Azkatraz: Day 3 Recap (or: Long Post is Loooooong)
Took me forever and a day to get this written up. Eeep! I'd meant to have this up sooner. This was probably the most packed day of the con, though, so maybe I shouldn't be surprised that it took so long. In any case, I promised you a tale of Welcoming Feasts and a BNF breakfast meeting and a night at Ye Olde Harry Potter-Themed Drag Club, and so you shall have one.
Day Three started with the three of us waking up hangover-free-luckily so, because we had plans to have breakfast with bethbethbeth! (Squeeeee, say the fangirls!) We pulled ourselves together pretty quickly and then headed off down Mason to the creatively named Café Mason, where the booths are huge and the breakfast menu is fairly impressive as well. Who knew there were so many variations on Eggs Benedict? (For the record, mine were Irish.)
Breakfast and coffee were good, but the conversation was better. bethbethbeth is just as brilliant and funny and warm and all-around fabulous in person as she is online, something that I'm certain many of you already know. But we had a wonderful time talking about any number of topics, from (amongst many other things) Snape's characterization and fanon assumptions to the insularity of ships to het shippers who read slash and slashers who sometimes read het. I'm still mulling some of her insights, which should tell you something about the quality and depth of the conversation. In short: great breakfast, and I'm SO glad that I got the chance to meet and talk with Beth. It was one of the highlights of Azkatraz.
Afterward, machshefa, mundungus42 and I went back to the Parc55, because we'd dawdled so long over breakfast and coffee and discussion that it was already nearly time for the Welcoming Feast, and they needed time to get into their Death Eater garb. (Not having any Death Eater garb, I showed solidarity by dressing in black.)
By the time we made it downstairs to the Welcoming Feast, it was already in progress, and it took some work getting through the costumed crowds to try and locate our group. (Although in the process we saw some amazing costumes, including a Dead!Snape, complete with blood and a knitted Nagini, tonksinger' as a picture-perfect Marietta Edgecombe and chibitoaster's astonishingly clever Gilderoy Lockhart costume.) Finally, we managed to locate dickgloucester, themoreyouclean, qui_quae_quod pern_dragon and others, looking all Death Eater-y. (Well, mostly. Themoreyouclean was a good little Gryffindor, unfortunately made into a target of Death Eater wrath for the photos. *g*) pythia_delphi was looking marvelous in her interpretation of Nagini (the eye makeup alone was a sight to see), and Dicky and Machshefa were dressed as twin Death Eaters in identical robes, a sight that was worth several pictures. Later, the Dark Lord himself appeared (Mr. Droxy, in one of the most amazing costumes I've ever seen), accompanied by Droxy!Bellatrix, who was both glamorous and evil, not to mention beautifully corseted.
After the introductory speech of the feast, a glimpse of Percy Weasley and much posing for and taking of photographs, we retreated from the Welcoming Feast to have a first look around the Vendor Room, which also hosted the drabble and drawble booths, as well as a gallery of the art for auction. I spent a lot of time ogling the House of Wormwood booth, because their stuff is just SO creative and gorgeous-incredibly expensive, but gorgeous. Although they had various bath and body potions, the big draws were these fabulous witchy hats and different varieties of what was essentially a Magical utility belt, a sort of organizer/fanny pack (sorry, Brits; I know that's a disgusting term for you) for you to tie around your waist or hips, with various pockets and a holster for your wand. They came in different fabrics and styles, to match your character's costume, and I thought they were awfully clever. The hats were even better; I can't do justice to the exquisite attention to detail on them, with their spiders and gears and feathers. They were wonderfully steampunky. (Seriously, you need to check out the website. The gallery of hats is worth a look.)
We checked out some of the other vendors-a lot of people hawking books, house-affiliated jewelry, the Tonner dolls (some of them rather creepy in their resemblance to the actors, others not so much-the Lucius doll looks like he just got a whiff of bad cabbage). Whimsic Alley was a lot of fun; they offered much less fancy hats, along with light-up wands, bumper stickers, t-shirts, hats and scarves and the like. They had street signs featuring various HP locations (The Burrow, Grimmauld Place, Privet Drive, and so on), and I was amused to note the Spinner's End sign was one of the first ones sold! They also had an enormous selection of buttons and pins, including one that featured a picture of Snape, paired with the caption "WILF." (Do I need to tell you what that means? Really?) Unsurprisingly, this one was very popular, and it was sold out well before the end of the con. ;-)
As for the art gallery, everything was beautiful. It was such a treat to see the art in person, because there are details that just don't quite translate when you're viewing it on the internet. I know I looked at pokeystar's art, which made me smile, and they had a lot of character portraits by foxestacado, all of which were stunning, particularly the one of Luna and the Giant Squid and the one of Snape and Hermione's wedding. There was a triptych by zephyr that was very nice, and I wish I could remember more. I positively squeed over spidermoth's set of HP merpeople dolls, because they're even more amazing in person than they are online. And yes, okay, I did molest them check under their little golden loincloths to see if they were anatomically correct. (They were. All of them. Including Luna.)
Lucius Malfoy (alabastard) showed up in the vendor room as well, and I had to stop and snap some pictures of him with a lovely Death Eater debutante on each arm.
After we were all shopped out, we headed back to our rooms for a bit, where I met back up with mundungus42 and we worked out a tentative schedule for which sessions to catch that day. We headed off to the Cross-Gen panel and were a wee bit late coming in, because we had trouble finding the room-but at least we found seats. Unfortunately, I missed leela_cat's introduction, but I did catch alisanne's. All in all, it was a very good panel, with some lively and insightful discussion from the audience, although the audience focus was very slash-heavy-which is fine for me, because I write some slash, and God knows I read plenty of it, but I couldn't help but wonder if we might have done more about teasing out the core appeal of cross-gen pairings by comparing those things that remain constant across slash, het and femmeslash varieties of cross-gen. But that's just me musing to myself, and the panel was great as it was. It pushed me to reexamine and clarify my own thoughts about cross-gen pairings, slash and het alike-why they work, what makes them work, how the power dynamic functions, what constitutes an equilibrium, and so on-which is always a very good thing. I also got some good plot bunnies out of this session, so well done there!
mundungus42, pythia_delphi and I headed next to the "Removing the Rose-Colored Glasses" panel, which was billed as a critique of the romance element in the books. The first two panelists lived up to that task, and I enjoyed their take on the removal of Ginny's agency and their exploration of Harry as Cinderfella and Harry as Gothic heroine (which discussion set off a furiously whispered discussion amongst the three of us about the degree to which Snape is a feminized and hence reviled and marginalized character, and whether Slytherin is a feminized house, and… well, you get the idea). The problem came when the third panelist spoke up and informed us that she disagreed with everything that had been said so far, and that, in contrast to the previous two panelists, she was going to give us a "literary" take on the romance.
Uh-oh, I thought. If she doesn't realize that the first two critiques were literary, then I have a bad feeling about this.
And it was justified.
I'm not going to rehash it here, but most of you will likely be happy that you skipped this one. The three of us walked out in the middle of an uncritical, "If JKR said this in an interview, it must be the Gospel Truth and Only Possible Interpretation" spiel, punctuated by the pronouncement that Ginny Weasley was a whore for daring to kiss boys other than Harry and was, in a word, "disgusting."
It's a good thing we were mostly out the door by then.
Luckily, walking out of that panel gave us the time to catch pir8fancier's presentation on the pacing of DH, where we caught up with Dicky, Machshefa, Minerva (annietalbot), and pyjamapants, who was… sewing pyjama pants. So meta! This panel was extremely popular, so much so that even the Dark Lord and Bellatrix dropped by to enjoy it. I was extremely fortunate to be granted a chocolate Dark Mark from Bella!
The presentation itself was marvelous. Pir8fancier is another of those people that I fangirl, but then, who doesn't fangirl her? She's thoughtful, intelligent and gracious, and I definitely enjoyed her autopsy of DH, incisively analyzing what went wrong where from the perspective of writing and plot mechanics. I think she came prepared for a more hostile crowd than she got, but in any case, she knew that the audience was with her when we all rolled our eyes at the mention of camping and the entire crowd groaned aloud when she called out the silliness of Ron suddenly being able to mimic Parseltongue, simply because the plot required it. There was much applause all around at the end of the presentation, and she earned it.
We'd originally planned to check out the "Brilliant, but Scary" presentation about Hermione, but decided to forgo it in favor of checking out the craft fair, since the silly schedule had the craft fair open for only one day, in direct competition with the rest of the programming. ~headdesk~ In any case, the craft fair was really very nice, with a lot of creative things to be seen. I picked up some postcards featuring foxestacado's portrait of Hermione and gazed around at the beaded jewelry, hand-carved wands, Honeydukes-like candies, scarves and the like.
One especially cute table was loaded with different stuffed Giant Squid dolls, very squishy and pretty, each one with a different name and look. Unthinkingly, I made a somewhat disgusting comment about do-it-yourself tentacle porn (you know you've been in fandom too long when you look at a pile of cute little squid plushies and your first thought is TENTACLE PORN), and in response I got a WAY TMI response from the vendor, who had apparently already taken an order for a special squid doll in… washable materials.
Ahem.
Anyway, since we had time to kill before heading off to the drag show later that evening, we headed off for a quick supper across the street to the Westfield Centre, where we made the best of what we thought was the only food court. (We weren't even close.) Burritos for everybody! In the process of getting them, there was this delightful conversational exchange:
Dicky: ~getting a soda~
Random Teenager: (looks at Dicky's robes) Are you a witch?
Dicky: (carefully) …I'm pretending to be a witch.
Random Teenager: Well, I'm a warlock!
Me: ~sporfle~
We killed some time after dinner by wandering around the mall (Pythia wanted to check out Hot Topic, where we all had a good laugh about the Edward Cullen body glitter) and taking some cosplay shots. At one point, we thought we caught Lucius Malfoy ordering a burrito, but it turned out that it was only alabastard. (Still the picture was fabulous!) Mundungus was still dressed as Tonks, so we had fun picking prissy, very not-Tonks stores out and taking shots of her mugging and checking out handbags and "transfiguring" the Hocus Pocus roses. Surprisingly, the salespeople were very friendly and helpful to us, even after we explained that we weren't really shopping. We also got a shot of Mundungus!Tonks mocking the HBP movie poster featuring broomstickcock!Ron. Sadly, as PJ was the one taking the shots and her camera was apparently lost, so were the photos. (Any luck on that, PJ? ~hopes~)
We came back and spent some time sitting in our room with Pythia and PJ (still working on her excellent PJ pants). This was really nice, just to be able to relax and talk in a more low-key setting. There are so few quiet moments during a con that I really cherished the ones that I had.
Eventually, we all set off for the drag show outing that amydmartin had organized. It was at a little drag bar in the Hayes Valley neighborhood called Marlena's, which was narrow and dark and papered in HP posters! (Apparently, Marlena, the owner, is a big Potter fan.) anonymous_plume generously offered to drive me, Mundungus42, Dicky and Pythia, and although we had a hell of a time trying to find a parking space, we did all have a lot of fun listening to Alan Rickman read The Return of the Native.
About Marlena's, I just can't say enough good things. This was THE highlight of the con in a lot of ways, and we just had so damn much fun. The drag queens were all completely fabulous, Marlena's staff were friendly and welcoming, the bartenders were generous, our group had absolutely packed the place full of very appreciative Death Eaters… it was a gigantic, noisy, happy lovefest, and it seemed to go on forever. I sat at the bar with Dicky, snapebeliever, Mundungus and droxy, and there was singing along and dancing and hugging and a LOT of tipping. Pythia_delphi is a true party animal! And at one point during the night, Droxy and Mr. Droxy were saluted by the whole bar, after they found out that she was a drag king. (Not that you would have guessed from her Bellatrix outfit.)
If you want a taste of what it was like, check out the video below of one of the headliners, Miss Snatch. (Video courtesy of pern_dragon, by the way, so all the credit and glory goes to her for recording and posting this.) Pern_dragon pointed out that Miss Snatch looks a bit like Snape in drag, and, well… see for yourselves:
And that wasn't even her best number.
Don't know how much more I can say about that night. We hooted and hollered and laughed all the way home (poor Anonymous_plume had the task of carting us all back, as we sniggered about the idea of Alan Rickman saying "intercoooourse"). We were very filled with good cheer and probably should have gone straight to bed when we hit the hotel, but instead we headed back to our rooms with Dicky and Pythia and spent a lot more time giggling and having fun and looking at photos. At one point, I do believe that Libby and I sang the "Feed the Birds" song from Mary Poppins, which evidently seemed like a good idea at the time. *g* (I think Dicky might have joined in, too. I'm a bit fuzzy.) Eventually, it dawned on us that Dicky and Machshefa were going to be presenting in the morning, and perhaps we should wake Pythia up and get everybody to bed.
So we did. Gigglingly. :D
That has to be in the top ten nights of my life, right there. I can't thank Amy enough for organizing it.
Day Three started with the three of us waking up hangover-free-luckily so, because we had plans to have breakfast with bethbethbeth! (Squeeeee, say the fangirls!) We pulled ourselves together pretty quickly and then headed off down Mason to the creatively named Café Mason, where the booths are huge and the breakfast menu is fairly impressive as well. Who knew there were so many variations on Eggs Benedict? (For the record, mine were Irish.)
Breakfast and coffee were good, but the conversation was better. bethbethbeth is just as brilliant and funny and warm and all-around fabulous in person as she is online, something that I'm certain many of you already know. But we had a wonderful time talking about any number of topics, from (amongst many other things) Snape's characterization and fanon assumptions to the insularity of ships to het shippers who read slash and slashers who sometimes read het. I'm still mulling some of her insights, which should tell you something about the quality and depth of the conversation. In short: great breakfast, and I'm SO glad that I got the chance to meet and talk with Beth. It was one of the highlights of Azkatraz.
Afterward, machshefa, mundungus42 and I went back to the Parc55, because we'd dawdled so long over breakfast and coffee and discussion that it was already nearly time for the Welcoming Feast, and they needed time to get into their Death Eater garb. (Not having any Death Eater garb, I showed solidarity by dressing in black.)
By the time we made it downstairs to the Welcoming Feast, it was already in progress, and it took some work getting through the costumed crowds to try and locate our group. (Although in the process we saw some amazing costumes, including a Dead!Snape, complete with blood and a knitted Nagini, tonksinger' as a picture-perfect Marietta Edgecombe and chibitoaster's astonishingly clever Gilderoy Lockhart costume.) Finally, we managed to locate dickgloucester, themoreyouclean, qui_quae_quod pern_dragon and others, looking all Death Eater-y. (Well, mostly. Themoreyouclean was a good little Gryffindor, unfortunately made into a target of Death Eater wrath for the photos. *g*) pythia_delphi was looking marvelous in her interpretation of Nagini (the eye makeup alone was a sight to see), and Dicky and Machshefa were dressed as twin Death Eaters in identical robes, a sight that was worth several pictures. Later, the Dark Lord himself appeared (Mr. Droxy, in one of the most amazing costumes I've ever seen), accompanied by Droxy!Bellatrix, who was both glamorous and evil, not to mention beautifully corseted.
After the introductory speech of the feast, a glimpse of Percy Weasley and much posing for and taking of photographs, we retreated from the Welcoming Feast to have a first look around the Vendor Room, which also hosted the drabble and drawble booths, as well as a gallery of the art for auction. I spent a lot of time ogling the House of Wormwood booth, because their stuff is just SO creative and gorgeous-incredibly expensive, but gorgeous. Although they had various bath and body potions, the big draws were these fabulous witchy hats and different varieties of what was essentially a Magical utility belt, a sort of organizer/fanny pack (sorry, Brits; I know that's a disgusting term for you) for you to tie around your waist or hips, with various pockets and a holster for your wand. They came in different fabrics and styles, to match your character's costume, and I thought they were awfully clever. The hats were even better; I can't do justice to the exquisite attention to detail on them, with their spiders and gears and feathers. They were wonderfully steampunky. (Seriously, you need to check out the website. The gallery of hats is worth a look.)
We checked out some of the other vendors-a lot of people hawking books, house-affiliated jewelry, the Tonner dolls (some of them rather creepy in their resemblance to the actors, others not so much-the Lucius doll looks like he just got a whiff of bad cabbage). Whimsic Alley was a lot of fun; they offered much less fancy hats, along with light-up wands, bumper stickers, t-shirts, hats and scarves and the like. They had street signs featuring various HP locations (The Burrow, Grimmauld Place, Privet Drive, and so on), and I was amused to note the Spinner's End sign was one of the first ones sold! They also had an enormous selection of buttons and pins, including one that featured a picture of Snape, paired with the caption "WILF." (Do I need to tell you what that means? Really?) Unsurprisingly, this one was very popular, and it was sold out well before the end of the con. ;-)
As for the art gallery, everything was beautiful. It was such a treat to see the art in person, because there are details that just don't quite translate when you're viewing it on the internet. I know I looked at pokeystar's art, which made me smile, and they had a lot of character portraits by foxestacado, all of which were stunning, particularly the one of Luna and the Giant Squid and the one of Snape and Hermione's wedding. There was a triptych by zephyr that was very nice, and I wish I could remember more. I positively squeed over spidermoth's set of HP merpeople dolls, because they're even more amazing in person than they are online. And yes, okay, I did molest them check under their little golden loincloths to see if they were anatomically correct. (They were. All of them. Including Luna.)
Lucius Malfoy (alabastard) showed up in the vendor room as well, and I had to stop and snap some pictures of him with a lovely Death Eater debutante on each arm.
After we were all shopped out, we headed back to our rooms for a bit, where I met back up with mundungus42 and we worked out a tentative schedule for which sessions to catch that day. We headed off to the Cross-Gen panel and were a wee bit late coming in, because we had trouble finding the room-but at least we found seats. Unfortunately, I missed leela_cat's introduction, but I did catch alisanne's. All in all, it was a very good panel, with some lively and insightful discussion from the audience, although the audience focus was very slash-heavy-which is fine for me, because I write some slash, and God knows I read plenty of it, but I couldn't help but wonder if we might have done more about teasing out the core appeal of cross-gen pairings by comparing those things that remain constant across slash, het and femmeslash varieties of cross-gen. But that's just me musing to myself, and the panel was great as it was. It pushed me to reexamine and clarify my own thoughts about cross-gen pairings, slash and het alike-why they work, what makes them work, how the power dynamic functions, what constitutes an equilibrium, and so on-which is always a very good thing. I also got some good plot bunnies out of this session, so well done there!
mundungus42, pythia_delphi and I headed next to the "Removing the Rose-Colored Glasses" panel, which was billed as a critique of the romance element in the books. The first two panelists lived up to that task, and I enjoyed their take on the removal of Ginny's agency and their exploration of Harry as Cinderfella and Harry as Gothic heroine (which discussion set off a furiously whispered discussion amongst the three of us about the degree to which Snape is a feminized and hence reviled and marginalized character, and whether Slytherin is a feminized house, and… well, you get the idea). The problem came when the third panelist spoke up and informed us that she disagreed with everything that had been said so far, and that, in contrast to the previous two panelists, she was going to give us a "literary" take on the romance.
Uh-oh, I thought. If she doesn't realize that the first two critiques were literary, then I have a bad feeling about this.
And it was justified.
I'm not going to rehash it here, but most of you will likely be happy that you skipped this one. The three of us walked out in the middle of an uncritical, "If JKR said this in an interview, it must be the Gospel Truth and Only Possible Interpretation" spiel, punctuated by the pronouncement that Ginny Weasley was a whore for daring to kiss boys other than Harry and was, in a word, "disgusting."
It's a good thing we were mostly out the door by then.
Luckily, walking out of that panel gave us the time to catch pir8fancier's presentation on the pacing of DH, where we caught up with Dicky, Machshefa, Minerva (annietalbot), and pyjamapants, who was… sewing pyjama pants. So meta! This panel was extremely popular, so much so that even the Dark Lord and Bellatrix dropped by to enjoy it. I was extremely fortunate to be granted a chocolate Dark Mark from Bella!
The presentation itself was marvelous. Pir8fancier is another of those people that I fangirl, but then, who doesn't fangirl her? She's thoughtful, intelligent and gracious, and I definitely enjoyed her autopsy of DH, incisively analyzing what went wrong where from the perspective of writing and plot mechanics. I think she came prepared for a more hostile crowd than she got, but in any case, she knew that the audience was with her when we all rolled our eyes at the mention of camping and the entire crowd groaned aloud when she called out the silliness of Ron suddenly being able to mimic Parseltongue, simply because the plot required it. There was much applause all around at the end of the presentation, and she earned it.
We'd originally planned to check out the "Brilliant, but Scary" presentation about Hermione, but decided to forgo it in favor of checking out the craft fair, since the silly schedule had the craft fair open for only one day, in direct competition with the rest of the programming. ~headdesk~ In any case, the craft fair was really very nice, with a lot of creative things to be seen. I picked up some postcards featuring foxestacado's portrait of Hermione and gazed around at the beaded jewelry, hand-carved wands, Honeydukes-like candies, scarves and the like.
One especially cute table was loaded with different stuffed Giant Squid dolls, very squishy and pretty, each one with a different name and look. Unthinkingly, I made a somewhat disgusting comment about do-it-yourself tentacle porn (you know you've been in fandom too long when you look at a pile of cute little squid plushies and your first thought is TENTACLE PORN), and in response I got a WAY TMI response from the vendor, who had apparently already taken an order for a special squid doll in… washable materials.
Ahem.
Anyway, since we had time to kill before heading off to the drag show later that evening, we headed off for a quick supper across the street to the Westfield Centre, where we made the best of what we thought was the only food court. (We weren't even close.) Burritos for everybody! In the process of getting them, there was this delightful conversational exchange:
Dicky: ~getting a soda~
Random Teenager: (looks at Dicky's robes) Are you a witch?
Dicky: (carefully) …I'm pretending to be a witch.
Random Teenager: Well, I'm a warlock!
Me: ~sporfle~
We killed some time after dinner by wandering around the mall (Pythia wanted to check out Hot Topic, where we all had a good laugh about the Edward Cullen body glitter) and taking some cosplay shots. At one point, we thought we caught Lucius Malfoy ordering a burrito, but it turned out that it was only alabastard. (Still the picture was fabulous!) Mundungus was still dressed as Tonks, so we had fun picking prissy, very not-Tonks stores out and taking shots of her mugging and checking out handbags and "transfiguring" the Hocus Pocus roses. Surprisingly, the salespeople were very friendly and helpful to us, even after we explained that we weren't really shopping. We also got a shot of Mundungus!Tonks mocking the HBP movie poster featuring broomstickcock!Ron. Sadly, as PJ was the one taking the shots and her camera was apparently lost, so were the photos. (Any luck on that, PJ? ~hopes~)
We came back and spent some time sitting in our room with Pythia and PJ (still working on her excellent PJ pants). This was really nice, just to be able to relax and talk in a more low-key setting. There are so few quiet moments during a con that I really cherished the ones that I had.
Eventually, we all set off for the drag show outing that amydmartin had organized. It was at a little drag bar in the Hayes Valley neighborhood called Marlena's, which was narrow and dark and papered in HP posters! (Apparently, Marlena, the owner, is a big Potter fan.) anonymous_plume generously offered to drive me, Mundungus42, Dicky and Pythia, and although we had a hell of a time trying to find a parking space, we did all have a lot of fun listening to Alan Rickman read The Return of the Native.
About Marlena's, I just can't say enough good things. This was THE highlight of the con in a lot of ways, and we just had so damn much fun. The drag queens were all completely fabulous, Marlena's staff were friendly and welcoming, the bartenders were generous, our group had absolutely packed the place full of very appreciative Death Eaters… it was a gigantic, noisy, happy lovefest, and it seemed to go on forever. I sat at the bar with Dicky, snapebeliever, Mundungus and droxy, and there was singing along and dancing and hugging and a LOT of tipping. Pythia_delphi is a true party animal! And at one point during the night, Droxy and Mr. Droxy were saluted by the whole bar, after they found out that she was a drag king. (Not that you would have guessed from her Bellatrix outfit.)
If you want a taste of what it was like, check out the video below of one of the headliners, Miss Snatch. (Video courtesy of pern_dragon, by the way, so all the credit and glory goes to her for recording and posting this.) Pern_dragon pointed out that Miss Snatch looks a bit like Snape in drag, and, well… see for yourselves:
Click to view
And that wasn't even her best number.
Don't know how much more I can say about that night. We hooted and hollered and laughed all the way home (poor Anonymous_plume had the task of carting us all back, as we sniggered about the idea of Alan Rickman saying "intercoooourse"). We were very filled with good cheer and probably should have gone straight to bed when we hit the hotel, but instead we headed back to our rooms with Dicky and Pythia and spent a lot more time giggling and having fun and looking at photos. At one point, I do believe that Libby and I sang the "Feed the Birds" song from Mary Poppins, which evidently seemed like a good idea at the time. *g* (I think Dicky might have joined in, too. I'm a bit fuzzy.) Eventually, it dawned on us that Dicky and Machshefa were going to be presenting in the morning, and perhaps we should wake Pythia up and get everybody to bed.
So we did. Gigglingly. :D
That has to be in the top ten nights of my life, right there. I can't thank Amy enough for organizing it.