Best day ever - DW Line Con 2011!!
This review and overview is spoiler free with the exception of what one of amy's series 6 outfits is, and the name of the big bad from these episodes - all which has been released officially. this is just to be safe.
Okay, it really was like two days, but still! Anyways. sinkingslowly and I took the bus in from Baltimore Sunday afternoon, originally intending to go to a friends, sleep there for the night, then head over bright and early 7am to get in line. From what we had heard from last year, at 7am there were only 5 people in line, so we figured we’d be safe. Well, as we were on the bus I’m getting texts from mischief89 who was staying not too far away with her sister, telling me at 8:45pm “There are already people in line!”. I sort of brushed it off as ”okay, the super dedicated people are probably there already, and there’s probably only like 2 of them”, so I asked how many. “10ish” is basically what I was told. I’m like “okay, not bad. Maybe we’ll get there at 6am instead. At almost 10pm, as we’re getting into NYC, we get a text saying “it’s about 30 people”. Well, I’m starting to freak out now. A little. If there are 30 people at like 10, maybe 7am would be too late. I convince liz “okay, lets go out at like 3am then instead.” easy enough, I think. 7 minutes later I get another text. “It’s up to 50 now.”
@_@ I believe is the best way to describe the face I made. Liz and I wepanicking a little. We had just got off the bus, neither of us had slept a ton, but we weren’t going to risk not getting an amazing spot because of sleep. We both looked at each other, grit our teeth, and grabbed a cab right over to the theater with ALL of our stuff instead of going to Elliot’s. We got there about 10:30pm, and there were only about 40 people in front of us, but we found out from the very nice lady in front of us that “with guests” they were up to about 70 already (there’s an unwritten rule of linecon apparently that if the guests come before 7am spot saving is okay). Found out the first people in line had gotten to the line at 4pm!
I decided to be an overexcited nerd and get into my amy outfit that night instead of in the morning, which everyone laughed at me for and called me crazy, but I had far too much fun. I made loads of friends, talked to all the other amys, and starting at midnight I would walk the line with my flip camera to see how it grew basically every hour (I started with every other hour, but it proved a fabulous way to keep warm all night so I kept doing it more and more often. People started to keep time by me! (“Hi again! Must be 5am!” ) About 3 or 4am I think I ditched my wig so I could lay down for a little, and about that time the weather got SUPER chilly, so I layered my blanket and my Pjs over my amy outfit for warmth, and just kept moving around. Overnight it was an amazing experience. Just seeing that many people lined up, sleeping on the sidewalk, nerds in solidarity of each other. It was fabulous. I met a few people that I had only talked to online, saw some friends I haven’t seen in a while, and made new friends.
About 5:30am I ended up grabbing coffee with someone that remembered me from dragon*con the year before, found the starbucks, and attempted to caffeinate my system for a long day on no sleep. (that starbucks became a lifesaver - bathrooms, plugs, and wifi!!!), before heading back to the line to change back into my amy wig and touch up my amy makeup. At this point a lot of people were still sleeping, but we were starting to show signs of life. I think by that point we had about 300 people in line (after counting the guests). Things were starting to get a little crazy with the line. Filming crews from the BBC America were starting to show up around 9, interviewing fans, so I headed up to the front of the line to see what was going on.
That was when the most amazing thing happened.
The first thing my mind said when I saw the hot guy with the sunglasses with the box of donuts walking towards me was “wow, that’s a hot guy with a box of donu--- OMFG IT’S ARTHUR DARVILL”. I think I forgot to breathe around that point. He did a quadruple look at me, and then was like “here! Take a donut!” I got a donut from Arthur Darvill himself aodfkjaldfjadsfkjakldfj!!! .
The Arthur Donut!!!
Then I heard a cheer, and a lot of people were swarming around all of a sudden - Matt and Karen had gotten out of the car with donuts too! I desperately wanted to get a picture with Arthur, but people were bombarding him, so I fought my way through the crowd to get to matt to try to get a picture with him
He turned to look at me, pointed, and shouted “HEEYYYYYY!!!! IT’S KAREN!!!”. I nearly died in happiness. He called me Karen. Not Amy. Karen. That’s like the best compliment ever (well, I thought it was. Found out a few minutes later there’s one even better, but to that in a moment.). was standing right next to him at that point, and he kept trying to get me and other people to take a donut, since he had two left, but no one seemed to want to take them. Weird, right? Anyways, I asked him for a picture, and he put his hand on my forearm (AAAAHHHHHHHH) and said something along the lines of “Yes, definitely. Have you seen Karen yet? But, yeah.” But then his stupid PR person or whoever it was grabbed him and dragged him away before I could get a picture. Sad. But I met his eyes, saw the stubble and HE TOUCHED ME AND CALLED ME KAREN OMFG. I am pregnant with his eye-babies or stubble-babies or something.
Anyways, I decided I was two for three on Team TARDIS, so I fought my way even more through the crowd to get to Karen. She had a lot of people around her too, but this one was apparently meant to be, because we ended up like face to face, and she even had this look of @_@ at first and then was all “:D!!!”. And then, the best compliment in the world. She started fangirling my costume. Not just complimenting it in passing, but she kept going on about it! “Oh wow, OH WOW you have this outfit and WOW you have the tally marks and omg look at the details and Your hair is the EXACT same color as mine!! Is it your real hair?” (me: no, it’s a wig) “It’s like the exact same color as mine!!” She’s at this point grabbed my arm, looked all over my outfit, and was then touching my wig, holding her hair next to it!! EEEE. I got a picture with her too!! The one on my phone told me it didn’t save from low battery, but someone else got one. (though I just checked my phone right now and it’s on there, so wat?! But, it’s a bit fuzzy but I don’t care omg) And apparently BBC America filmed the entire thing of me and her, so I really hope the footage comes out because my mind was so on cloud 9 I don’t even know if I was talking English. XD
Someone else got a better picture of the two of us, but I haven't gotten it yet, so here's the one from my phone -
Anyways, I ended up dancing in circles for the next 15 minutes (and was on cloud 9 the rest of the day!! MATT CALLED ME KAREN, ARTHUR GAVE ME A DONUT AND KAREN FANGIRLED MY COSTUME OMG). Tried to call everyone I know, no one answered, so I went to starbucks to message stars_fell so I’d have someone to fangirl with, even for a few moments. XD
After that linecon went pretty quickly. The line by this point was wrapped around two blocks and was almost to 500 people. Doing my 11am video (missed the 10am one due to squeee) I ran into a few more friends that I hadn’t seen in forever, which was awesome, before heading back to our spot. Our group ended up having 5 people, but we had made lots of friends in line by that points, so it really was like a giant party or con. Someone bought chalk, so I used a yellow one to go along the entire line drawing the crack on the sidewalk or walls (mwahaha). Lots of pictures were being taken, and we got all the Amys in the line that we could find gathered in front of the giant crack on the wall to get a group picture. Loads of people took pictures, plus the BBCamerica photographer got group shots, and then individual ones of all of us, which ended up on the bbcamerica facebook. A couple of other photographers grabbed individual or group pictures of me, which made me happy since I’d never worn this outfit at a con or anything before, so I only had bad webcam pictures of it.
Photo from the BBCAmerica facebook page
© Lauren Goldberg 2011
From the BBC america page - amys in front of the crack
Went to starbucks again to charge and wifi, and the line for the bathroom was crazy. I believe they dubbed it “Linecon 2.0” or “#starbuckslinecon”. At this point we really needed something to drink and some AC - it had gone from freezing the night before to being about 80!!! We were going to spend more time there, but I checked the twitter hashtag and saw that people were trying to get BBCA to give out the wristbands really early - there were already issues with people trying to cut in line. So, we headed back. Some awesome people I met got me interviewed by BBCA, which was awesome, and we all just hung out. And then I understood why people wanted BBCA to hand the tags out early - someone came up to us and offered us $40 to let her join our party. We told her know, and she did it to everyone else down the line - everyone I saw told her no. She was asking the wrong crowd - we all froze our asses off the night before, and we weren’t giving our spot to someone that had just shown up after noon. A few minutes later, bbca came through and handed out the wristbands. Blue went to people that would be in the main theater with the live panel. Yellow to the second room. Fliers were given to the people on standby for space.
Well, demand was so great they opened a 3rd theater for the flier people - they ended up being able to fit over 700 people for the showing! And they still had to turn people away!!
They made us stand and condense the line around 5pm, which had us all freaking out. Yeah, false alarm. We ended up standing till about 6:45, when the cast was finished taking pictures out front, and they opened the gate for us. We all had so much stuff, but we packed it in, made it as small as possible, and headed into the theater. Since we camped overnight we made it to the first theater, obviously, so we headed up the steps, where they gave us a free DW hat, and we stuffed everything under our feet, so excited we couldn’t contain it!
They started the episodes only a few minutes late, and I won’t spoil it, but O.M.G. That’s what you need to know. Moffat is a bastard and ends the first episode on the worst cliffhanger EVER so you guys are going to be in PAIN between the first and second episode, but together the episodes were easily a 10 out of 10. I think they might be my favorite who episodes, and the Silence are 1000000x scarier than any other thing on who. It takes a lot to scare me, but I had my knees up to my chest, hugging them.
The Q&A was sort of badly run, and they should have pre-screened the questions because they wasted a lot of time with people asking “How do I get on the show if I’m under 16” or “what advice would you give a writer”, things like that. I don’t think I heard one question asked there that hadn’t been asked at another panel or interview, which bothered me a little since I know a few of us had questions about things relating to the series, not just “would you make benedict cumberbatch the new master?” (which I will admit had an amusing answer from Moffat).
After that we said goodbye to the whovian friends and family we had made the night before, and headed back to normal life after the best 24 hours ever.
I'll be editing the pictures and videos soon and do a post then, promise!! <3
I exploded with tags here, but I just can't contain myself omg!!