BayCon -- let's get this party started (Friday afternoon).
(Recap: I was honoured with the position of Toastmistress at BayCon 2007, the longest-running general science fiction convention in the San Francisco Bay Area. Me plus Memorial Day Weekend plus a cast of thousands for the win! My convention report is taking a million years, a) because I'm way too detailed, and b) because there's lots to say. It'll be finished, however, because otherwise, Kate kills me.)
When last we left our intrepid heroines -- myself, being blonde, bubbly, and made of pep, and Kate, being brunette, bouncy, and made of semi-homicidal efficiency -- we had just checked into The Hotel Room of the Gods, and were in the process of establishing dominance over our territory by spreading our crap over every available surface we could find. We had a lot of crap, which made the process easier. There were a lot of available surfaces, which made the process harder. And let me just say, between the two of us? We had roughly enough makeup, perfume, hair goo, and other assorted toiletries to be a mall beauty pageant. All we were missing was the Vaseline.
For our teeth, people, jeez. Get your minds out of the gutter!
Our first priorities, after we finished unpacking, were simple ones: get our badges and get ourselves something to eat, as failure to get something to eat would make the badges somewhat moot. Most conventions frown upon killing and eating their other guests, even if you are the Toastmistress. Before we could leave the room, I had to head upstairs and change from traveling clothes (jeans and tanktop) to grownup 'I are teh Toastcat, I are bringing classy to teh con' clothes. Gray slacks, white tank top (this will be important later), purple button-up shirt. Appropriate jewelry. When did I become a girl?
Kate expressed appropriate amazement at the fact that I was dressing like a grownup, and we ventured forth, ready to face the great quest that lay ahead of us. Because you see...
For the past twenty-four years, BayCon has been held in the same hotel. It changed names, going from the Red Lion to the DoubleTree, but it remained essentially the same facility. This year was different. This year, the convention was in a new hotel, in a new city, and while this was in many ways an awesome thing which made the convention more accessible to new attendees (more on this later), it was not without its share of...interesting difficulties. The first of which was the suddenly burning question, 'Where the hell is Program Operations*?'.
(*A footnote. Program Operations -- which is going to be abbreviated as 'Prog Ops' for most of this convention report, because I am an intrinsically lazy blonde who doesn't feel like typing the whole name over and over again -- is the place where guests go if they want to know where they're supposed to be. Or to pick up their badges. Or their packets. Or to accost the Programming staff to find out why they can't find their reading. Or because they're bored. Or to get a soda, as it's connected to the Green Room. Or, if you happen to be me or Kate, to bribe the staff with food, since we've done their jobs and we know how bored they are. Expect to hear the phrase 'and one time, in Prog Ops...' a lot over the course of this recap.)
The hotel was spacious, charming, and apparently laid out by gremlins on peyote who really and truly believed that no convention facility was complete without a tesseract, several hidden elevators, stairs that went absolutely nowhere, and a second-and-a-half floor. (I only wish I were exaggerating as much as several of you probably think I am.) If you left our hotel room going left, you would eventually reach Prog Ops and the bulk of the program rooms. If you left our hotel room going right, you would eventually reach...a dead end.
Best hotel ever.
Kate and I may have the navigational sense of slightly overbred cats, but even we can handle 'follow the halls until they either put you somewhere cool or come to an unexpected end', and we managed, with only a few false starts, to find our way to what would be our reliable oasis of sanity throughout the weekend to come: Prog Ops. Of course, we didn't know that at the time. We just knew that dammit, we needed badges, and it was the duty of Prog Ops to provide.
Once inside the room, we found ourselves greeted with happy, smiling, harried, slammed, entirely frantic faces, which is normal on the first day of a large convention. Being good people who, again, have done those jobs, we did our best to get in and get out in a prompt, polite manner, but not before we had made the acquaintance of...
* Kimmie! The world needs more happy, smiling, snarking blondes who know how to sew. Especially since I don't know how to sew. Especially happy, smiling, snarking blondes who give hugs as good as she does. Kimmie can stay.
* Megs! Megs is, quite possibly, the bubbliest person over the age of six that I have ever met in my life. Despite this, she's the opposite of annoying. Megs is soothing in her happycat self, and she did a lot to make the weekend awesome. Megs, too, can stay.
Since I was, y'know, a headline guest, our badges were up at the top of the pile (mine as Toastmistress, Kate's as 'temporary no-sex lesbian girlfriend/manager of the Toastmistress'), and we were able to collect them with reasonable speed. We also collected our first ribbons* of the weekend. I got one no one else go: TOASTMISTRESS. Because it's good to be the Toast.
(*BayCon has serious ribbon-mania -- strips of variously coloured fabric with slogans embossed on them and stickum on one side, so that you can stick them to your badge. By the end of the con, some people had strips of ribbons, colloquially called 'ribbon wangs', so long that they couldn't let them dangle anymore. There will be more on this later. Practice safe ribbon.)
Now that we were legal and official and allowed to rove the halls at will, Kate and I celebrated by...leaving the halls in favour of walking to the nearby Trader Joe's. Look, unfed blondes are homicidal blondes, and homicidal blondes are not generally your blondes of choice for, oh, say, MCing your opening ceremonies. Which I was scheduled to do. So feeding me, and more importantly, caffeinating me, was at the tippy-top of the priority list. After 'stopping for Kate to have a cigarette' and 'navigating the social minefield of the lobby', that is, since necessity demanded that I stop and hug everyone I knew, sort of knew, thought I might know, or liked the looks of. Again, it's good to be the Toast.
There was a 7-11 in the center with the Trader Joe's. We stopped there first. The 7-11 promptly proceeded to fail us in all possible meaningful ways, as it had no chilled diet soda that I was willing to drink, did not have Kate's brand of cigarettes, and didn't have my preferred type of chewing gum. TOTAL FAILURE. Luckily, the Rite-Aid was just on the other side of the parking lot, and had all these things, or there might've been a killin'. I think we made the lady at the 7-11 nervous, which wasn't a good sign, given that we so didn't rank among the stranger things she was likely to see over the course of the weekend.
Once we'd worked our way around to the Trader Joe's, we picked up lunch (salads and sandwich rolls and beverages, oh my), snacks for later (fiber bars and lots of grapes), and what would prove to be my downfall: a large clamshell full of ripe, red, lucious-looking strawberries. Clutching our spoils firmly in-hand, we retreated back to the hotel, walked around it for roughly eighty years before we found a way inside, and went up to our room to eat. Or rather, for me to eat, one-handed, while Kate did my nails.
Say it with me again, ladies and gentlemen: we are such girls.
Unfortunately, it turned out that my strawberries were just as lovely, ripe and lucious as they appeared, and despite extreme care being taken on my part, my one-handed eating efforts simply weren't enough to contain the biohazard. Put another way, they squirted. Only a little bit, but when you're wearing a white tank top, a little bit is all it takes. Only the fact that Kate and I wear the same size tank top was enough to save me from a true fashion disaster. We hurriedly exchanged my original tank for a fresh one in a fetching shade of slate blue, fixed my hair, touched up my makeup, strapped me into a pair of black high heels, and dispatched me to open the convention. Yay, the start of official programming!
Opening ceremonies at BayCon is a reasonably subdued affair: all the headline guests gather, along with the Chairman, to say hello, get their faces seen, and officially kick off the con, for the amusement of, well, whoever happens to show up. We actually had a reasonably good crowd show up, which was awesome, except for the part where I totally blew the name of the Artist Guest of Honour. If the room had been empty, no one would have ever needed to know! Sabre, our lovely Chairbabe for the year, performed the ceremonial ribbon-cutting with a pair of safety scissors, which went over well, and Kevin Andrew Murphy demonstrated the best way to bribe a Toastmistress by giving me a bottle of rose petal mead. Mmmmmm, mead.
After opening ceremonies, it was time to dash back to the room and change into more comfortable, roll-around clothing, because my first program item was coming up: SCIENCE FICTION CHARADES. Yes, as my second terribly onerous Toastmistress duty, I had to moderate a game of charades.
My life is so hard sometimes. SO VERY HARD.
The game was scheduled to take place in a room called 'Gazebo'. After a goodly bit of casting-around (which included the hand-delivery of several Stars Fall Home pre-orders), I discovered that the Gazebo room was...a gazebo. Outside. In the boffer courtyard. Sometimes, we make things so complicated that simplicity confuses us.
The boffer guys were in the process of taping down their padding for the weekend, so I called Shawn -- pity Shawn, who gets endlessly tapped to entertain me when Kate is, for whatever reason, not available -- and chattered at him vapidly until the boffer guys finished their duct-tape reindeer games and I was able to start charades. There were eight of us playing, all told, including a man in a splendid Prisoner costume and the guy who'd originally been sent by Programming to count panel attendees. We were supposedly restricting ourselves to recent science fiction/fantasy/horror movies. This lasted, like, ten minutes. Highlight of the panel: Kate recruiting another player and doing a two-person reinactment of Revenge of the Nerds. There are reasons that I love conventions. Seriously.
Fortunately for my sanity and speed of wardrobe turn, I didn't have any other Friday panels before Meet the Guests that evening. Now, Meet the Guests is traditionally made of win. It's the event where we suction pretty much the entire attendance of the con into one room by virtue of offering them access to all the guests in one concentrated area, plus free food (really, the free food is often the bigger draw). It's strongly suggested that those of us who represent 'the guests' dress up for the occasion. Many attendees and members of staff do the same, because it just makes us look snazzy.
Now, some of you know me, and can thus get a reasonably good visual image of me going. Those of you that don't know me, I'm 5'7", 165 lb., blonde, and, in the right dress, seem to be made entirely of legs and cleavage. Blue eyes, good skin, glasses, gapped 'my momma was an Irish girl' teeth, long hands, tiny ankles. So totally the Marilyn (Munster, not Monroe). Also, I've lost the better part of a hundred pounds in the last two years, so my skin fits sort of oddly in places, but that's what support garments are for. Got your mental image generator cooking? Good. Here's what we did for the Meet the Guests reception:
V-necked, high-waisted, two-tone gown -- bronze over baby blue -- in a very 1930s cocktail cut. Strappy bronze sandals with glittery heels and soles. Ornate black and silver drop-necklace with sparkly bits. Matching earrings. Blue and purple smoky makeup. Hair in a 1930s movie diva side-stroke, carefully sleeked and sprayed and gelled until I seriously looked as if I'd just escaped from an L.A. Confidential poster. Seriously, here, Guy Pearce shoulda been all up on me. He was not. This made me Sad.
Kate wore a truly awesome little black dress with strappy sandals, and between the two of us, we were, indeed, sexycats, bringing sexy to the convention. One well-turned ankle at a time, yo.
After we finished abluting, we proceeded to Meet the Guests, where we staked out seats at the Guest of Honour table and I proceeded to grill the other guests mercilessly, thus allowing me to sound much more intelligent when talking about them up on the stage. Alan Dean Foster was easy, having been one of my favourite authors for years. Richard, the Artist GoH, got easier when I realized he'd painted the iconic Swamp Thing poster. I had a squealing fangirl moment. It passed. Blessedly.
Now, my duties at Meet the Guests were as follows:
* Show up.
* Look pretty.
* Talk about how awesome the other guests are.
* Let Sabre talk about how awesome the con will be.
* Avoid high-calorie free desserts.
* Fail to play with the table decorations.
Being as I am, of course, me, I was successful at all line items except for the one that ordered me to fail, and wound up getting a fierce chiding from Kate over how 'when you're dressed like that, you can't play with the decor'. Sometimes it's very difficult being a blonde. Even a blonde who looked as totally and unbearably awesome as I did. Woe.
Once speeches were finished, we all got off the podium and did our mingling thing. Lots of people took our pictures, and I posed with Grizz, next year's Chairman, who was looking truly snazzy. Tres bien. Tres, tres bien.
Eventually, it was time for the party to be over, and so we wandered back to the room, got out of our fancy duds, and did a wander around the party floor. Which also happened to be the third floor, mind, and hence our floor. Score! Many stops for smoking and pre-order deliveries followed. Joyelle (our missing roommate) called to say that she was just too wiped to come to the con until Saturday, and so we wandered through, made our goodnights, and finally retreated to our room to plan for Saturday, aka, 'Seanan works really really really hard, neglects Kate utterly, and eventually drops dead from the strain'.
Ah, sweet BayCon. One day down...
...three more days to go. The fun, my dears, is just getting started.
When last we left our intrepid heroines -- myself, being blonde, bubbly, and made of pep, and Kate, being brunette, bouncy, and made of semi-homicidal efficiency -- we had just checked into The Hotel Room of the Gods, and were in the process of establishing dominance over our territory by spreading our crap over every available surface we could find. We had a lot of crap, which made the process easier. There were a lot of available surfaces, which made the process harder. And let me just say, between the two of us? We had roughly enough makeup, perfume, hair goo, and other assorted toiletries to be a mall beauty pageant. All we were missing was the Vaseline.
For our teeth, people, jeez. Get your minds out of the gutter!
Our first priorities, after we finished unpacking, were simple ones: get our badges and get ourselves something to eat, as failure to get something to eat would make the badges somewhat moot. Most conventions frown upon killing and eating their other guests, even if you are the Toastmistress. Before we could leave the room, I had to head upstairs and change from traveling clothes (jeans and tanktop) to grownup 'I are teh Toastcat, I are bringing classy to teh con' clothes. Gray slacks, white tank top (this will be important later), purple button-up shirt. Appropriate jewelry. When did I become a girl?
Kate expressed appropriate amazement at the fact that I was dressing like a grownup, and we ventured forth, ready to face the great quest that lay ahead of us. Because you see...
For the past twenty-four years, BayCon has been held in the same hotel. It changed names, going from the Red Lion to the DoubleTree, but it remained essentially the same facility. This year was different. This year, the convention was in a new hotel, in a new city, and while this was in many ways an awesome thing which made the convention more accessible to new attendees (more on this later), it was not without its share of...interesting difficulties. The first of which was the suddenly burning question, 'Where the hell is Program Operations*?'.
(*A footnote. Program Operations -- which is going to be abbreviated as 'Prog Ops' for most of this convention report, because I am an intrinsically lazy blonde who doesn't feel like typing the whole name over and over again -- is the place where guests go if they want to know where they're supposed to be. Or to pick up their badges. Or their packets. Or to accost the Programming staff to find out why they can't find their reading. Or because they're bored. Or to get a soda, as it's connected to the Green Room. Or, if you happen to be me or Kate, to bribe the staff with food, since we've done their jobs and we know how bored they are. Expect to hear the phrase 'and one time, in Prog Ops...' a lot over the course of this recap.)
The hotel was spacious, charming, and apparently laid out by gremlins on peyote who really and truly believed that no convention facility was complete without a tesseract, several hidden elevators, stairs that went absolutely nowhere, and a second-and-a-half floor. (I only wish I were exaggerating as much as several of you probably think I am.) If you left our hotel room going left, you would eventually reach Prog Ops and the bulk of the program rooms. If you left our hotel room going right, you would eventually reach...a dead end.
Best hotel ever.
Kate and I may have the navigational sense of slightly overbred cats, but even we can handle 'follow the halls until they either put you somewhere cool or come to an unexpected end', and we managed, with only a few false starts, to find our way to what would be our reliable oasis of sanity throughout the weekend to come: Prog Ops. Of course, we didn't know that at the time. We just knew that dammit, we needed badges, and it was the duty of Prog Ops to provide.
Once inside the room, we found ourselves greeted with happy, smiling, harried, slammed, entirely frantic faces, which is normal on the first day of a large convention. Being good people who, again, have done those jobs, we did our best to get in and get out in a prompt, polite manner, but not before we had made the acquaintance of...
* Kimmie! The world needs more happy, smiling, snarking blondes who know how to sew. Especially since I don't know how to sew. Especially happy, smiling, snarking blondes who give hugs as good as she does. Kimmie can stay.
* Megs! Megs is, quite possibly, the bubbliest person over the age of six that I have ever met in my life. Despite this, she's the opposite of annoying. Megs is soothing in her happycat self, and she did a lot to make the weekend awesome. Megs, too, can stay.
Since I was, y'know, a headline guest, our badges were up at the top of the pile (mine as Toastmistress, Kate's as 'temporary no-sex lesbian girlfriend/manager of the Toastmistress'), and we were able to collect them with reasonable speed. We also collected our first ribbons* of the weekend. I got one no one else go: TOASTMISTRESS. Because it's good to be the Toast.
(*BayCon has serious ribbon-mania -- strips of variously coloured fabric with slogans embossed on them and stickum on one side, so that you can stick them to your badge. By the end of the con, some people had strips of ribbons, colloquially called 'ribbon wangs', so long that they couldn't let them dangle anymore. There will be more on this later. Practice safe ribbon.)
Now that we were legal and official and allowed to rove the halls at will, Kate and I celebrated by...leaving the halls in favour of walking to the nearby Trader Joe's. Look, unfed blondes are homicidal blondes, and homicidal blondes are not generally your blondes of choice for, oh, say, MCing your opening ceremonies. Which I was scheduled to do. So feeding me, and more importantly, caffeinating me, was at the tippy-top of the priority list. After 'stopping for Kate to have a cigarette' and 'navigating the social minefield of the lobby', that is, since necessity demanded that I stop and hug everyone I knew, sort of knew, thought I might know, or liked the looks of. Again, it's good to be the Toast.
There was a 7-11 in the center with the Trader Joe's. We stopped there first. The 7-11 promptly proceeded to fail us in all possible meaningful ways, as it had no chilled diet soda that I was willing to drink, did not have Kate's brand of cigarettes, and didn't have my preferred type of chewing gum. TOTAL FAILURE. Luckily, the Rite-Aid was just on the other side of the parking lot, and had all these things, or there might've been a killin'. I think we made the lady at the 7-11 nervous, which wasn't a good sign, given that we so didn't rank among the stranger things she was likely to see over the course of the weekend.
Once we'd worked our way around to the Trader Joe's, we picked up lunch (salads and sandwich rolls and beverages, oh my), snacks for later (fiber bars and lots of grapes), and what would prove to be my downfall: a large clamshell full of ripe, red, lucious-looking strawberries. Clutching our spoils firmly in-hand, we retreated back to the hotel, walked around it for roughly eighty years before we found a way inside, and went up to our room to eat. Or rather, for me to eat, one-handed, while Kate did my nails.
Say it with me again, ladies and gentlemen: we are such girls.
Unfortunately, it turned out that my strawberries were just as lovely, ripe and lucious as they appeared, and despite extreme care being taken on my part, my one-handed eating efforts simply weren't enough to contain the biohazard. Put another way, they squirted. Only a little bit, but when you're wearing a white tank top, a little bit is all it takes. Only the fact that Kate and I wear the same size tank top was enough to save me from a true fashion disaster. We hurriedly exchanged my original tank for a fresh one in a fetching shade of slate blue, fixed my hair, touched up my makeup, strapped me into a pair of black high heels, and dispatched me to open the convention. Yay, the start of official programming!
Opening ceremonies at BayCon is a reasonably subdued affair: all the headline guests gather, along with the Chairman, to say hello, get their faces seen, and officially kick off the con, for the amusement of, well, whoever happens to show up. We actually had a reasonably good crowd show up, which was awesome, except for the part where I totally blew the name of the Artist Guest of Honour. If the room had been empty, no one would have ever needed to know! Sabre, our lovely Chairbabe for the year, performed the ceremonial ribbon-cutting with a pair of safety scissors, which went over well, and Kevin Andrew Murphy demonstrated the best way to bribe a Toastmistress by giving me a bottle of rose petal mead. Mmmmmm, mead.
After opening ceremonies, it was time to dash back to the room and change into more comfortable, roll-around clothing, because my first program item was coming up: SCIENCE FICTION CHARADES. Yes, as my second terribly onerous Toastmistress duty, I had to moderate a game of charades.
My life is so hard sometimes. SO VERY HARD.
The game was scheduled to take place in a room called 'Gazebo'. After a goodly bit of casting-around (which included the hand-delivery of several Stars Fall Home pre-orders), I discovered that the Gazebo room was...a gazebo. Outside. In the boffer courtyard. Sometimes, we make things so complicated that simplicity confuses us.
The boffer guys were in the process of taping down their padding for the weekend, so I called Shawn -- pity Shawn, who gets endlessly tapped to entertain me when Kate is, for whatever reason, not available -- and chattered at him vapidly until the boffer guys finished their duct-tape reindeer games and I was able to start charades. There were eight of us playing, all told, including a man in a splendid Prisoner costume and the guy who'd originally been sent by Programming to count panel attendees. We were supposedly restricting ourselves to recent science fiction/fantasy/horror movies. This lasted, like, ten minutes. Highlight of the panel: Kate recruiting another player and doing a two-person reinactment of Revenge of the Nerds. There are reasons that I love conventions. Seriously.
Fortunately for my sanity and speed of wardrobe turn, I didn't have any other Friday panels before Meet the Guests that evening. Now, Meet the Guests is traditionally made of win. It's the event where we suction pretty much the entire attendance of the con into one room by virtue of offering them access to all the guests in one concentrated area, plus free food (really, the free food is often the bigger draw). It's strongly suggested that those of us who represent 'the guests' dress up for the occasion. Many attendees and members of staff do the same, because it just makes us look snazzy.
Now, some of you know me, and can thus get a reasonably good visual image of me going. Those of you that don't know me, I'm 5'7", 165 lb., blonde, and, in the right dress, seem to be made entirely of legs and cleavage. Blue eyes, good skin, glasses, gapped 'my momma was an Irish girl' teeth, long hands, tiny ankles. So totally the Marilyn (Munster, not Monroe). Also, I've lost the better part of a hundred pounds in the last two years, so my skin fits sort of oddly in places, but that's what support garments are for. Got your mental image generator cooking? Good. Here's what we did for the Meet the Guests reception:
V-necked, high-waisted, two-tone gown -- bronze over baby blue -- in a very 1930s cocktail cut. Strappy bronze sandals with glittery heels and soles. Ornate black and silver drop-necklace with sparkly bits. Matching earrings. Blue and purple smoky makeup. Hair in a 1930s movie diva side-stroke, carefully sleeked and sprayed and gelled until I seriously looked as if I'd just escaped from an L.A. Confidential poster. Seriously, here, Guy Pearce shoulda been all up on me. He was not. This made me Sad.
Kate wore a truly awesome little black dress with strappy sandals, and between the two of us, we were, indeed, sexycats, bringing sexy to the convention. One well-turned ankle at a time, yo.
After we finished abluting, we proceeded to Meet the Guests, where we staked out seats at the Guest of Honour table and I proceeded to grill the other guests mercilessly, thus allowing me to sound much more intelligent when talking about them up on the stage. Alan Dean Foster was easy, having been one of my favourite authors for years. Richard, the Artist GoH, got easier when I realized he'd painted the iconic Swamp Thing poster. I had a squealing fangirl moment. It passed. Blessedly.
Now, my duties at Meet the Guests were as follows:
* Show up.
* Look pretty.
* Talk about how awesome the other guests are.
* Let Sabre talk about how awesome the con will be.
* Avoid high-calorie free desserts.
* Fail to play with the table decorations.
Being as I am, of course, me, I was successful at all line items except for the one that ordered me to fail, and wound up getting a fierce chiding from Kate over how 'when you're dressed like that, you can't play with the decor'. Sometimes it's very difficult being a blonde. Even a blonde who looked as totally and unbearably awesome as I did. Woe.
Once speeches were finished, we all got off the podium and did our mingling thing. Lots of people took our pictures, and I posed with Grizz, next year's Chairman, who was looking truly snazzy. Tres bien. Tres, tres bien.
Eventually, it was time for the party to be over, and so we wandered back to the room, got out of our fancy duds, and did a wander around the party floor. Which also happened to be the third floor, mind, and hence our floor. Score! Many stops for smoking and pre-order deliveries followed. Joyelle (our missing roommate) called to say that she was just too wiped to come to the con until Saturday, and so we wandered through, made our goodnights, and finally retreated to our room to plan for Saturday, aka, 'Seanan works really really really hard, neglects Kate utterly, and eventually drops dead from the strain'.
Ah, sweet BayCon. One day down...
...three more days to go. The fun, my dears, is just getting started.