How Star Trek changed my life - The early years.

Greetings!

I have been a Trek fan from a very early age, but in the UK 'Sci-Fi' has a fairly geeky image, so it is kept hidden behind closed doors (Victorian attitude?) for fear of ridicule. I had grown up with Dr Who, Star Trek - The Original Series, Blakes 7, Space 1999, Thunderbirds, Joe 90, Captain Scarlet, Stingray and early anime series Marine Boy. Later on came Star Trek - The Next Generation and Red Dwarf.

I had collected a few Trek items, mostly Playmates Phasers and Tricorders. I knew that any of the original costumes and props cost many thousands of dollars/pounds and rarely came up in auctions, so they were well out of my reach. My first Trek uniform (from Rubies) was bought for a friends 30th birthday party and was also used for my first look-alike engagements... a nurses convention in Harrogate (not far from Patrick Stewart's birthplace in Mirfield, Yorkshire) demonstrating the 'Next Generation of Temporal Artery Thermometers'. My next engagement was for a firm of local solicitors who were promoting the 'The Next Generation of Litigation'! As I approached my 40th birthday, a very dear friend (and tailor/dressmaker) called Virginia offered to make a tailor-made one-piece uniform for me, so we found some suitable fabric in Soho, London, plus a pattern from eBay, est voila!

Anyway, at the time I was single and wondering what to do next with my life, so I decided to attend my first major Star Trek Convention at the Hilton Hotel in Las Vegas during August 2005. As a closet geek, I had attended a number of Trek conventions in London, so I was used to 800-1,000 people attending a convention. Maybe a handful of photographs were taken, but that was all, I was totally unprepared for the 15,000 people that greeted me in Las Vegas... it was like being a rabbit caught in the headlights! This was to be the turning point in my look-alike career and the unknowing start of my costume collection. I was fortunate enough to meet two very important people... Beverly Lynn Sterling and Barron Westall-Toler. They both unwittingly contributed greatly to my knowledge and understanding of Gene Roddenberry's ethos of Star Trek.

I had only been at the Vegas convention for a couple of hours (and dressed in my new tailor made unifrom) but I had never been stopped so many times and asked to have my photograph taken. The fact that I looked fairly like Patrick Stewart and had an 'authentic' english accent was enough! Most people I chatted to that morning were suprised that I looked like 'him' and sounded like 'him'... some even suggested that I had had plastic surgery and it wasn't my real voice!!

In those days the actors from 'The Experience' used to walk around the convention and an early encounter was with the Klingon actor ''Major Kahlen'. I could say that our eyes met across a crowed convention... I approached her to say hello, but all I received was a fairly curt, but professional, in-character rebuff. Anyway, enough was enough and I decided to go back to my room to change out of my uniform, via the Spacequest bar for a quick beer, which is where I bumped into Barron, who looks exactly like Captain Benjamin Sisko. "Captain!" we both said, "What are you drinking?" was the next line... so we decided that top shelf (Cadillac) Margaritas were our poison and we have never looked back!