Can you name actors whose performances provided hope for you in dark times? Walter Koenig did that for me – twice. As a kid, I would come home and flop on the carpet to watch back-to-back syndicated re-runs of my obsession: Star Trek. While my favorite character was Uhura (woman doing cool things on the bridge, natch), the character who impacted me most was probably Ensign Chekhov, ship’s navigation. You see, Chekhov was Russian. I was Ukrainian. At the time, no one had heard of Ukraine, so we said we were Russian .

Why did his ethnicity matter so much to me? I was a sensitive kid, and I knew that the US and the Soviets were not on friendly terms. Russians were “the bad guys” in my air-force-base-adjacent home town. My friends’ fathers might have to fight them at any minute. I kept very, very quiet about my ethnicity.

But Star Trek gave me hope. Specifically, the charming, funny, smart Ensign Pavel Chekhov gave me a vision for a future where I wasn’t the bad guy. Where nations of all ethnicities might live more or less harmoniously. I loved the way that Star Trek explored war, prejudice, injustice, and the like. These things mattered a lot to me as a Russian-Cuban-American kid. (Recall that I didn’t figure out I wasn’t ethnically Cuban until much later…) So Chekhov gave me hope that someday I wouldn’t need to hide that my grandmother came from Siberia (or that my dad grew up in Cuba.)
Koenig’s performance provided me with a SECOND much-needed infusion of hope as well. In my thirties and well into my forties, I was scared to fly. Sick-to-my-stomach, white knuckles gripping the armrests, terrified. No matter how many times Dr. Science demonstrated the Bernoulli effect with a boarding pass, I remained terror-stricken about flying. However, my kids’ grandma was too ill to fly, and I really wanted them to have a relationship with her, so we flew every year-ish just to make sure that happened. And poor Dr. Science held my hand and talked physics, year after year.

My flight card

Until one year my therapist suggested I might come at it (my fear) from a different angle. She knew I was a Star Trek nerd and suggested I think about flying as the precursor to the sort of thing all my STTOS/STNG/DS9 heroes did. And something about that really clicked for me. My imaginary heroes loved to fly. They did it fearlessly. I mean, come on, flying in a starship? How cool would that be? And suddenly I was able, if only for a brief few seconds, to imagine a world where I loved flying, too. My therapist said it would probably help if I had something tangible to hold or look at the next time I flew. I made the credit-card-size image shown above. I didn’t pick Kirk or Spock or even Uhura for my flight-loving crew member. I picked Walter Koenig’s Chekhov. He was just so happy to be on the Starship Enterprise, and he was Slavic, like me.

That little card stayed in my wallet for five or more years as I worked my way from someone who got sick before boarding every flight to someone who loves flying. Yes, I love flying now. I love the moment of take off, when that Bernoulli miracle happens. I love landing where we hit the ground at two hundred miles an hour and you feel gravity shoving you one way and then the other. I even love a little bit of turbulence because it lets me know I’m up in the air. Okay, only a little bit. Too much and I get nervous like anyone else.

But that’s the point. I fly now “like anyone else,” instead of flying like a nervous Nell. And when I really think about it, and especially when flying over the Mars-like American southwest, I actually love it. I actually “enjoy the ride.” And yes, my character Jillian Applegate goes through this transformation in A Flight in Time, in case you were remembering something about a once flight-phobic character in the Cidney Swanson cast of heroines.

So thank you, Walter Koenig (1936-2026, rest in peace,) for the gifts your acting brought into my life. Ad astra.
PS And yes, the name of my Saving Mars character Pavel Brezhnaya-Bouchard is totally an homage to my favorite male Star Trek character.
PPS. And yes, the Russian-Ukrainian-American ballet family in Siren Spell are called the Chekhovs for the same reason.
PPPS If you are flight-phobic, I wrote A Flight in Time for you, my friend. Please give it a read.