Making It So, by Patrick Stewart

  I am a huge Trekkie and not just any Trekkie, but a The Next Generation one, so naturally I had to read the memoir of Patrick Stewart, the actor portraying iconic captain Jean-Luc Picard.

  I have to start with the things I liked least, starting with the misleading name of the book, a Star Trek pun related to the captain's "Make it so" phrase. It implies more connection to Star Trek than the book actually provides. Star Trek is a mere two or three chapters and nothing very substantial. Second would be the sanitized feel of the book. I don't blame Mr. Stewart, an old Brit and decent human being who wouldn't dream to gossip or attack or expose intimacies in the lives of others in a book. Yet I felt the same thing applied to himself. I was getting the gist of what was happening, but not the feel that it was a lived moment. A lot of tell, don't show, basically.

  Making It So is a complete memoir, starting from early childhood until the present, and focuses on the single true passion of the author, which is theater. Even working for years on Star Trek series and movies, he seems to consider them just weird breaks in his otherwise serious career as a thespian. Human relationships form and dissipate, amazing things happen, the world changes around him, but the only parts where I felt inspired and moved were the ones about the damn theater.

  I don't even like theater! Yet, very coincidentally, my first contact with theater and the part that I actually enjoyed was watching BBC Television Shakespeare, while also following the text on the big book of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare when I was a little kid. And what do you know, Patrick Stewart is there playing Claudius, the bad guy in Hamlet. So I watched the captain before he was a captain and I was almost as old as he when he found his acting vocation.

  The enthusiasm about theater in this book almost made me want to try the thing again, but while I rationally understand the attraction and the beauty of it, I also feel completely repulsed by sitting in a theater, surrounded by theater people, trying to discern what is going on on a stage that is either too far or too close and risking one of those experimental plays where the audience is included in the story and expected to contribute, all while being unable to reasonably extricate myself from it. So no, the line must be drawn h'yah!

  Bottom line: a nice memoir, but feeling too distant most of the time and getting more intimate only when discussing a subject I am not really into.