Missives from Wonderland

This is my entry for Week 5 of LJ Idol: Wheel of Fortune. The topic is "Toi toi toi," which is an actor's alternative to saying, "Good luck."


My swim bag on my back, I'm about to step out the door to teach an aqua fitness class when I notice my husband at the computer, stepping into some sort of virtual fracas involving multiple players in armor, several monsters, and a towering dragon, jaws spewing fire.

"Have fun storming the castle!" I chirp as I step through the apartment door.

My husband responds, grimly, "Thanks." I can hear his fingers clacking furiously on the keys as the door closes behind me. It's part of our love language to quote "The Princess Bride."

While I haven't technically performed onstage since my last improv class about 17 years ago, I've spent enough time with actors and stage folk over the years to have adopted their prohibition towards saying "Good luck." In fact, even writing the phrase in this essay feels a little sketchy. Excuse me while I knock vigorously on our wooden coffee table to negate the bad juju.

Of course, being part of a nerdy family -- with parents who were proud to watch the original "Star Trek" when it first aired -- and having married a fellow geek, we often draw our felicitations from our shared culture.

"May the Force be with you!" I tell our teenage son. Slathered in sunscreen and bug spray and wearing his wide-brimmed "Australian outback" hat, he exits the car to join the other youth counselors, or "Green Shirts," for the first day of Cub Scout summer day camp. Given the large intersection between geeks and those involved in Scouting, I wouldn't be surprised if other Green Shirts are sent off similarly. I think it's safe to say that many of the Green Shirts -- and the campers alike -- have seen at least one film in the "Star Wars" series.

I'm not much of a "Hunger Games" fan, but I've seen the first movie, and my son has read the first book. So, I could envision an instance where I would wish him, “May the odds be ever in your favor.” That does, however, seem a bit dark, given the sorts of conditions and challenges faced by the young tributes in the series. I'm not sending him off to kill other teens in the hopes of being the sole survivor, after all.

If our son had turned out to be sports-minded, we might have found ourselves encouraging him to "Leave it all on the field" or "Knock it out of the park!" Or even -- gasp -- the mathematically questionable phrase, "Give it a hundred and ten percent!" But our son followed in his parents' geeky footsteps and, instead of joining the baseball team, became a proud member of the high school robotics team. At their matches, they shout in unison, "L-O-V-E, we love our drive team!" Love triumphs over luck any day.

A much more likely send-off for my son would be "Don't forget your towel!" The most appropriate time to use this benediction, of course, would have been while he was leaving for his weeklong overnight summer Scout camp. Of course, as fans of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" know, this phrase implies much more than the ability to take a shower, because in that universe, there's nothing that ensures survival quite as effectively as knowing where your towel is.

If anyone in our immediate family had taken Latin instead of French, we might have gravitated towards the pseudo-Latin phrase “Fortunatus Maximus!” Apparently, that phrase is especially amusing to Latin students, because it doesn't exist in classic Latin. But of course, any English-speaking person will grok it as meaning "great fortune." It's one of those geek jokes that only make sense to an exclusive sub-group (and anyone who's had it explained to them).

Along the same lines would be chemistry jokes, preferred by chemists, science teachers, and pretty much all dads everywhere. Such a person might see me off to teach an after-school science club by wishing me, "May you always find the SOLUTION to your problems." I could see my husband, a former chemist, saying this and then fixing me with a broad smile as he awaited my reaction. (See what I did there?)

But the most often-used geeky phrase conveying good wishes originated with "Star Trek." The Vulcan phrase "Live long and prosper" has become the go-to phrase for a multitude of uses and has been so prevalent in popular culture that the Vulcan salute can be immediately understood to convey that wish. I'd certainly rather hear "Live long and prosper" than have someone tell me to "break a leg" or "knock 'em dead."

And while we're still several years away from seeing our son off to college, I can imagine myself leaving our son in front of his dorm room and bidding him adieu with a Vulcan salute, which, as the child of geeks, he would know conveyed every good wish that I could muster.



KFP in his "Australian outback" hat and wearing a "Star Wars" t-shirt. This photo is two years old, so the shirt no longer fits and he's now taller than me! He's still rocking the hat, however.