I first met Lindsay Wagner 15 years ago in
Pasadena, California during a fan-club reunion. I had no idea I was going to
have tea with her this summer until about four weeks ago. Between late July and
early August this year, Lindsay was scheduled to host four shows about her
career, two in Texas and two in California. I purchased a ticket on-line to see
her show in Fort Worth, Texas, on the 28th of July. Unfortunately, this
particular show was cancelled and I was not able to change my plane ticket to
attend one of her other three shows. Knowing that I was flying from Brazil,
Karen Stowe, Lindsay's publicist, went much beyond her call of duty and sent me
an email inviting me to have tea with Lindsay while they were in Texas. We met
on the 28th of July, at a café, north of Dallas.
I wanted to take the opportunity to tell Lindsay how her work had had
such a strong impact on my life. In 1977, when I was 15 years old, my
grandmother and I had a love affair with Lindsay's TV series The Bionic Woman.
We got together every Saturday evening to watch Lindsay play Jaime
Sommers on our television screen. Grandma lived next door to us and we used to
spend a lot of time together. She often took me to the movies. Together we saw
on the big screen Sissi
with Romy Schneider, The Sting with
Paul Newman and Robert Redford, The Way We Were
with Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford, Towering Inferno
with Steve McQueen and Paul Newman, Poseidon with
Gene Hackman and Ernest Borgnine, Jaws with Roy
Scheider and Richard Dreyfuss, just to mention a few. While my parents were
busy working and raising us, grandma was busy having the time of her life with
her grandchildren.
A few weeks before Christmas 1977, I told Grandma I wanted to send
Lindsay Wagner a Christmas card since she had become such a part of our lives
during that year. Grandma thought it was a great idea and encouraged me to buy
a card and write her. I took a bus to the only mall in town, went to a
stationary store there and chose a beautiful card. Since I did not know any
English, my next task was to convince my father to write "Feliz Natal e
Próspero Ano Novo" in English in order for me to copy it onto the card.
My father had learned English with the American GIs during World War II.
The U.S. had Army Air Force bases in several cities on the northeastern coast
of Brazil. They used these bases as refueling stations on their way to North
Africa. In 1941, when the American GIs started arriving in Fortaleza, my father
was 12 years old. He spent a lot of time with the GIs trying to pick up
English, and by the time they left in 1946, my father was proficient in
English. He went on to become an English teacher and even wrote an English
grammar handbook, which became very popular among senior students who were getting
ready for their entrance exam to college all throughout the 1960s.
My father had always been a very serious person. In contrast to Grandma,
when I approached him with the idea of sending Lindsay Wagner a Christmas card,
he really discouraged me. He could not understand why I wanted to send a
Christmas card to someone whom I had never met. I was determined, though. I
followed him all through the house asking for his help. He finally gave up and
wrote some Christmas greetings in English on a piece of paper. I then copied
them on the Christmas card I had purchased. Half of my task was accomplished,
but I still needed Lindsay's address. Fortunately, my dear cousin Mosita had
seen her contact address in a Brazilian magazine and gave it to me. With the
address in hand, I went to the Post Office to choose the stamps for the
envelope.
I had been a stamp collector since I was 8 years old and would never mail
anything without first picking the most beautiful stamps I could find. As a
stamp collector, I even had the commemorative stamp of Pelé's one thousandth
goal, which was issued in 1969. Stamps were a way for me to learn about
different countries. I had a thirst for everything foreign, and the stamps
fueled my imagination. My paternal grandmother had died in a plane crash in
1954 and since then my father avoided flying at all costs. Since we never
travelled anywhere, I constructed my foreign experiences through books, stamps,
and movies. I was an avid reader and by the time I was a teenager, I had read
in Portuguese the works of Robert Lewis Stevenson, Jonathan Swift, James
Fenimore Cooper, and
Harriet Beecher Stowe, among others.
By 1977, besides reading and collecting stamps, one of my favorite pastimes was memorizing
the lines from the Bionic
Woman. I would place my cassette recorder next to the TV and record each
episode. Back then there were no VCRs or DVDs. Thus, in order for me to listen
to the episodes again, even though they were dubbed into Portuguese, I recorded
them in cassette tapes. I would listen to them again and again until I
memorized the lines. I would also open our Encyclopedia Barsa
and research the places that were mentioned in each episode and locate them in
a big Encyclopedia
Britannica Atlas we had.
In May 1978, five months after I had sent Lindsay Wagner that Christmas
card, I received in the mail an envelope from her. In it, there was a picture
with a message written on the back. What a happy moment that was for me!
Unfortunately, I could not read the message because I did not know any English.
When my father got home from work, I ran to him with a big smile on my face and
Lindsay's photo in my hand. I wanted him to translate what was written on the
back of that photograph. My father looked at me and said "I can't believe
it has been five months since Christmas and you are still going on with
this". Even though he did not think much of my precious picture, he did
translate it for me. He then said that I should learn English and be
independent from him in my most creative endeavors. He gave me money and told
me to go register for English classes at IBEU (Brazil-United States Institute)
in downtown
Fortaleza. Once my classes at IBEU started, I fell completely in love with
English and would spend hours at IBEU's library looking at books, phone books,
college catalogues, etc. I would also find all kinds of excuses to spend hours
in the language laboratory listening to my lessons again and again. A year
later, in 1979, during my last year of high school, I learned Morse code and
took an exam to become an amateur radio operator (ham radio), which was indeed
a most clever idea. Upon receiving my ham radio license, I did not have to stay
so many hours at IBEU in order to feel connected to the U.S. I could go home,
turn my radio on and talk for hours with ham radio operators all over the U.S.
This is how I practiced my English.
As a kid, I had no idea why the Bionic Woman
series had caught my attention so much. Two or three decades later, I learned
how much effort Lindsay Wagner had put into changing the scripts of the Bionic Woman to
make the series much more than just a "Bionic" franchise, based on
Martin Caidin's novel Cyborg. Lindsay
worked hard on the stories along with writer and producer Kenneth Johnson to
ensure that the series reflected the complexity of social issues, rather than
just painting things as black and white or people as all good or all bad.
Though the Bionic
Woman had super physical power, she did not solve problems by force.
When I met Lindsay Wagner for tea last week, I wanted to convey to her
how much her efforts had paid off. She indeed had caught the attention of
thousands of kids all over the world, like me, with her work. She not only
helped consolidate strong values I had learned from my parents, such as kindness,
compassion, and forgiveness, but she also inspired me to follow my dreams.
During our time together, I told her how my desire to send her a Christmas card
in 1977 paved the way for me to learn English and move to the USA to go to
graduate school years later.
I went on to earn a Master of Arts in English from Millersville
University of Pennsylvania in 1992 and a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the
University of Florida in 2002, both of which were paid for with graduate
assistantships and scholarships. After earning my Ph.D., I returned to Brazil
in 2003 and taught English and Anthropology at the University of Fortaleza, in
Brazil, for several years and was also a visiting scholar at Millersville
University of Pennsylvania, where I had earned my M.A. years earlier, at
Campbellsville University, in Kentucky, and Cottey College, in Missouri. For
five years I also coordinated the Study Abroad Program at the University of
Fortaleza, where I had the opportunity to guide hundreds of students to go
abroad. In 2009, I received a grant to study Geographic Information System
(GIS) at Idaho State University. None of this would have happened had it not
been for Lindsay Wagner's efforts to make her series much more than a
franchise.
For 39 years, Lindsay Wagner has inspired me more than anyone else, first
through her work in the Bionic Woman series;
later, through her countless other TV movies and mini-series that celebrated
life and the resilience of the human spirit; and more recently, through her
seminars and conferences that I have been able to watch on-line through
downloads from her webpage. When things get tough in my life, I always
think of Lindsay and all the wonderful things she has been able to accomplish
in her own life as well as the many things she has taught me along the
years. She has always brought me hope and courage to overcome life
challenges, pursue my dreams, and have a happy and fulfilling life.
E-mail:
nedabezerra@gmail.com
