Roger Floyd's Website

“What follows is commentary” … Chet Huntley

The Vicarious Reader or Viewer

If you could be a character in a novel or TV show or movie, what book or show would you pick?

In this case, I’m suggesting that you insert yourself into the story line of a show or book as yourself, not as a character who already exists in the story.  If you could enter a story as yourself, what story would you enter?  To limit this to a reasonable number of possibilities, your selection has to be to enter a fictitious story, not a real event.  (After all, we can’t have people changing the past.)  You have to be yourself in most respects, though you can alter your occupation to fit the story line.  Would you like to be a detective on a crime show, say, “Law and Order,” and hang out with all the others in the squad room and go on criminal investigations all over New York?  Would you like to be on “General Hospital?”  You could make yourself a doctor or nurse and treat disease and operate and cure people and still have time to be around some of your favorite medical characters.  Or your favorite soap opera characters.  Would you like to be one of the orphans taught to pick pockets in “Oliver Twist?”  How about  as a tenant in the same building as Sheldon and Penny and Leonard?  (You’d have to trudge up and down the stairs.  They haven’t fixed the elevator yet.)

Would you like to pilot an X-wing fighter and meet Luke and Leia and Han Solo and all the others, and potentially have your arm wrenched from its socket by a Wookie?  Think of the number of Stormtroopers you could blast.  Perhaps you could trudge along with  Dr. Watson and watch Sherlock Holmes at work.  Or enter an Agatha Christie story and watch Hercule Piriot at work.  Hang out with Walter White as his new next-door neighbor in Albuquerque?  The possibilities are endless.

I think if I could, I’d like to be on the bridge of the Enterprise with Capt. Picard and Cmdr. Riker and the others.  But I wouldn’t want to be a bridge officer. I’d like to be a visitor.  I’d like to be a 21st century person put into suspended animation and revived by Dr. Crusher in the Sick Bay (they need to get a better term for the ship’s medical facilities) in the 25th century.  Capt. Picard was a student of history so I suspect he’d like to have someone around whom he could talk to about Earth’s history.  I’d love to sit in his ready room just off the bridge and shoot the breeze with him.  Could be very enlightening.

Another possibility for me would be as a doctor on M*A*S*H.  Korea in the early 1950’s wasn’t a great place to be, especially with a war on, but the people would be interesting.  The panic, yes, the boredom, the terrible food in the mess tent, but the chance to see something that few have ever seen and experience something that few have ever experienced would make it a fascinating ordeal.  It would all add up to an interesting time.  To say the least.

In any event, use your imagination.  Where would you go?  What would you become?  Be yourself, but be imaginative.