Capricon - Friday
As you will remember, our intrepid fan is stuck without necessary equipment...
So, far too early, my cell phone starts singing to me, "Right Now... (I'm not fond of many of the songs you don't have to pay for on this phone, but those words seem right for "wake up NOW".) So I get up, hurry through a shower (with or without a tuner, I'll be onstage soon), and dash off to the con suite, where, happily, I find a bleary eyed musician with a wide-awake son, who is willing to lend me a tuner, "after I have some coffee". So, we sit and talk, and I have some breakfast. I am not exactly awake yet myself, when I go to get more milk, without looking I grab his cup, which clearly says "Starbucks Coffee" on it. So, he loans me a tuner of a make I've never used before. I assume there is a mysterious way to set it to something other than 440A, but don't need that function. I head off to the Capricon Cafe room, where the concert will be, and set to tuning. A friend is running the room, so I don't have to take the instruments to my panel--bonus. And a kind-looking gentleman offered to read to me, from what turned out to be a sequel to Bronte's Egg. Extra bonus. A personal reading by Richard Chwedyk. I enjoyed it a lot, and meant to introduce myself and find out when and where it would be published before rushing off, but it passed the time all too well and I suddenly realized I had two minutes to get to my first panel, at the other end of the hotel. I hope he knows the hurried expression of appreciation I gave him while tucking the instruments behind the stage were heartfelt!
I figured I could find him later during the con, but my memory for faces is poor, and the whole time he was reading my eyes were fixed on tiny indicator lights. The only time I saw him later, he had a whole circle of listeners, and I wasn't about to interrupt that!
My first panel was MCSI (Magical Crime Scene Investigation) where we talked a little about magic and a lot about real world issues that would relate to how the magic would (or wouldn't) work. For instance, if a spell figures out (like a futuristic brain scan might be able to do) if someone is aware they are saying something made-up, it still won't tell you what they are making up, or how it relates to the investigation. The difference between mistaken and lying. "Pseudologia Fantastica" - the ability of some con men to enter so deeply into the con that they believe it while they are in it. (Is this related to the ability of so many people to internalize the world and characters in their favorite TV shows or novels?) The symbiotic relationship between language and one's perception of reality.
Then to the concert, where due to Capricon moving to a format of 75-minute panels in 90-minute time slots, I arrived a bit early. Good thing--the borrowed tuner's 440A and filkart 's tuner's 440A did not match. Everyone's brains croggled. Retuning 42 strings (one autoharp and my guitar) would take pretty much the whole concert time; Art didn't want to do the concert without the autoharp, so we figured out that of the people present billroper could probably retune Art's 12-string fastest, so that's what happened. Thanks Bill! I still haven't figured out how the tuners weren't matched up, that's just so, so, wrong! (I try to keep certain stronger words out of posts I don't friends-lock). And I can't imagine that the question that goes with the answer regarding life, the universe, and everything, has to do with the number of strings I tuned...
I had just enough time to pack up the instruments and return them to my room, before heading toward my next panel, SF on TV. In honor of The Twilight Zone, which hits its 50th anniversary in November, there was cake. And I learned things, as I often do in panels--for instance, part of the reason the Firefly series failed is that Fox decided to air the episodes out of order. I got to explain the term "story arc".
Then I was scheduled for Cap 101, where no neofen showed up at all, and Steven Silver spent a great deal of his time detailing the differences between the Chicago conventions, and the organizations that run them, and the fannish opportunities for socialization in between conventions in Chicago. They weren't interested in filk, or happenings in Milwaukee, so I started writing down the bones of the short story that took shape in my head while I was chasing the elusive sleep the night before. Longhand. Ugh. But the people were friendly, and I handed out the "merit badge" FIAWOL stickers. (The earlier panels were Celluloid Devotee and hmm...I don't see a TV related sticker here. Oh, well, if I find it later, I'll edit the post.)
After that, there was food and conversation and some filking, though no one stayed up very late, least of all me, since I had a panel sheduled for the next day at the un-ghodly hour of 10:00 a.m. I even went in the Dealer's room, though I'm not much for window shopping, but it is a good place to run into people.