New England Fan Experience - part 2
So, on with my story ... after we listened to Morena's talk, we headed on down to the Art room. I was very excited to see that this year would have an Artist's room, as I have very fond memories of awesome displays of artwork, crafts, etc. from Shore Leave and DragonCon 2000; the NEFE artroom hardly had anything in it! Items that *were* there were glasswork items of anime subjects, some photo manipulations, and sculptures (I guess you'd call them that). All very lovely, but pitifully few of them.
The autograph area had been set up outside in a tent (in November in New England? Yikes!). There were portable heaters set up out there, but it was still freezing! The autograph tables were eventually set up in the lobby later Saturday afternoon, for which the celebrities were thankful! I had paid $20 to get Morena's autograph and, again, found that the sci-fi celebs were pretty much ignored. I didn't have to wait more than 5 minutes to get Morena's autograph and was able to chat with her for a little bit. She even signed a second item for me (before her "keeper" told her she was only supposed to sign one thing per autograph ticket). My daughter-in-law was teasing my son that he had a major crush on Morena's character, Inara, right there at the autograph table. While he fiercely denied it, he had a big silly smile on his face; I had Morena autograph the picture "To Gary" and gave it to him as his early Christmas present. Many times later that afternoon I walked by the table on the way to other events in the video rooms and poor Morena was sitting there with no one to talk to and nothing to do. I teased her that she should play games on her Blackberry to while away the time, but she said she didn't know how (or she didn't have any games on it).
I had bought an anime figurine at the Dealer's room for my oldest son and wanted to have it autographed by the voice actor, Johnny Yong Bosch, so I went to get in the autograph line about half an hour after it opened. The line had about 100 people in it (I kid you not!), so I decided I'd come back at the tail end of the autograph session. As I walked thru the lobby, I was almost beaned in the head by a nerf football being tossed back and forth across the lobby by Robert Picardo and Mark Goddard. Nobody was coming to their autograph tables and they were bored silly and playing catch to pass the time.
I spent the rest of the afternoon/evening watching the "Star Trek: Phase II" episode "To Serve All My Days" (which is written by D. C. Fontana and stars Walter Koenig), then went to get my figurine autographed. I also ran into one of my sci-fi friends from way back when, Karen, who is a writer for Titan Magazines. We had a great conversation getting caught up a bit with our families but, even more fun, talking about writing novels, creating one's own universe for our original characters, etc. Both my son Gary and his wife Victoria have been working on novels for years now and they had quite a lively chat with Karen about this. Karen gave us her business card with the URL for her blog which she created for the purposes of discussing the creation of new Worlds for original novels: World Building Rules!
The last event of my evening was really good - a sneak preview for fans of the newest episode for "Star Trek: Phase II" entitled "Blood and Fire." It was a really good story, written and directed by David Gerrold, and has Denise Crosby from ST:Next Generation as one of the stars. The story was a 2-parter and I had to leave before the end of the second half, as it was going on 8:30 at night, we hadn't had dinner yet and certain grandson was getting restless. I can't wait until the full production version becomes available online on December 20th. These fan actors do a fantastic job of portraying the characters we know and love without overacting ... well, except for Captain Kirk, but William Shatner was such a hambone, Jim Cawley really *has* to overdo some of the mannerisms just a little to remain true to the original character portrayal! He does a great job, and there are some fun inside jokes written into the dialogue of the episode too ... I won't spoil it for you - just watch it when it becomes available on the website.
Overall, I had an okay time at the convention, with the Star Trek videos and meeting my friend Karen again ranking as the highlights of the whole day. I'm not sure if I'd go again next year, though; I'll have to wait and see who the guests are and what the programming tracks look like.