Dragon*Con 2006
September 1-4
Hotel
So let me start this off by mentioning that Dragon*Con is huge. HUGE. And its not the typical convention that I attend. I’d say its about 20% anime (and that’s probably being generous, since its what I had my eye out for the most) and the rest pretty much caters to any kind of nerd you can imagine. I walked for three days straight and I still didn’t see everything. So I’ll basically recite the line of events how I remember it, and I gotta say, it was AWWWWSOME DEWDS.
Friday Sept. 1st
Driving Providence to Boston. Never fun. Especially if you’ve ever been to Boston and seen the third world country its become. Anyway, I get to Atlanta after leaving my car in what looks like a ditch by the side of the airport. IndianaStone and I meet up and ride the MARTA from the Atlanta airport to downtown Atlanta. We find the convention just fine, but somehow the Holiday Inn eludes us completely and we’re dragging our tons of luggage around for about half an hour before a bum finally shows us the way. I give him all my Sacagawea dollar coins that the stupid MARTA ticket dispenser gave me. We get arranged in the hotel and head out to get our con badges.
Let me give you some excellent advice for anyone who goes to Dragon*Con:
Buy your tickets from TicketMaster. I got my badge in about 10 minutes while Indy, who paid cash waited much much longer. And the next day people were waiting hours. So yes, use TicketMaster.
So Indy and I wander around the convention and immediately I see one of my favorite bands, The Last Dance. I’ve been a fan of these guys for years so I immediately went up and got an autographed CD. I’m still kicking myself for forgetting my camera at the hotel but the experience was amazing.
Dio and Sergio show up a few hours later (they drove from the North Pole) and we all hit the bars. I FINALLY got to meet LostDecoy after like 4 years of knowing this bitch. She’s awesome. I love her. That is all. I met a ton of other awesome OBers and there’s lots of photographic proof.
Saturday Sept. 2nd
FIRST CELEBRITY SIGHTING DAY.
Saturday I wore my B.B. Hood costume and people really got a kick out of it. Most didn’t really make the connection but seeing a leedle red riding hood with an uzi is enough to make anyone giggle. IndianaStone and I walked the “Walk of Fame” which is basically this crowded room where you walk around in a giant circle seeing the panel of guests. Some of my most notable people were of course as follows:
Kevin Sorbo: Awesome, polite man and MY GOD IS HE TALL. We were chatting for awhile and I asked to get my picture with him of course he obliges. When he stood up though he was huuuuuge! In our picture I’m tucked in the nook of his arm. It was a great moment and I’m glad I got to meet him.
Peter S. Beagle: Most people don’t recognize the name but he wrote the The Last Unicorn, one of my favorite childhood books that has followed me into adulthood. He was an incredibly sweet man and I bought one of the collectors items of his ORIGINAL write up of the book. Apparently when he first published the book the company went out of business not 6 weeks later so only 6,000 copies were made. So instead of crawling into a hole Peter rewrote the entire book and republished it with a different company, and the rest is history. Now he’s hugely famous and still writing excellent books. A great pleasure to meet this man.
Peter Mayhew: You know, the guy who played Chewbacca under that huge furry suit. I’m not usually one to talk shit, but this dude wasn’t so nice. Maybe he was just having a bad day. I ended up getting a blurry picture with him and I was so unimpressed I just ended up deleting it.
We met a ton of other actors, writers, and artists but those were the ones that really stuck out in my mind.
Also something about that day, we checked out the “gaming room” which was in the basement of the Hilton (I think?). It was this dark cold cellar packed with tables. I don’t think a single person looked up from their card games to look up at us. The ‘computer section’ was about 20 computers with lines (and no counterstrike) so I passed it by.
Eventually we went back to the hotel and changed out of costume to go hang out with our friends. Later that night as more and more booze was getting inhaled I think I ended up in a really packed room of the Hilton smoking with Sergio on the balcony. After a bunch of room parties we went home.
Sunday Sept. 3rd
Now Dragon*Con ain’t no ordinary convention. Sunday isn’t the good-bye day. People just keep on partying till Monday and that’s exactly what we did. We ended up sleeping in really late so I didn’t wear my Deedlit costume for entirely too long. IndianaStone and I took Exploding Alex to the Walk of Fame again to see if Kevin Sorbo was still hanging out, and indeed he wasn’t. It was pretty crowded so we just wanted to get the hell out of there. On the way out I hear “HEY ITS DARK CRYSTAL” over my shoulder and its James Callis from BattleStar Galactica. Now I don’t watch the show, and I wasn’t dressed as a Dark Crystal elf, but what the hell, close enough. So I stopped as he took a picture of ME. Now that’s hot.
After that I ran back to the hotel and changed and we met up with all the OBers at a bar and whaddya know, there’s Grant and Kari from Mythbusters at the bar. This was one of the highlights of the convention. They were awesome and just as happy to see fans as we were to see them. So of course a bunch of pictures were taken of Grant and Kari signing all sorts of anatomy for cameras. I’d do it all over again every night if I could. After that the bar closed and we “retired” for a drunken card party of “Apples and Apples” in one of the hotel rooms. It wouldn’t seem like a particularly interesting game but when you’re plastered its genius. We drank ourselves silly that night until finally at 4am I had to leave. (My plane left in like three hours). So Sergio, Dio, Indy and I stumble back to our hotel and clean up, pack and head out. I actually showed up at the airport still drunk. And that was the Dragon*Con 2006. I still have permanent marker on my stomach.
