#all three of the Voyager shots would be reworked as stock shots for the early seasons

[spockvarietyhour]

Voyager and Val Jean, "Caretaker"

[emilys-write]

Mistake

“Had I known how much I’d be struggling right now, I wouldn’t have done it. Doing this was just one huge mistake.”

I thought I had it all. I know how cliché that sounds, but I truly did. I was thriving at work as one of the stars of a TV show entering its 15th season—Forgotten Ones; I’d also been a part of one of the biggest movie franchises of the 21st century—the Voyagers trilogy. My co-stars Andrew and Eric are more like brothers to me than anything. I was content in my personal life. Sure, I was single, but I had amazing friends, and I was closer than close with my family, despite the fact that I only got to see them a few times a year. I was happy, and I put some need to conform to archaic societal norms ahead of that happiness. Everyone I knew had kids, and I was tired of being “Aunt Naomi.”

I wanted to be “Mom.”

I wanted it more than anything. I wanted to get to experience those firsts: the first word; the first time they sit-up, crawl, walk; the first time they get their haircut; cutting and losing those teeth. Everything I’d experienced second-hand through the eyes of the parents around me, I wanted for myself. I was even looking forward to the 3 AM feedings and not getting a decent night’s sleep for the foreseeable future, the times when I’d try everything to figure out why they’re crying but would never be able to find the one thing that’ll soothe them, and always having some kind of spit-up on my clothes because all of that would mean that I was finally a mom. 

In September of 2016, three months after my 30th birthday, Andrew and his wife welcomed their second child, and I decided I was going to try In Vitro Fertilization. At the time, the longest relationship I’d had in four years was a one-night stand turned occasional late-night companion, so a natural conception was out. I wasn’t a fan of choosing a stranger from some national database to make up half of my child’s genetics, so I had to bite the bullet and ask someone I knew. Really, though, the only one I’d felt comfortable asking was my best friend Matt. I was closer to him than anyone, and given that he was—in the iconic words of Janice Ian—“almost too gay to function,” there was no chance of any kind of romantic feelings making an already complicated situation that much more.

Matt and I had met 9 years previous on the set of the first Voyagers film. He and I were in the same place in our lives—feeling stuck in our day-to-day lives and ready to quit acting—when we were cast, and so we hit it off immediately. We were there for each other through every high and low life threw at us, like the time our co-star and my then-boyfriend Derek cheated on me in the middle of shooting the second movie, and I was then stuck playing his loving girlfriend for the next year-and-a-half. Matt was the one to encourage me to take on new challenges, and I would do the same for him. He let me write and direct some inconsequential skit he was obligated to do for some website because he knew how interested yet apprehensive I was in entering those fields. A year later, I made my writing and directorial debut on Forgotten Ones.

To say Matt was wholly on-board with a baby, though, is a gross overstatement. He’d just broken up with his fiancée of two years when I sprung the idea on him. I’d meant to do it in a more meaningful way and approach the topic gently, but one too many Jägerbombs during one of his visits to Vancouver in early December led to a very loud and very slurred “D’ya wanna have a baby?” He ended the conversation with a very firm “Hell no!” followed directly by another shot. I didn’t bring up the idea again until I visited him in Pasadena the next month.

“Matt, I need to talk to you.” The words fell from my mouth in a jumbled frenzy after what was supposed to be a calming deep breath.

“Oh, God. That doesn’t sound good,” he joked, jumping over the back of the couch to sit next to me. “What’s up?” I kept my gaze on the glass of wine on the coffee table in front of me and continued to fidget with my hands—cracking my knuckles, checking my nails, anything that got rid of even the slightest bit of the anxiety I felt.

“I want to have a baby, and, well, I’m not exactly swimming in romantic partners at the moment, but I don’t want it to be with some stranger and I just—would you want to have a baby with me?” I finally looked over at him as I cut myself off and got the question out. He was silent for what felt like forever, which only prompted me to continue my nervous rambling. “You wouldn’t have to be involved—if you don’t want to, that is. You could totally just be, like, Uncle Matt, or whatever. A-and it’d be through In Vitro, so you and I wouldn’t be doing it the old-fashioned way, and—”

“Okay,” he interrupted me. “I’ll do it.”

We had our first appointment to have the Intrauterine Insemination done four months after that conversation, in April of 2017. And the second two months after when the first didn’t take. And the third two months after that when that one didn’t take. Finally, in early September, those two blue lines appeared on each of the ten pregnancy tests I took. Just to be absolutely sure, I made an appointment at the doctors for the next day. The pregnancy was confirmed two days later, and I was over the moon. The more and more we tried, the more Matt came around to the idea, but I don’t think he ever seemed willing to take on responsibilities further than being “Uncle Matt,” which was fine by me. He told me not long after he agreed that he’d done so mainly because of how much he knew I wanted to have a baby, but he’d never had any inclination to have children himself. He was always one who didn’t want to be tied down to anything, which is why his engagement had been so shocking to me. I had never really expected him to want to be that baby’s father, and the fact that he was even willing to help me in this was more than I could ask.

Early on in the process, we decided that we’d keep it a secret from anyone who didn’t absolutely need to know. I didn’t want some second-rate gossip column telling the world before I wanted it known. In order to give them enough time to adequately rework anything they needed to, the first people I told were the stunt coordinators, wardrobe department and the writers on Forgotten Ones. My character, Carter, had already had a child five seasons back, and so everyone decided to work with the pregnancy rather than around it and end the season with the birth of Carter’s second child. My family was the next to know.

Christmas Eve in Bantam, Connecticut. I was already at the tail-end of my first trimester and eager to finally spill the beans. My family had always celebrated together on Christmas Eve, and so this was my one chance to tell everyone at once. I kept the focus of the announcement on my mom, though. It was her first grandchild after all. 

As tradition dictated, my family always opened gifts from youngest to oldest. My uncle acted as the guardian of the gifts, passing them out when the time came for each person to open theirs. I’d pulled him aside before dinner to ask him to “overlook” a gift for my mom, and act as though he’d just seen it after my grandfather had opened his final gift. He followed the plan perfectly. Everyone was getting ready to leave the basement and go back upstairs for dessert when he found the final gift.

“Oh, Michelle. There’s one more for you.” He grabbed the box adorned with red-and-white-striped wrapping paper and handed it to my mom.

“Huh. There’s no name,” she commented as she looked over the box. For the last month, I’d been incessantly telling her that she, my brothers and I should all get brand-new stockings to hang on her mantle this year. And so, when she opened the box to find a note resting on top of some tissue paper reading “Make sure to leave a space for me on your mantle next year,” she rolled her eyes and looked over at me.

“Naomi, I told you I like the stockings we have just f—” She pulled back the tissue paper to find a “My First Christmas” stocking with the first sonogram sticking out of the top and another card reading “Merry Christmas, Grandma! I’ll see you in May!” She jumped out of her seat and, as everyone huddled around the box she’d let fall to the ground, ran over to hug me. With the same shaking hands and tear-filled eyes she was sporting, I returned the embrace.

Two months later, we found out we were having a boy. Charles Alexander Collins. Around the same time, I’d finally let everyone on set know about the pregnancy. The scripts with the reveal of Carter’s pregnancy were about to come out, I was starting to show, and I couldn’t let Andrew and Eric find out through deduction instead of through me. The three of us, along with their spouses, were opening a wine bar in Virginia, Andrew and Eric’s home state. We all flew down for the weekend to check on the progress, and so the boys could spend time with their families. I arrived to the bar half an hour before we had planned to meet in order to set up. I’d ordered a fake label off of a store online that read “Babyfeet. Sweet Spring Baby. Connecticut. May 2018” and put it over one of the bottles we were supposed to be sampling that day, placing that towards the end of the line. Everyone began to arrive soon after I’d let Ali, our bartender, in on the plan and ensured my stock of red and white grape juice were set. We all sat at the table, and Ali brought over the first wine. After a lengthy discussion of the notes and bodies of the drinks we’d sampled—of which I faked my way through almost as badly as April on Parks and Rec had—Ali brought over five new glasses, four filled with the white “Babyfeet” wine and one with white grape juice. We sampled, and Eric asked Ali to bring the bottle over. I had to take another sip of my “wine” to cover my face as she did and they looked over the bottle. Andrew’s wife Jennifer was the first to catch the meaning and, with a squeal of excitement, jump out of her chair and hug me. Everyone else was quick to follow, a congratulatory chorus echoing in the space. As I’d assumed would be the case, we didn’t get much done after that.

I had my first real confrontation with people who had a more negative opinion towards my decision when I posted a picture of the bump online that same weekend. I’d included a brief explanation of why I’d chosen IVF, and left it at that. Of course, there were the many excited fans posting positive comments and posts, but there were those ones telling me I was wrong for doing it this way, that I was “going to Hell and the baby would be damned.” So many people telling me they’d lost respect for me because I couldn’t wait and do things the proper way. I’d love to say I took those comments in stride, that I ignored them and focused instead on moments like when Colton, who played my son Noah, started excitedly making plans for everything he was going to do with his “new best friend” Charlie, but they got to me. I worried that Charlie wouldn’t get the same love from our fans as Andrew and Eric’s children got, that instead he’d be ridiculed for my choices. I was afraid for the future, how everyone I wasn’t close with would treat him when they found out he was different. I wanted to believe I’d be enough for him, but was that just false hope? It’s not like his world wouldn’t be filled with strong male and female figures, but did he need a dad to really make it? Was I just being selfish, and was that selfishness going to ruin his life? Even worse than the comments, gossip magazines began running stories, using me as the poster girl of “alternative pregnancy.” It was like I wasn’t a person anymore, just some idea people could lash out at. It’s not as though I hadn’t received my fair share of hate comments in the past, but all of this was different. No longer were they shaming me because I cut my hair shorter than they thought or dyed it the wrong color, things that were so inconsequential in the long-run. They were criticizing me going after what I wanted, condemning me during what was supposed to be the happiest time in my life because the way I went about it didn’t fit their cookie cutter world.

We wrapped shooting in early April, the last scene filmed being the birth scene. Given the current plot of the show and our setting in a post-apocalyptic world, Carter had a vastly different experience than I was about to have a month after. Instead of a nice hospital room with doctors and nurses galore, this scene involved laying on a dingy table in a dimly lit room with her friends to help. Still, when they placed the all-too realistic doll on my chest, it just made me all the more eager to get to do this for real and finally meet Charlie.

May 2, 2018. Three days before the projected due date. I’d woken up early in the morning to sharp pains in my abdomen. I made myself busy until my water finally broke and my contractions had gotten to that “every 5-7 minute” point at 9:23 AM, 5 hours after I’d woken up. Go time. I was out of the house and in an Uber on the way to the hospital in 7 minutes flat, a new record. I made it to the hospital in just under 20 minutes, headed straight to the Labor and Delivery area and was admitted to the triage room. The nurses decided the labor was progressed enough to admit me, and the next thirteen hours turned into an ice-chip fueled waiting game. I was alone in Vancouver, everyone having already gone home now that the season was over. Matt was in Louisiana filming his next movie, and my mom was supposed to fly in on the 4th. At around 11 o’clock that night, I finally began to feel like I needed to push. I called a nurse who, in turn, found the doctor, and it was time to go.

For the first few minutes, everything was going well. Then, I started feeling light-headed and more tired than I’d been all day. I chalked it up to the pain and continued to follow the doctor’s orders. Moments later, the machines I was hooked up to began beeping rapidly. The nurses and doctor began working faster to get Charlie out. Once he’d made his arrival, they quickly took him to the table against the wall. He wasn’t crying like he was supposed to. He was silent.

“What’s going on? Is he alright?” No one answered. I listened to the doctor’s rushed commands as they worked on Charlie, every word he uttered hanging in the still air of the room.

He wasn’t breathing.

It wasn’t working.

They lost him.

It was determined that the drop in my blood pressure during the delivery led to Perinatal Asphyxia. Charlie couldn’t get enough oxygen; he went into cardiac arrest and died on the table before I’d ever even gotten the chance to see more than a glimpse of him.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 

“I can’t do this. I need to stop.” I stood from my chair, handing the baby to Andrew as the director yelled “Cut,” and walked off the set. It had been three months since Charlie, but the wound was still fresh. I’d erased all the social media apps on my phone, unable to let myself use the sites as distraction when I was flooded with notifications from people expressing their sympathy once the news broke. I appreciated the sentiment, but I couldn’t keep seeing that every day. I spent our hiatus back in Connecticut with my family and Matt—who’d remained my rock through this—and only made the decision to come back to work because I thought it would distract me. But playing a doting mother of a newborn when my reality was so far from that pulled me right back into those initial moments after I had Charlie. I couldn’t take it. The director called to break for lunch, and I sprinted back to my trailer, tears welling in my eyes.

I was in my trailer alone for a few minutes before there was a light knock on the door. I wiped my eyes but remained in my spot on the couch.

“It’s open,” I called out, my voice small. Our Prop Master, Cathy, opened the door and walked up the steps.

“Hey, hon. Do you want to talk?” She came over and sat at the other end of the couch.

“I just…I just feel so hopeless now,” I started, skipping any kind of formality. “Charlie was my everything for so long, and now I’m stuck with this huge emptiness. I don’t know what to do. I want so badly to go out there and keep going. Carter, this show, all I’ve known for 15 years is this. I don’t want to give it up but…I don’t think I’m strong enough to do this.” Cathy put her hand on my arm sympathetically.

“Here.” She reached into her pocket to retrieve a card and handed it to me. “This is a support group for women going through what you did. A few years ago, my friend went through this, and she says she wouldn’t have been able to get through it the way she did without going and sharing with the group.”

“Thank you, Cathy,” I said, looking up from the card. “But—”

“Just think about it.” She smiled warmly and, like some fairy godmother here to point me in the right direction, gave me a tight hug and left.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 

“And, uh, that’s what brought me here. I have to admit, I almost didn’t come. I just had those nasty comments going through my head along with the thought that some paparazzi would catch me coming out of here, and I’d be ridiculed for not being able to handle this. But I know I can’t. And I can’t keep going like this, either. I mean, I was so happy before this. I can’t help but think that had I known how much I’d be struggling right now, I wouldn’t have done it. I would have just found a way to be happy being “Aunt Naomi;” I wouldn’t have forced this. I don’t care how happy I was through the pregnancy, It feels meaningless now; everything does. I just feel like doing this, trying to have a baby like this…

it was just one big mistake.”

[itsworn]

1934 Deluxe Roadster is Better Than Original

Solid.

Mike Griffith’s ’34 Deluxe Roadster is remarkable in many ways. Its condition is remarkable: Most of the sheetmetal is original and rust-free, and those few parts that have been replaced are gennie Henry Ford steel, not repop. The car’s top is remarkable in that it’s original. Time-worn, certainly—it’s more than 80 years old, after all—but not ragged or torn at all.

That Mike bought the car, sight unseen, after a five-minute phone conversation is remarkable. We’ll get to that in a bit.

Maybe most remarkable of all is the fact that the roadster passed through three different car collectors between 1964 (the farthest back Mike can trace, to date, anyway) and when he bought it a year ago, and none of those gentlemen did much, if anything, with it. They all prized it and had plans to restore it, but for various reasons left it sit, largely untouched, for decades.

Not preservation, exactly. More like benign neglect.

All that changed when Mike bought it. When we first saw the car a year ago (and showed you pictures in the Sept. ’16 Roddin’ @ Random department), Mike told us his plan was to get the car running by hopping up the original flathead but to leave as much as he could as-is. “It’s only original once,” he told us then.

For the most part that still holds true. But when he put his head together with his buddy Rocky Webb to get the car on the road, they realized there were myriad details that needed attention, restoration—and in some cases modification—to fulfill Mike’s desire to drive the roadster. So while the body, top, and some of the running gear are still as they were when they rolled out of the Ford plant, Rocky and Mike have unapologetically hot rodded the car. “We’re doing it as if it’s 1950 and we’re 19 years old,” Rocky explains.

Previous Lives

Mike has been buying, selling, and collecting hot rods and speed parts for years. He’s one of those people who seems to know everyone in the hobby, and through those connections finds remarkable (there’s that word again) examples of historic and significant coupes, roadsters, gassers, customs, you name it. His parts collection borders on mythic; at one time he had gathered on the order of 100 Deuce grille shells. Mike is often our go-to guy if we need a vintage part—or an interesting location—for a photo shoot.

As is often the case with his purchases, Mike did extensive homework on this roadster and was able to trace its history back to 1964. That’s the year it was purchased by a collector in Fallbrook, California, who intended to subject it to a full, back-to-factory restoration. That never happened, though. It sat in his garage until a cancer diagnosis in 2000 prompted him to sell. The buyer was a man named Chris Carrier. “He was a collector of famous cars, cherry cars,” Mike says. “He bought Barris cars, bought Neal East’s car.” But, says Mike, “he had cancer himself.”

Carrier took the car to Connecticut, and it was most likely he who installed the replacement fenders, hood sides, and gas tank cover—all real Ford steel. “That’s a trademark of Carrier,” says Mike about the provenance of the parts. “It had to be right.”

Carrier passed away before he could do much else with the roadster. “His significant other put his cars up for sale, and a man named Jim Lowrey from New Hampshire bought six or seven of them, including this one,” Mike recounts.

Lowrey replaced the roadster’s original flathead with a ’34 21-stud engine out of a pickup that belonged to his father. Beyond that he left the car alone.

About two years ago Mike ran into another collector buddy, Dave Simard, at a Southern California swap meet. The two got to talking, the subject of Chris Carrier came up, and Simard told Mike about the ’34 roadster. Simard said the car was available, though he wasn’t interested. “I have 60 cars,” Simard told Mike. I don’t need another one.”

Intrigued, Mike got in touch with Lowrey. Or tried to. For three months. “Either his phone’s not working, or he’s not answering, or something,” Mike recalls. Finally Mike got Lowrey on the phone, and within five minutes the deal was done. “He’s straight up and knows his stuff,” Mike explains. “If Simard is high on it, and if Chris owned it, I know it’s good. I didn’t even ask for photos. I saw it for the first time when it rolled out of the trailer.”

Road Worthy

Rocky Webb is a contractor and industrial steel fabricator whose passion is hot rods. “My dad was born in 1932, and he had these kinds of cars when he was young, so I enjoy working on them,” he explains as we walk around his own Model A-based roadster. Turning to Mike’s oh-so-original car, he says, “I’d never be able to own one of these, but because of Mike I get to work on one.”

Rocky’s contributions to the car are more than we can list here, but among the highlights: When the two men realized the engine in the ’34 would need more work than our photo shoot schedule would allow, Rocky loaned Mike a ’39 Merc 99A flathead he had in his garage, and then hopped the motor up with an immaculate McCulloch supercharger. Rocky swapped the car’s original mechanical brakes for hydraulic binders (and found a trick way to plumb them with modern hardline that looks like brass), mounted a reverse-eye spring pack on a stretched and filled front axle that came from Mike’s parts stash, reworked the linkage for a set of ’39 pedals, and even built a new seat frame from scratch.

“It’s a good combination,” Rocky explains, “Mike’s knowledge of old-school hot rodding techniques and my fabrication abilities.” Rocky also wanted to give credit to several people who helped him get the roadster ready in a short time, including Mike Herman and the crew at H&H Flatheads; upholsterer Victor Lozano; Bill and Mike McGrath at the Early Ford Store, who “were really accommodating and even opened their place on a Sunday to let us get parts”; and Rocky’s friend Ray Covarrubias, who “spent a lot of nights with me helping me get this car together and tight.”

Rocky took the roadster on its initial shakedown run just a couple days before our photo session, to make sure we’d have no issues shooting car-to-car action. There are a couple small things to fix, he admits, like getting the hood to close over the tall Stromberg on top of the blower, and finding a set of shocks. But overall, he’s pleased.

Mike’s maiden voyage didn’t take place until we were there, cameras in hand.

“It’s a runner,” he tells us with a big grin after Wes gets his action shots. “It handled great at speed. Went down the road smooth and straight. No wobble. It’s tight, nothing’s loose. It’s solid.”

For more than 50 years, this ’34 Deluxe Roadster languished in the garages of several collectors, essentially untouched. It took the efforts of owner Mike Griffith and his friend Rocky Webb to get it back on the road again.

The sheetmetal on Mike’s roadster has been on the car since it left the factory, save for the driver-side front and rear fenders, the gas tank cover, hood sides, and a small patch panel behind the driver’s door. “The original factory black paint is still on the body,” Mike says. “Our next step will be to slowly remove the thin coat of primer and polish out the original paint.”

Like the body, the roadster’s top is original, and in excellent shape considering the fabric is more than 80 years old. “In all the years I’ve owned hot rods, I’ve never owned one with an original top,” Mike says.

Rocky graciously loaned his ’39 Merc 99A flathead when the flattie in the roadster couldn’t be made worthy in time for our shoot. Starting with a bare block, Rocky had built the motor over the course of a year using “parts and good advice” from H&H Flatheads. Inside the motor are new pistons on the stock rods and crank (with N.O.S. Michigan bearings), an H&H blower cam, adjustable lifters, and small-block Chevy valves and keepers. The Red’s headers came from Mike’s parts stash.

The Merc is bigger than the Ford engine, so they had to really shoehorn it into the roadster’s engine bay. With the motor pushed right up against the firewall, Rocky had to fab a new oil filler tube. He even had to bend the fan blades for extra clearance.

Rocky bought the McCulloch supercharger from Mike Spacik at the L.A. Roadsters Father’s Day show swap meet. “It was the nicest, most complete McCulloch blower I’ve ever seen, so I bought it,” Rocky says. He figures it’ll push 4 to 5 psi “and should add 20 to 30 hp.”

The reverse-eye spring and stretched and filled front axle also came from Mike’s collection of hot rod parts. “It was probably dropped in the late ’40s or early ’50s,” he says. Bending the $2.50 eBay steering arm to accommodate the new axle “was a real thrash,” according to Rocky.

Mike and Rocky left the rearend alone, with the exception of adding ’48 Ford juice brakes. “It’s amazing that the rearend hasn’t been rebuilt, the transmission hasn’t been rebuilt, and they work so well,” Mike says. “We did drain the goo out of the rearend and replaced it, but that’s it.”

Those mufflers are so old they’re packed with steel, not fiberglass. They give the flathead a very mellow tone.

The car came with a seat cushion and some upholstery that looked like it could have been original, but that was it. No seat back. Rocky fabbed a seat-back frame in wood and metal, restored the wire springs in the cushion, and found some material at Victor Lozano’s upholstery shop that looked a lot like the original seat covers. “Victor did the seat in a moment’s notice,” Rocky says. He and Mike plan to use more of the same material to finish the rumble seat.

The steering wheel, column, shifter, and dashboard are all original. For now there are modern gauges in the panel to monitor the fresh flathead, but eventually Mike will put ’34 gauges in the holes. On the drawing board is an underdash panel, hooked to a piano spring, for temp, oil pressure, and amp gauges. “That way we can flip it down when driving and flip it up, out of sight, at shows,” Mike says.

The 16-inch Kelsey Hayes wheels also came from Mike’s parts collection. While the rear tires are Coker Firestone repops, the fronts are vintage Olympic Air Ride tires Mike got from fellow SoCal rodder Robert Lomas.

“A lot of people would mothball a car as nice as this,” Mike says. “But it’s meant to be driven.”

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