Star Trek con part 1: cast member one-on-ones
As I may have mentioned about fifty times, this weekend I went with 
iggyw to a 50th anniversary Star Trek convention in New York! Various cast members from all the series and movies attended, plus writers, directors, tie-in novel authors and editors, the organizers of the first Trek con back in the '70s, ancillary media producers such as podcasters and bloggers, people who've reconstructed sets and props, several thousand "ordinary" fans like us, NASA employees, vendors, etc.
My first con was actually the 25th Star Trek anniversary when I was 10 years old; Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner came to Long Island to do their shtick. My mom won the tickets on a radio show and she and my dad bought me a little TNG comm badge when we got there. So coming back for the 50th felt all the more meaningful. And poignant, of course, with the loss of Nimoy. I'm forever grateful to have had the opportunity to hear him speak at length in 2011 at a temple in Maryland.
(A few people spoke about Anton Yelchin, too, from the heart. But there was no official programming to memorialize him, whereas there were at least three events in Nimoy's honor. Strange and sad.)
For me, the main reason to go to an "official"/top-down con, with all the costs and crowds and tacky commercialism, is to meet celebrities and watch them interact with one another. I am very happy with how things turned out on that front. Details below!
A future post will cover the many panels we tried out, plus the excellent cosplay, dinner with
coffeeandink, and other miscellany. Just crunched for time this week with work stuff.
One-on-one interactions
This con in particular appealed to me because two-thirds of the Deep Space Nine cast came. ♥ ♥ ♥ (For those of you who don't know, I grew up on TOS and TNG but DS9 is the series of my heart.) I went when the con opened on Friday with the hope of short lines so I could collect autographs for this poster of the station that hung on my bedroom wall for my entire adolescence and that I still had rolled up in the closet at my dad's house.
Mission: successful. Click for bigger.
Armin Shimerman was the only one in the DS9 autographing area for about the first 20 minutes. He set up his table and then came over to personally greet the few of us in line. Asked us our names, where we were from, etc. What a sweetheart. Introduced us to his wife, Kitty Swink, who'd come too. Joked that he'd always been the first one on set so being early for autographs was fitting (although really he was just on time and everyone else was late). Later, when I unrolled my poster, he pointed out where Quark's Bar was located, and then with my encouragement, drew an arrow to it from his signature. :)
I confess to a slight disappointment with Rene Auberjonois. I'd met him briefly a couple of times at Broadway stage doors/backstage in the early 2000s and remembered him as being jovial and chatty. Maybe he was just tired-he'd indicated as much on Twitter on his way to NY and also said in person that he was late that morning because it had taken an hour to get to the convention center from his hotel by car-but I couldn't get any traction when I tried to explain how much I loved his performance as Odo. Of course I didn't expect him to remember me, so it didn't bother me that it didn't ring a bell when I said I'd also enjoyed him in Sly Fox and Dance of the Vampires, but I wasn't sure what to do with his reply of "You must have been a baby!" I took another stab at it the next day but still not great. Oh, well.
No such trouble with Nana Visitor or Terry Farrell! They were all smiles and nice-to-meet-you's. Possibly they are androids who had been put in smile mode; they look like they haven't aged a day since the show ended. Gorgeous and friendly. TF had just signed for a diverse group of little girls with Trill spots. She exclaimed over
iggyw's blue hair. When she signed my poster, she put "Terry Farrell, J. Dax" and I joked that we all know there's only one true Dax, to which she said, "Fuck yeah," replaced the "J." with a heart, and added, "I, Terry Farrell, am Dax and always will be. xx" Then she shared some choice opinions about her character's demise and replacement. Also we made fun of Ira Steven Behr. She swore a lot; it was great. Beautiful handwriting, too.
Uh and on Saturday
iggyw and I were standing around talking to a fellow fan in the atrium about her thesis on time travel narrative structures when a passing Nana Visitor stopped by to chat with some other cluster of attendees next to us. She had in tow a young man who was the spitting image of Alexander Siddig and therefore had to be their son Django, born during the series and now, impossibly, twenty years old, looking even older.
iggyw kindly did not complain when I gripped her sleeve during my slight case of death by nearby Siddig offspring (confirmed less than a minute later by Nana's introduction), nor when I fanned myself all the way up 10th Avenue as we searched for dinner. Nnnnh, that whole family is gorgeous.
I found it interesting over the weekend how my fondness for a character didn't always correlate with the length or enjoyability of a conversation with an actor/actress. Another case in point: Cirroc Lofton. I don't have a ton of feelings about Jake Sisko, but we got to talking about the cultural impacts of Star Trek from technology to social commentary, including "Far Beyond the Stars," when Jake was shot by police. He had a lot to say. I mentioned that it was nice to have someone on the show who was around my age and whose character turned out to be a writer, and then we started talking about careers, too. He must have kept us going at his table for ten minutes. The benefits of no one else being in line....
Not much to say about Michael Dorn. He was handsome and perfectly nice, even though he tried to steal my silver marker. :)
Levar Burton, despite having doubtless heard the same message a thousand times, gave me a serious-sounding thank you and a fist bump when I thanked him as a child of the '80s for both Geordi and Reading Rainbow and for continuing to work on programs to improve children's literacy. Seems like a real down-to-earth guy.
It occurred to me later than it should have that even though my feelings about the reboot movies are complicated, I have enjoyed watching Bruce Greenwood and Peter Weller-the only con guests from the new films after Karl Urban and what's-her-name who played young Carol Marcus canceled-in plenty of roles besides sexy Captain Pike and villainous Admiral Marcus. So I stopped by their autograph lines as well. Not to buy anything but just to meet them.
(This whole setup is so awkward where you as a fan are trying to have a Moment with someone who played a character who probably means a lot to you while staring at a sign that says $50 or "no selfies" or whatever. I guess at least it was good that the organizers let you in even if you couldn't or didn't want to pay for something.)
Anyway, by the end of the day on Saturday there was almost no one in line for either of them, so I didn't feel bad taking up money-making time just to tell Bruce Greenwood that I liked him in his collection of Atom Egoyan films (The Sweet Hereafter, Exotica, etc.) and Wild Orchid (can't believe I brought that up, I might as well have said "I liked seeing you roll around naked on the floor with that woman that one time") and that his (spoiler?) death scene in Into Darkness was one of the only affecting moments for me in the movie. He asked my name and shook my hand and had pleasant if not extended responses to the above. His face is still a sexy face even though he has grown a giant handlebar horseshoe moustache for his current role.
Peter Weller also proved to be a cool cat (if eccentric), to borrow his lingo. After finishing up a conversation with Levar Burton, he waved me forward, listened to my little intro asking if it was okay to say hello without doing an autograph, and proceeded to intensely shake my hand and get my name and ask all kinds of follow-on questions about where I'm from and how long my mom has been a Trek fan and whether she's seen Into Darkness or just the original series, and then that led to a debate about the value of Into Darkness as a remix and whether or not Marcus and Khan are straight-up bad guys, followed by appreciation of the tragically canceled show Odyssey 5, which was my favorite of his ("You're old enough to remember that?" he asked. "I'm 35," I said. "You look 12," he replied. One day people will stop mistaking me for a student? Maybe?), his current directing projects and what it was like to film the "unfilmable novel" Naked Lunch (bad, he said; he was in a bad place at the time; he hates Toronto now). He told me to wait a sec in the middle so he could sign an autograph for someone else and then got back into it. So that was nice. Although of course the fun thing about introversion is that by the end I was like HOW DO I EXIT THIS CONVERSATION.
If I come down with con crud, though, I'm blaming it on him. He sounded sick.
In conclusion, an upside of being a fan of cast members of a less popular Trek series or of minor-Trek-role but long-career character actors is they have short autograph lines. You could practically hear crickets in the Star Trek: Enterprise section, while the TNG area drew crowds and Walter Koenig's fans sent up resounding cheers each time he came out to sign.
Last but not least, I sprung for a DS9 cast photo. What tipped the scales in favor of the pricey treat was the idea to print out recent head shots of the missing three cast members (Alexander Siddig, Avery Brooks and Colm Meaney) and hope the others would be willing to hold them up. There was a scary moment as I got closer in line when one of the handlers looked at my file folders and started to make motions about them not being allowed, but what he said was, "No presentations," and when I explained that it was just pictures to include in the shot, he said no problem. (And the people behind me said, "You didn't!")
The cast was willing to humor me, hooray; I think someone said it was a nice idea, and Nana said they were good shots. She held Siddig's, Cirroc held Brooks' as I'd guessed he might, and then Rene on the other end took Meaney's. And oh, I am so happy with how it turned out and happy I decided to do it. I've loved DS9 for 23 years; it's clearly not leaving my heart anytime soon. Let us skip the introspection this realization inspired re: whether I ought to have grown and changed more in the intervening decades.
Look how cute they are. And we inadvertently color-coordinated! \o/ Click for bigger.
Next post: cast panels (DS9, TNG, VOY, TOS-sort-of) non-cast panels, cosplay contest, etc.
Originally posted at http://bironic.dreamwidth.org/342420.html, where there are
comments.
iggyw to a 50th anniversary Star Trek convention in New York! Various cast members from all the series and movies attended, plus writers, directors, tie-in novel authors and editors, the organizers of the first Trek con back in the '70s, ancillary media producers such as podcasters and bloggers, people who've reconstructed sets and props, several thousand "ordinary" fans like us, NASA employees, vendors, etc.
My first con was actually the 25th Star Trek anniversary when I was 10 years old; Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner came to Long Island to do their shtick. My mom won the tickets on a radio show and she and my dad bought me a little TNG comm badge when we got there. So coming back for the 50th felt all the more meaningful. And poignant, of course, with the loss of Nimoy. I'm forever grateful to have had the opportunity to hear him speak at length in 2011 at a temple in Maryland.
(A few people spoke about Anton Yelchin, too, from the heart. But there was no official programming to memorialize him, whereas there were at least three events in Nimoy's honor. Strange and sad.)
For me, the main reason to go to an "official"/top-down con, with all the costs and crowds and tacky commercialism, is to meet celebrities and watch them interact with one another. I am very happy with how things turned out on that front. Details below!
A future post will cover the many panels we tried out, plus the excellent cosplay, dinner with
coffeeandink, and other miscellany. Just crunched for time this week with work stuff.
One-on-one interactions
This con in particular appealed to me because two-thirds of the Deep Space Nine cast came. ♥ ♥ ♥ (For those of you who don't know, I grew up on TOS and TNG but DS9 is the series of my heart.) I went when the con opened on Friday with the hope of short lines so I could collect autographs for this poster of the station that hung on my bedroom wall for my entire adolescence and that I still had rolled up in the closet at my dad's house.
Mission: successful. Click for bigger.
Armin Shimerman was the only one in the DS9 autographing area for about the first 20 minutes. He set up his table and then came over to personally greet the few of us in line. Asked us our names, where we were from, etc. What a sweetheart. Introduced us to his wife, Kitty Swink, who'd come too. Joked that he'd always been the first one on set so being early for autographs was fitting (although really he was just on time and everyone else was late). Later, when I unrolled my poster, he pointed out where Quark's Bar was located, and then with my encouragement, drew an arrow to it from his signature. :)
I confess to a slight disappointment with Rene Auberjonois. I'd met him briefly a couple of times at Broadway stage doors/backstage in the early 2000s and remembered him as being jovial and chatty. Maybe he was just tired-he'd indicated as much on Twitter on his way to NY and also said in person that he was late that morning because it had taken an hour to get to the convention center from his hotel by car-but I couldn't get any traction when I tried to explain how much I loved his performance as Odo. Of course I didn't expect him to remember me, so it didn't bother me that it didn't ring a bell when I said I'd also enjoyed him in Sly Fox and Dance of the Vampires, but I wasn't sure what to do with his reply of "You must have been a baby!" I took another stab at it the next day but still not great. Oh, well.
No such trouble with Nana Visitor or Terry Farrell! They were all smiles and nice-to-meet-you's. Possibly they are androids who had been put in smile mode; they look like they haven't aged a day since the show ended. Gorgeous and friendly. TF had just signed for a diverse group of little girls with Trill spots. She exclaimed over
iggyw's blue hair. When she signed my poster, she put "Terry Farrell, J. Dax" and I joked that we all know there's only one true Dax, to which she said, "Fuck yeah," replaced the "J." with a heart, and added, "I, Terry Farrell, am Dax and always will be. xx" Then she shared some choice opinions about her character's demise and replacement. Also we made fun of Ira Steven Behr. She swore a lot; it was great. Beautiful handwriting, too.
Uh and on Saturday
iggyw and I were standing around talking to a fellow fan in the atrium about her thesis on time travel narrative structures when a passing Nana Visitor stopped by to chat with some other cluster of attendees next to us. She had in tow a young man who was the spitting image of Alexander Siddig and therefore had to be their son Django, born during the series and now, impossibly, twenty years old, looking even older.
iggyw kindly did not complain when I gripped her sleeve during my slight case of death by nearby Siddig offspring (confirmed less than a minute later by Nana's introduction), nor when I fanned myself all the way up 10th Avenue as we searched for dinner. Nnnnh, that whole family is gorgeous.
I found it interesting over the weekend how my fondness for a character didn't always correlate with the length or enjoyability of a conversation with an actor/actress. Another case in point: Cirroc Lofton. I don't have a ton of feelings about Jake Sisko, but we got to talking about the cultural impacts of Star Trek from technology to social commentary, including "Far Beyond the Stars," when Jake was shot by police. He had a lot to say. I mentioned that it was nice to have someone on the show who was around my age and whose character turned out to be a writer, and then we started talking about careers, too. He must have kept us going at his table for ten minutes. The benefits of no one else being in line....
Not much to say about Michael Dorn. He was handsome and perfectly nice, even though he tried to steal my silver marker. :)
Levar Burton, despite having doubtless heard the same message a thousand times, gave me a serious-sounding thank you and a fist bump when I thanked him as a child of the '80s for both Geordi and Reading Rainbow and for continuing to work on programs to improve children's literacy. Seems like a real down-to-earth guy.
It occurred to me later than it should have that even though my feelings about the reboot movies are complicated, I have enjoyed watching Bruce Greenwood and Peter Weller-the only con guests from the new films after Karl Urban and what's-her-name who played young Carol Marcus canceled-in plenty of roles besides sexy Captain Pike and villainous Admiral Marcus. So I stopped by their autograph lines as well. Not to buy anything but just to meet them.
(This whole setup is so awkward where you as a fan are trying to have a Moment with someone who played a character who probably means a lot to you while staring at a sign that says $50 or "no selfies" or whatever. I guess at least it was good that the organizers let you in even if you couldn't or didn't want to pay for something.)
Anyway, by the end of the day on Saturday there was almost no one in line for either of them, so I didn't feel bad taking up money-making time just to tell Bruce Greenwood that I liked him in his collection of Atom Egoyan films (The Sweet Hereafter, Exotica, etc.) and Wild Orchid (can't believe I brought that up, I might as well have said "I liked seeing you roll around naked on the floor with that woman that one time") and that his (spoiler?) death scene in Into Darkness was one of the only affecting moments for me in the movie. He asked my name and shook my hand and had pleasant if not extended responses to the above. His face is still a sexy face even though he has grown a giant handlebar horseshoe moustache for his current role.
Peter Weller also proved to be a cool cat (if eccentric), to borrow his lingo. After finishing up a conversation with Levar Burton, he waved me forward, listened to my little intro asking if it was okay to say hello without doing an autograph, and proceeded to intensely shake my hand and get my name and ask all kinds of follow-on questions about where I'm from and how long my mom has been a Trek fan and whether she's seen Into Darkness or just the original series, and then that led to a debate about the value of Into Darkness as a remix and whether or not Marcus and Khan are straight-up bad guys, followed by appreciation of the tragically canceled show Odyssey 5, which was my favorite of his ("You're old enough to remember that?" he asked. "I'm 35," I said. "You look 12," he replied. One day people will stop mistaking me for a student? Maybe?), his current directing projects and what it was like to film the "unfilmable novel" Naked Lunch (bad, he said; he was in a bad place at the time; he hates Toronto now). He told me to wait a sec in the middle so he could sign an autograph for someone else and then got back into it. So that was nice. Although of course the fun thing about introversion is that by the end I was like HOW DO I EXIT THIS CONVERSATION.
If I come down with con crud, though, I'm blaming it on him. He sounded sick.
In conclusion, an upside of being a fan of cast members of a less popular Trek series or of minor-Trek-role but long-career character actors is they have short autograph lines. You could practically hear crickets in the Star Trek: Enterprise section, while the TNG area drew crowds and Walter Koenig's fans sent up resounding cheers each time he came out to sign.
Last but not least, I sprung for a DS9 cast photo. What tipped the scales in favor of the pricey treat was the idea to print out recent head shots of the missing three cast members (Alexander Siddig, Avery Brooks and Colm Meaney) and hope the others would be willing to hold them up. There was a scary moment as I got closer in line when one of the handlers looked at my file folders and started to make motions about them not being allowed, but what he said was, "No presentations," and when I explained that it was just pictures to include in the shot, he said no problem. (And the people behind me said, "You didn't!")
The cast was willing to humor me, hooray; I think someone said it was a nice idea, and Nana said they were good shots. She held Siddig's, Cirroc held Brooks' as I'd guessed he might, and then Rene on the other end took Meaney's. And oh, I am so happy with how it turned out and happy I decided to do it. I've loved DS9 for 23 years; it's clearly not leaving my heart anytime soon. Let us skip the introspection this realization inspired re: whether I ought to have grown and changed more in the intervening decades.
Look how cute they are. And we inadvertently color-coordinated! \o/ Click for bigger.
Next post: cast panels (DS9, TNG, VOY, TOS-sort-of) non-cast panels, cosplay contest, etc.
Originally posted at http://bironic.dreamwidth.org/342420.html, where there are
comments.