DragonCon (Day 3, the finale)
She also said that the thing she would miss most about playing Laura Roslin was the weight of her responsibilities, and the new appreciation for pressures politicians must face, having to make real and irrevocable decisions that would affect people’s lives. Richard Hatch fielded the question of whether Tom Zarek was a hero or villain, and played off this point: that while Hatch personally was shocked by some of Zarek’s choices, and that he fought to change some of them (such as killing the Quorum after they agreed to back Zarek, which became only after the rebuffed him), he could nevertheless see that Zarek was making his choices based on a combination of idealism, pragmatic concern for the survival of the species, and a perception of hypocrisy on the part of Roslin, Adama, Tigh, et al. After the terrorist bombing campaign on New Caprica, did his actions with SFM really still place him beyond the pale? Wrestling with this, Hatch reluctantly came down on the side of ‘hero’. McDonnel immediately disagreed, saying that Zarek was a villain, but that Hatch played him heroically.
At the end, every actor took the microphone and led the crowd in a chant of So Say We All. Mr. Juliani was last, and perfectly deadpanned: “Line?” before taking his turn to demagogue.
.
After that, we parted company with spacepug (alas), and joined up with the Squeers, and went to some Asian style restaurant, which I recall had sushi and Thai dishes. I was rather full from the crappy food I’d had earlier, but I got some vegetable tempura so I wasn’t taking up space without paying on a busy night.
After about half an hour, the furious organizing of prophetkristy and other gaeta_squee folks paid off, and Mr. Juliani stopped into say hello. He pulled up a chair next to me, got a beer, and made polite but genuine conversation for the best part of an hour.
A week later, my recall isn’t flawless, but the highlights in my mind are:
I complimented him on his comic timing, and he played it off as the antics of a class clown. I agreed, but insisted that it still wasn’t an easy thing to do and that he did it well, even in a high stakes setting like a con panel. This is the sort of thing I like to do, and after decades of practice I’ve gotten pretty good at it, and clearly he has, too. There are all sorts of things that good actors can do that I can’t, but getting a laugh with smart-ass comments like he did at the end of the panel we’d just seen was something I could easily imagine myself doing. I didn’t explain all this, but I think he understood that my compliment was both informed and considered.
He made a point of asking all our names, and where were from, and what we did professionally. He seemed intrigued by our journeys, both geographical and mental, to come all the way to the intense, sub-cultural experience that was DragonCon this past weekend. I think he was more interested in the women at the table, since they all had normal jobs that weren’t connected to nerd culture, unlike mine.
He mentioned that he’d done well enough off of BSG to afford a house in the over-priced Vancouver market, albeit during the recent downturn, before the coming Olympics started to reinflate the market.
He referred to Meg Roe as his partner, and I itched to ask him about why he used that term, since they were clearly professional collaborators, and why they hadn’t gotten married, but held off as that could easily become far too personal.
While he was obviously willing to hang out with hard core fans, and curious about us and our interest in him and/or his work, he also obviously preferred to keep his role in BSG and his connection to fandom at a certain remove. This seemed to be motivated in part by his need to keep working, and his interest in playing many parts, and not becoming entrenched in one role. He said something about acting being a great career but not a lucrative one, with the exception of BSG.
(He gave no specifics, but based on what SP told us about housing prices in Vancouver, I suspect that he cleared some real money, probably over 100K, from his five years on the show. I wonder what the higher profile stars might have made? In any event, this was clearly an exception, and not the rule, and it seems only to have allowed him entry into an upper middle class life…though that’s probably a rare exception for actors.)
In that light, I find it interesting that he’s not terribly interested in doing more con experiences like DragonCon, which paid him to be there. (And since they could get genuine A list stars like Malcolm McDowell, Patrick Stewart, and Mary McDonnell, as well as a long roster of lesser-known but beloved actors, clearly the Con can pony up some real money.)
Anyway, Mr. Juliani was clearly aware of the way actors can become too closely identified with one role to find other work, and that this can be especially true of actors in SF tv shows, such as the cast of the original Star Trek. I mentioned having seen Marina Sirtis at a convention years before, and how she’d discussed struggling with the same issue, but had ended by thanking the audience for her house, her car, and so on.
I can’t recall why, exactly, but someone brought up Confederate Memorial Day (or whatever it’s called), which often happens to fall on MLK Day, which led me to ‘educate’ (bore) everyone with the reason for the BS about pilgrims at Thanksgiving.
I think I also observed that at cons, the fans come in costume, and the stars come in street clothes, even folks like Aaron Douglas, who really get into the con atmosphere. I wish I’d asked him who he’d come dressed up as, if he had to pick.
I did ask him if he’d ever played the BSG board game, and he said no, that it would be weird to be ‘Gaeta’ in the game, and weirder to be someone else, though he at least pretended to find my brief description of the game itself interesting.
Anyway, as he departed, Mr. Juliani asked everyone what they were going to do with the evening. I immediately responded: ‘play D&D’, and he laughed and called me a nerd. Which was probably the coolest moment of the con for me.
.
After he left, I said my goodbyes to the Squeers, and headed off to the Hilton to play WATE 1-5, Lost In The Fog. There were two tables running it that night, and I wound up at the one with a proper mix of PCs, and not the one that was four strikers and a cleric. We had a nice, leisurely time, but in retrospect I don’t think the DM rose to the challenge of the adventure.
SPOILER FOR THIS ADVENTURE:
The DM was an older gentleman, with an interest in actual role-playing and an ability to imagine setting and detail. The structure of this adventure is unusual, in that there are only two fights, sandwiching two skill challenges, the first of which involves finding a particular fisherman on Waterdeep’s wharfs. Since the guy was a businessman who wanted to be found, the DM didn’t see much point in stringing it out beyond a streetwise and a diplomacy check. At the time, not knowing what was coming, I didn’t see any reason to gainsay him, but it did lead me to misunderstand how the adventure ran, and so I didn’t realize that the fourth and final encounter was actually the fourth, and not the third. He was able to pad out the third encounter, which involved underwater salvage, with an appearance by a menacing looking shark that turned out to be a whale shark, so I don’t see why couldn’t come up with fun mini-obstacles to pad out our search for the fisherman.
Anyway, the actual play was fun, I managed to get off the minion slayer coupon, I fell in love with the Orbmaster’s Incendiary Detonation encounter power, and I scored an Orb of Sanguinary Consequences, so that rocked.
It was about 3 AM when I got back to the hotel and got to sleep.
At the end, every actor took the microphone and led the crowd in a chant of So Say We All. Mr. Juliani was last, and perfectly deadpanned: “Line?” before taking his turn to demagogue.
.
After that, we parted company with spacepug (alas), and joined up with the Squeers, and went to some Asian style restaurant, which I recall had sushi and Thai dishes. I was rather full from the crappy food I’d had earlier, but I got some vegetable tempura so I wasn’t taking up space without paying on a busy night.
After about half an hour, the furious organizing of prophetkristy and other gaeta_squee folks paid off, and Mr. Juliani stopped into say hello. He pulled up a chair next to me, got a beer, and made polite but genuine conversation for the best part of an hour.
A week later, my recall isn’t flawless, but the highlights in my mind are:
I complimented him on his comic timing, and he played it off as the antics of a class clown. I agreed, but insisted that it still wasn’t an easy thing to do and that he did it well, even in a high stakes setting like a con panel. This is the sort of thing I like to do, and after decades of practice I’ve gotten pretty good at it, and clearly he has, too. There are all sorts of things that good actors can do that I can’t, but getting a laugh with smart-ass comments like he did at the end of the panel we’d just seen was something I could easily imagine myself doing. I didn’t explain all this, but I think he understood that my compliment was both informed and considered.
He made a point of asking all our names, and where were from, and what we did professionally. He seemed intrigued by our journeys, both geographical and mental, to come all the way to the intense, sub-cultural experience that was DragonCon this past weekend. I think he was more interested in the women at the table, since they all had normal jobs that weren’t connected to nerd culture, unlike mine.
He mentioned that he’d done well enough off of BSG to afford a house in the over-priced Vancouver market, albeit during the recent downturn, before the coming Olympics started to reinflate the market.
He referred to Meg Roe as his partner, and I itched to ask him about why he used that term, since they were clearly professional collaborators, and why they hadn’t gotten married, but held off as that could easily become far too personal.
While he was obviously willing to hang out with hard core fans, and curious about us and our interest in him and/or his work, he also obviously preferred to keep his role in BSG and his connection to fandom at a certain remove. This seemed to be motivated in part by his need to keep working, and his interest in playing many parts, and not becoming entrenched in one role. He said something about acting being a great career but not a lucrative one, with the exception of BSG.
(He gave no specifics, but based on what SP told us about housing prices in Vancouver, I suspect that he cleared some real money, probably over 100K, from his five years on the show. I wonder what the higher profile stars might have made? In any event, this was clearly an exception, and not the rule, and it seems only to have allowed him entry into an upper middle class life…though that’s probably a rare exception for actors.)
In that light, I find it interesting that he’s not terribly interested in doing more con experiences like DragonCon, which paid him to be there. (And since they could get genuine A list stars like Malcolm McDowell, Patrick Stewart, and Mary McDonnell, as well as a long roster of lesser-known but beloved actors, clearly the Con can pony up some real money.)
Anyway, Mr. Juliani was clearly aware of the way actors can become too closely identified with one role to find other work, and that this can be especially true of actors in SF tv shows, such as the cast of the original Star Trek. I mentioned having seen Marina Sirtis at a convention years before, and how she’d discussed struggling with the same issue, but had ended by thanking the audience for her house, her car, and so on.
I can’t recall why, exactly, but someone brought up Confederate Memorial Day (or whatever it’s called), which often happens to fall on MLK Day, which led me to ‘educate’ (bore) everyone with the reason for the BS about pilgrims at Thanksgiving.
I think I also observed that at cons, the fans come in costume, and the stars come in street clothes, even folks like Aaron Douglas, who really get into the con atmosphere. I wish I’d asked him who he’d come dressed up as, if he had to pick.
I did ask him if he’d ever played the BSG board game, and he said no, that it would be weird to be ‘Gaeta’ in the game, and weirder to be someone else, though he at least pretended to find my brief description of the game itself interesting.
Anyway, as he departed, Mr. Juliani asked everyone what they were going to do with the evening. I immediately responded: ‘play D&D’, and he laughed and called me a nerd. Which was probably the coolest moment of the con for me.
.
After he left, I said my goodbyes to the Squeers, and headed off to the Hilton to play WATE 1-5, Lost In The Fog. There were two tables running it that night, and I wound up at the one with a proper mix of PCs, and not the one that was four strikers and a cleric. We had a nice, leisurely time, but in retrospect I don’t think the DM rose to the challenge of the adventure.
SPOILER FOR THIS ADVENTURE:
The DM was an older gentleman, with an interest in actual role-playing and an ability to imagine setting and detail. The structure of this adventure is unusual, in that there are only two fights, sandwiching two skill challenges, the first of which involves finding a particular fisherman on Waterdeep’s wharfs. Since the guy was a businessman who wanted to be found, the DM didn’t see much point in stringing it out beyond a streetwise and a diplomacy check. At the time, not knowing what was coming, I didn’t see any reason to gainsay him, but it did lead me to misunderstand how the adventure ran, and so I didn’t realize that the fourth and final encounter was actually the fourth, and not the third. He was able to pad out the third encounter, which involved underwater salvage, with an appearance by a menacing looking shark that turned out to be a whale shark, so I don’t see why couldn’t come up with fun mini-obstacles to pad out our search for the fisherman.
Anyway, the actual play was fun, I managed to get off the minion slayer coupon, I fell in love with the Orbmaster’s Incendiary Detonation encounter power, and I scored an Orb of Sanguinary Consequences, so that rocked.
It was about 3 AM when I got back to the hotel and got to sleep.