Gary Jones Interviews Sommer, Fan

David Read: Welcome everyone, to Episode 28 of Dial the Gate. My name is David Read. We are launching a new branch of category today. Fandom interviews. Hosted by my friend, Gary Jones. Gary, thank you for making this series possible. Our very first interviewee is going to be one of our moderators. Miss Sommer Roy. Sommer has had over 35 major surgeries. And {she} is one of the strongest people that I know. And she is just a fighter. And Gary, we wanted to start off with someone in our inner circle. And work our way out for more of these interviews. So Gary has recorded six so far and Sommer is our first. So, I’m going to let him take it from here. Thank you, Gary. Thank you, Sommer. And enjoy the show! OK guys, ready for a photo in 3, 2, 1.

Sommer Roy: David, you do know you are not on video when you got that picture.

David Read: That is correct, there were nine of you, I wanted a “Brandy Bunch” shot. If I put myself on…

Sommer Roy: Oh. OK.

Gary Jones: Hi everybody, I’m Gary Jones. Welcome to “Dial the Gate”. I’m using the one name they managed not to use on Stargate. They gave me seventeen other names, but I got to keep my own name for the credits. And uh, so you might know me as “Chief Master Sargent Walter Harriman” and I’m just delighted to be here on Dial the Gate and interviewing various fans around the world, it’s the best! This is the closest I can get personally to being at a convention and having somebody come over to my table and chat me up. It’s great. And the first person I’m talking to today is the loveliest woman, Sommer Roy. Welcome, Sommer, to my laptop.

Sommer Roy Thanks, Gary, it’s so great to be here. It’s so great to see you again since I saw you in Chicago last summer.

Gary Jones: Yeah, we’ve met before, and we’ve talked, and we had a great time.

Sommer Roy: We did.

Gary Jones: Chicago is a fabulous city. And so where are you situated right now?

Sommer Roy: I am in Texas, near Austin.

Gary Jones: Nice.

Sommer Roy: Yeah.

Gary Jones: Well, great, welcome and what’s been going on in your life in terms of like, I guess your husband, does he work from home, or can you leave the house or what’s the deal?
Sommer Roy Well, I’m immunocompromised so I can’t leave the house very often at all. I go to the doctor and that’s about it. Yeah, my husband’s working from home right now we’ve been very lucky that he can work from home. He has a big setup and everything. They kind of imported his desk into our house. He’s set up and ready to go.

Gary Jones: Really?

Sommer Roy: Yeah.

Gary Jones: Are you getting on each other’s nerves or what’s the deal?

Sommer Roy: No, we are actually quite enjoying it very much because for the last probably ten or fifteen years we have been running a family hotel, I guess. We have a lot of people that have come and gone into the house. And I took care of my grandmother for the last three years. She passed away at 93 last year.

Gary Jones: Oh. Wow.

Sommer Roy: Yeah, and we absolutely adored having her and we miss her very very much but this is the first time in a good ten to fifteen years that we’ve actually had the house to ourselves it’s been very enjoyable to be able to eat lunch together and just kind of have some down time.

Gary Jones: When he gets to eat lunch with you does he get to complain about the other people?

Sommer Roy: Yeah, definitely.

Gary Jones: I can’t stand Dave in marketing! That’s why it bugs my a**.

Sommer Roy: Exactly! He does. He gets to vent a little bit and go back to work so I know a lot about what’s going on with his job right now.

Gary Jones He’s like; He’s like check out this memo I got. What the he** is this all about?
Sommer Roy Yeah, exactly.

Gary Jones And that’s your chance to go, well you know what you should do? You know what I would do? You just go in there and you just tell them, like…

Sommer Roy Right?

Gary Jones: Now I read something that you just mentioned earlier about your immune-compromised and I know believe it or not, I have a connection to something like that in my own life, because my girlfriend’s son is twenty-four. I’ve known him and been with her six years and he’s immune compromised. You know, so like he uh he’s got some cerebral palsy and a little bit of developmental delay. But he’s really super high functioning and a great guy. But he’s concerned you know about um, going outside he’s very on top of it, right? If we say oh maybe we can go to a restaurant. He’s like I don’t know about that. So he’s kudos to him, you know what I mean?

Sommer Roy: Yeah, it’s hard.

Gary Jones: Yeah. It is hard, right?

Sommer Roy: Yeah, Zoom has been a lifesaver for me. Because I can see my family and my friends, chat and talk and it’s just been really great to have at least some kind of human connection.

Gary Jones: Yeah, Yeah, my mom is in a home, she’s eighty-five. She’s in a home in Ontario.
She just does a landline; she’s very old school. And I was trying to get her because of the place, it’s a wonderful place but down on the main floor in the library they have a couple of desktop computers set up and I was trying to get her to come on Zoom. And say you know, we can talk, face to face. And she’s like oh no it’s computers I don’t like them. I don’t want to so I just did an end run. My girlfriend suggested you just do an end run around her and talk to the people there and set it up, you know and then just wheel my mom in front of the computer. So, she has no choice there, she’s like what’s going on here? They go well, we are just going to put something you want to see here in the library. And they just wheeled her in front and there I was, along with my girlfriend and her nephew from Wales and his wife. We were all on the screen talking to my mom and she was like “Oh, My Gosh” she was so stunned that this is how it worked. And I see like the simplest thing, like all I need to do is just arrange for the people there to send me a Zoom link and you know, we work out the time differences and away you go. But what I wanted to ask you about, which I just found really quite fascinating, was, is it true that watching Stargate was improving, sort of having a positive impact on your health?

Sommer Roy “Oh, My Gosh, Yeah, aside from my faith and my friends and my family, I consider that one of the foremost things in my life that really helped me, um, and there’s physical evidence of that as well because, I was in the hospital and it was after a major, major surgery I’d had, it was either a hip replacement or a back surgery, one or the other. And Stargate would come on the TV. And I would be a lot agitated, my blood pressure would be way too high. And then when Stargate the theme song would come on, my nurses would notice my blood pressure would go down and my stats would sort of go back to normal and for that hour or whenever, I would do really well. So, they got to sort of joking about it. And the doctor came in He said, “Well, let me just write that on your chart.” He said,” I’m prescribing Stargate for you every day, you need to watch.” So, it was actually on my medical chart “prescription for Stargate every day”. And it was so comforting to me. The music, the score, the actors, the adventure, the family feel, the humor.

Gary Jones: My acting, my acting.

Sommer Roy: Of course, Of course. Watching you dial that gate every day.

Gary Jones: I didn’t want to have to put it in there myself, because it sounded like you weren’t getting to that part.

Sommer Roy: Oh no, trust me, I would. Because without you, nobody would go through the gate.

Gary Jones: Exactly! So, like, there you go! That’s incredible, you know, I didn’t know that I find that really fascinating. To the whole kind of like I guess it’s like dopamine or whatever. You know or that it releases a chemical that makes you actually feel better and relax or change you on a kind of molecular level or whatever, you know? I think that is a very cool thing to know. Because I have talked to other fans who have told me how over the years Stargate SG-1 got them through all this trauma in their lives.

Sommer Roy: Yeah, yeah.

Gary Jones: When I first heard that I’m like, I was like what, no. Seriously? And not in kind of -I wasn’t blowing it off but I was more like really taken aback. Of the kind of power of this show.
You know, like, it really, what can you say about this show? I laugh about it because I kept doing conventions after the show was well off the air and then it was in re-runs and now it’s just been picked up by Netflix.

Sommer Roy: Yeah, yeah, I’m so excited about that.

Gary Jones: I cannot. I was like, what? As soon as I saw that, I actually texted Amanda Tapping. And I said, “It literally is the show that won’t die”. It will not die. She wrote she’s like “Oh, My Gosh” “Can you believe it?” You know. We were both like, Wow. It’s almost as Iconic as shows like Seinfeld or you know these shows that you kinda know what you’re gonna get. You know? You can see why Netflix would want um something like Stargate to be on their roster because it’s almost like a no brainer.

Sommer Roy: Definitely. And the fans of this particular franchise are absolutely so loyal and so they cherish the show. Even the younger generations that are growing up sort of outside the Stargate era.You know, are picking up on it, and loving the show. And creating more online word of mouth.Online babble about it. And getting it out there and more known. Wonderful people, like David, who is doing shows, and highlighting the actors, and the writers, and all of that. It’s just something that I think sticks with people, and they are passing that on to the next generation. Which I think is absolutely wonderful.

Gary Jones: Yeah, yeah, one time, another time that I got to see the impact of the fans was a few years ago. A friend of mine had said to me. I wasn’t on twitter and a friend of mine said “You should get on Twitter”. It’s good for you. This is back when you could only write like 140 characters. You know up to 280 But back in the day and I said to him, “Why? What’s the big deal? He saiDavid Read believe it or not the constraint of 140 characters would be perfect for you in terms of writing jokes. Because I was like Oh, Ok. And He was right. So, I get on to Twitter. And I’m just trying to figure out, “How do I get followers?” I didn’t know what to do or who was out there. I was just trying to learn about this animal that was called Twitter. I looked at other comedians like Steve Martin and Bill Murray and I just saw, I mean they have like thousands of followers. But I was watching their, watching what they wrote. And it was very much them. And I thought well, I can’t that’s just who they are. I can’t immolate that. So, what am I gonna do? So I literally, I used to get the newspaper delivered, I would go through that newspaper and I would look for headlines.
That I thought had the potential to be a joke. So, a daily current event that happened right then and I thought Oh, that’s funny. I can turn that into a joke. With the constraint of writing 140 characters. So, it was really cool. And I was going along and gaining one to two followers every couple of days or something. It was like climbing a mountain, it was fairly laborious. And people would go oh that’s kind of funny and then they would follow me. One day this woman, her name is Karen Ford, and she lives in Newfoundland. And she just wrote to me. I posted a joke, and she wrote to me and said “Are you Gary Jones from, Stargate?” I was like Oh! So, I just wrote her back and I was like,“Yeah, I’m the gate technician”. and she goes “Oh my Gosh!” and then there was like a flood of Stargate fans that just poured into my feed. I couldn’t believe it. I was like “What?” And so Karen Ford, it turns out, here and her husband ran a convention in Newfoundland, In Sant John’s called Sci-Fi on the Rock. And I just thought, then I found out that, that’s why she even knew who I was. And was asking if I was Gary Jones from Stargate. And so I said uh, She told me what she did and organized this convention. I said “Well, you have to invite me”. You’ve got to invite me out there. And she said “Well, yeah but we are booked for this year”. And I don’t know what came over me, but I said “No, No, I’ve got to come this year, you gotta make it happen”. She’s like “Uh, ok.” So, she talked to her husband who was in charge of booking. Next thing I know I’m on a plane to Newfoundland.

Sommer Roy: Wow.

Gary Jones: And I went to the Sci-Fi on the Rock convention. And it was fantastic. And then there was another guy. Another city on the other side of Newfoundland, that held their own convention too. That guy was at this, Sci-fi on the Rock and he said “Oh. I want you to come to my convention.”

Sommer Roy: Oh, how nice.

Gary Jones: I ended up going to two conventions. At two times in newfoundland. And then, there was a fan from Prague. And this woman just DM’d me and said, “Have you ever come to the Prague convention?” And I said “No. But I‘d love to.” And she said “Well, I know the person who runs the convention”.

Sommer Roy: Goodness!

Gary Jones: Seriously, I said “Give him my info, Give me his info.” And I wrote to the guy, emailed him, he invited me out and I went out and uh, Jennifer Spence, who was one of the actors in Stargate Universe. She uh. She was out there too. And so, I went out there and I spent the weekend in Prague. And this is all to me, I just joined the dots all the way back to the Stargate fans.

Sommer Roy: Right.

Gary Jones: Meeting them through Twitter. That’s just an example, kind of like the power of the show and how many fans are out there. It was almost like, plugging the plug out of a dam and it just like the water just came pouring out. But I didn’t know what was behind it. You know, what I mean?

Sommer Roy: Yeah, yeah, exactly the fans are absolutely amazing. I was lucky enough to be chosen as a super fan. Because I had submitted a video. I guess a lot of people applied and I was lucky enough to be chosen. I have a lot of medical stuff so it’s really hard for me to get out. But, It just so happened that a lot of my medical stuff has been wrapping up and I could travel. And I’ve just met the best people. And even you and the actors all seem like the best group. Down to earth, you know, sometimes you meet your idols, I guess, and you are disappointed.You know what I mean? Because they’re not exactly who you think they are. It’s not that you are your character but the fact that the actors and the writers also care about the fans. It says a lot about who you are. I think that what draws a lot of people to you guys still. You guys just have the ability to interact with us in a way that we feel like you really, really care. Because it seems like you genuinely do.

Gary Jones: Well for me… I mean that’s lovely to hear but it took a bit of getting used to for me to be honest. You know, starting out just going to my first conventions. But what I discovered after a while was, and this was like the common denominator, it was that it was a community. And I was being invited into a community. So, the fact that I was being invited in, I didn’t feel kind of distanced or separate from it. I think I did at first to be honest only because I was like,
What is this world? Why does anybody want to talk to me? I’m just a supporting guy on-

Sommer Roy: NO!

Gary Jones No, Seriously, I’ve never done conventions before, so I didn’t know that world.

Sommer Roy: Yeah, yeah.

Gary Jones: So when they first asked me to do one in Vancouver. They said we want you to come out and do, I think it was Gate-Con, I think, and I was like, no, I don’t think so. They’re like Yeah, you should. And I was like, well no, come on, the fans don’t know me. And I used to think that the camera would pass me like this, you know, like, nobody even knows who I am. They go like. Yeah, You’re the chevron guy! And I was like, “What? Are you serious”? So, they told me all about it. So it was jarring at first and very- I was trying to find my sea legs. But once I got into it and going to enough conventions you meet the same people over and over again. So many of the fans go to the conventions, So I’ve actually found myself like in Germany and the U.S. going like “Hey, I know you! Like “Oh my Gosh” you know”? And it’s really great, like it’s genuinely lovely to see these people. And it’s kind of amazing to think they will take their holiday time. They will book their holidays, and they will travel to a convention. Because they love Stargate so much that they want to talk to the fans, to the actors.

Sommer Roy: Exactly. Exactly, it’s such a great experience for me. I feel like it’s something that has got me through so much. And to actually see kind of behind the scenes and meet some of the people who helped create that entire world, it’s just fascinating to me. And is something that is very close to my heart. It’s very, very, much appreciated.

Gary Jones: And you know the people that are on the show, they are just like regular people, they’re actors, they are playing characters. But in my experience, it would be, really weird for me to see somebody that I know who is a friend on the show, sort of not be like that in front of fans. Like, they are just the people I know from the show. They are genuine, fun, smart and creative, lovely people. I mean that’s partly why they got hired for the show because they bring that to their acting and then they are able to translate that to the fans.

Sommer Roy: Yes, yeah, exactly. Well, I hope one day to meet all of you, because see, secretly, I think I’m part furling, so you know, I’m a little short some people might say so I always just had the same Furlings just sort of sound like my people. One day, one day, I might be on the show as a Furling. That’s like the lifelong dream.

Gary Jones: That’s hilarious.

Sommer Roy I did a DNA test recently, and one of the things I’m quite interested in is Egyptian mythology. Ended up being a lot of my heritage from Egypt, and that area.

Gary Jones: Really?

Sommer Roy: Yeah, but there’s a little bit of my DNA they couldn’t figure out that’s the Furling part. That’s the Furling.

Gary Jones: That’s hilarious. Well, listen Sommer, it’s been great to see you again and chat with you and it’s just wonderful. And I look forward to the next time we talk. It’s always a blast talking to you.

Sommer Roy I I so much enjoy talking to you too, Gary and thank you so much for having me it’s been a joy.
And I love hearing your stories, you just have the best stories.

Gary Jones: Great. Thanks a lot. Bye, Sommer.

Sommer Roy: Bye

Gary Jones: Hey everybody, thanks for watching this episode. Hey, do you want to share your Stargate story on air with me? Email the show at [email protected]. That’s [email protected]. Tell us a little about how Stargate has helped you grow as a person. Or affected your life in a positive way. And I’ll be recording more fan interviews in 2021, and you might be next! See you next time.