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When The Phantom Menace came out, the original Star Wars was put into heavy rotation on TBS. One night I was channel surfing, came across it and thought, “God, I haven’t seen this in ages.” So Ariel and I settled in to watch it. As the battle of the Death Star ensued, the phone rang. I answered it.
“Peter, hey, it’s Mark.”
Hamill.
He was one of the friends that Bill Mumy had introduced me to. He had been appearing in a Broadway play, The Nerd. Bill flew in to see him, invited me along, and after that we’d gone up to Mark’s gorgeous apartment and hung out. At one point he offered me a beer which I drank, and that is the single time in all my life that I’ve consumed a beer, because when Luke Skywalker offers you alcohol while Will Robinson is standing there, you drink the damned beer.
Anyway, I said into the phone, “Uh, hey, Mark, I’m watching you about to blow up the Death Star.”
He said, “I can call back…”
“No, that’s okay, I’ve seen this movie before. I know how it ends.”
He had called because he was going to be producing a trade paperback of a comic series of his, The Black Pearl (no relation to the later Disney version) and wanted to know if I’d be interested in writing an introduction. I said sure, we chatted for a couple minutes, hung up, and then said, “What has my life come to that Luke Skywalker calls me while I’m watching him on television?” |
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