichelle Nichols, only the existential threat wasn’t some demon or some chainsaw-wielding murderer at our heels, it was the fear that we might not get to the room where Nichelle Nichols was kept and I might never get to meet her and have my picture taken with her, and honestly, I’d rather be dismembered with an ax than miss such an opportunity. So, we ran.

I, like everyone else, became aware of Nichelle Nichols via reruns of Star Trek: The Original Series. We call it that now, but back then it was just Star Trek because we hadn’t been given eight other series. I think I was five years old. I walked in and my older brother was watching an episode on the tiny black-and-white TV we had in our bedroom. It was staticky and the sound was horrible, but I was transfixed. By everything, but especially by Lt. Uhura. There was just something—a lot of somethings, honestly—about her.

We had four channels where we lived: the Big Three (ABC, CBS, and NBC) plus PBS, so if it wasn’t on one of those, I wouldn’t even know where to go looking for it. Cable was a thing, but only in major cities like Los Angeles and New York and Chicago. Or maybe they just had more public access channels, so it seemed like cable to us with our measly four channels and a crappy black-and-white television set. My brother and I watched all the space shows we could: Star Trek, Space: 1999, Doctor Who. And as a fledgling gay, there were only three women I was acutely aware of at that time: Liza Minnelli, who I had seen in Cabaret on The Movie of the Week one night; Lynda Carter, who was Wonder Woman (another show we watched religiously); and Nichelle Nichols. These women would pretty much shape the rest of my life, but at that time, from the age of five until I was about seven or eight and really figuring out that while I didn’t like girls “like that,” I certainly idolized women who had that certain je ne sais quoi.

Nichelle Nichols was by far the most elegant, graceful woman I had ever beheld. That’s not saying Lynda Carter wasn’t, she was. Still is. But different. Hers was a fresh-scrubbed, pink-cheeked, your-older-brother’s-serious-girlfriend type of elegance. And Liza Minnelli was spunky, sassy, and her beauty wasn’t general-issue. Nichelle Nichols was regal. She was a queen. To me, at five, she was THE queen. And my allegiance, along with her ranking, fluctuated over time. It happens. But she was always, always in my top five.

So, when I’d purchased my membership to Dragon Con 2012 and saw that she would be there, I knew what I had to do. I made a plan. I took reading material, snacks, drinks. I woke up early so I could get my badge and make it to where the line was already forming. I stood—literally—for three hours. Now I was running down this fakakte hallway and I wasn’t going to make it, and if I didn’t, I wasn’t sure what I would do for the rest of my life…

Then we were through the door and there she was. The goddess. My queen. She turned and smiled as we crashed through the door. “I was waiting for you,” she said, and her voice was a melody, just like it always was on Star Trek, and I thought I was going to cry. She said it like she had been waiting her whole life to meet me, the way I’d waited all mine to meet her. The photographer was a putz, though, so he was rushing us into place, barking orders, ruining the moment. I stood next to her, smiled, and he snapped the photo.

“Thank you for waiting,” I said, then felt like an idiot, so I added: “You’re a goddess. And you smell really nice.” (She did.) Then I really felt like an idiot, so I just went to grab my backpack where I’d thrown it on the floor just inside the room. The guy with the ponytail told me where I could pick up the photo later, and where Nichelle Nichols would be in the Walk of Fame so I could get her to sign it. I left, determined to do just that. I’d idolized this woman my entire life and I needed to make the most of this opportunity, in case it never presented itself to me again.

I was still relatively new to Dragon Con, so I spent the day getting just wandering around until it was time to line up again, this time without the nightmare hallway, the ponytail, or the asshole photographer. There’s no real way for me to describe Dragon Con that will make it make sense to someone who has never been. It’s chaos from the time it starts until the moment it ends. Sometimes it’s controlled chaos, but more often than not, it’s out of control and yet it somehow controls itself and everything is fine in the end. Finding Nichelle Nichols at her table in the vast Walk of Fame room was easy, but I still felt everyone that stepped in front of me was some trickster keeping me, the epic hero, from my ultimate reward.

But then I was in line, and it was considerably shorter than the one I’d waited in that morning—just four people in front of me. I got closer and closer. I chatted with the lady in front of me about our love of Star Trek and our love of Nichelle Nichols and how we hoped we would get to meet Leonard Nimoy should he ever return to Dragon Con. I held my money in my hand. Thirty-five dollars. I wanted to be ready. I didn’t want to waste Nichelle Nichols’s time. In my mind, I practiced what I would say to her that I hadn’t been able to say earlier because of the photographer.

Then a guy in a wheelchair pulled up alongside us and the lady turned to me and asked if I minded if she let him go in front of her. Of course, I didn’t mind. He insisted that we go, that we’d been waiting, but we stepped aside and let him go. I watched him struggle to retrieve his Dragon Con magazine from the bag on the back of his chair, so I stuffed my cash into my front pocket and helped him retrieve it and turned it to the page he indicated so that Nichelle Nichols could sign it for him. They chatted, too, and the lady and I stepped back into our places.

She went, got her photo signed, and stepped away. “Have a great rest of your con,” she told me as she walked away. “You, too,” I called after her.

Then, there I was, face to face with Nichelle Nichols. Everything I’d practiced saying to her vanished from my mind. She still smelled nice, but I didn’t want to lead with that. Thank God, she said, “That was so sweet of you to let that gentleman go before you,” and that broke the ice and she and I started talking about what an impact she’d had on me when I was so young and how she continued to shape the way I saw the world. She was gracious and self-effacing and then she asked me which photo I wanted her to sign. I asked her to choose. She laughed and I gathered that she didn’t get asked that often. The truth was, she could have signed the bottom of my shoe, and I’d have removed it then and there and had it encased in Lucite.

She chose a photo of herself as Lt. Uhura from the original series. “Is there anything you want me to say?” she asked, her Sharpie poised.

“Anything you say will be perfect.”

So, she signed the photo, told me to allow it to dry, thanked me again for being so nice about the gentleman in the wheelchair, and then it was all over. I thanked her profusely, tried not to burst into an ugly cry, and went about the rest of my Dragon Con. When I got home that night, I found the $35 crumpled up in the front pocket of my shorts and I was mortified. I’d stolen a photograph and autograph from Nichelle Nichols! What was I going to do?

Well, she wasn’t there the next day, so I couldn’t just take it back and give it to her and apologize profusely. So, I planned that the next time she was at Dragon Con, I would have the money ready and take it to her. But, as fate would have it, she began to have health issues and news stories told us she was embroiled in some issues with a manager and family members over her care as she aged, so she didn’t attend Dragon Con again until 2018. I rushed to her table only to find she wasn’t there. I checked back often to no avail. I couldn’t seem to get it right, and I didn’t want to just leave it with someone, so that year’s convention ended with me still owing Nichelle Nichols thirty-five dollars.

Friends told me that she’d probably forgotten it, that I shouldn’t worry about it, but I couldn’t not worry about it. One friend suggested she’d waived the fee because of how nice I’d been to the guy in the wheelchair. I doubted that, because the lady before me had paid. Someone else suggested that the Universe (or God…?) had rewarded me with a free autograph, but I could think of nothing I’d done that deserved such a reward, and so I agonized over it.

Then, the news stories got worse. There were rumors of elder abuse as the goddess, my queen, continued to deteriorate. It became clear to me I would never be able to give her the money I owed her. Someone shared a GoFundMe that someone had organized in her name, but I was suspicious. I am often suspicious of those things and would rather give money directly to the person in need. So, I did not send the $35 to the GoFundMe. Maybe I should have. Maybe that was my chance and I blew it.

Nichelle Nichols passed away on July 30 of this year. I was crushed. And like my post about Olivia Newton-John’s death, I don’t gnash my teeth and rend my garments over the passing of celebrities, even the ones I’ve idolized for years. It feels disingenuous to me, and it doesn’t honor their memories, in my opinion. Other people can do whatever they want. I spent the days following the death of Nichelle Nichols watching all my favorite Uhura episodes of the original Star Trek. I tried not to think of the $35, but it crept in, until one evening, out of the blue, I recalled the line from Mishlei (Proverbs) 31, verse 10: “A woman of valor who can find? For her price is far above rubies.”

And that gave me peace. Because in Judaism, there are two things valued more than rubies: the virtue of wisdom and a woman on noble character. And Nichelle Nichols embodied both those things to me and many other people, and maybe now, finally, as I head tonight to pre-game for Dragon Con (which technically begins at midnight on Thursday), I can let go of my $35 debt to Nichelle Nichols and honor her legacy, which—like wisdom and a virtuous, capable woman—is valued far above rubies.

(Me with Nichelle Nichols, 2012)