Creature of Mad Enthusiasms

I don't think I'd ever posted this, so... I'm on:
BSI, ASH, and Other Sherlockian Societies (ironically, a member of none except scions Red Circle and Watson's Tin Box. I will probably be talking about SherlockNYC, which doesn't seem to have a presence at the con)

Costuming on a Budget I (don't know what the distinction is - I do know that the woman who runs Wear Sherlock is also on this or on II. I made my pitch on making or faking Victorian.)

From Doyle's Reality to Our Own (trying to remember why I asked for this, trying to remember...)

The Cozies (They're going to have a hella time shutting me up on this one, actually. Just A Few Opinions, based on having been a critic for years.)

Sherlock Holmes Radio Shows (In which I pimp Jim French and Great Detectives, and also Big Finish although I don't think they're on the radio, actually. Have they ever been on the radio?)

In addition, unless it's scheduled against one of my panels (please don't be scheduled against one of my panels, please don't be scheduled against one of my panels...) I really really really want to see Watsons Through Time.

( I said I'd do 11 and signed up for 8 )

Lot of shippy panels suggested this year, far moreso than last year.

It's suggestion time for MediaWest panels, and I'm suffering a failure of imagination. Any thoughts? I'll leave the suggestion of general discussion on Who & T'wood to someone else, so all I've got to offer right now are:

1) Sarah Jane Adventures, general discussion

2) Classic Doctors, Brand New Adventures (and more!) aka, "Nea advertises Big Finish for an hour."

3) Can You Go Home Again? Returning to a fandom after a long time away. (aka, is EL STILL angry at me for that Starlog letter? Is there even a Starlog anymore?) Actually, I've done this twice; I returned to Beauty and the Beast and Doctor Who fandoms after a decade. Very different experiences, and MW is the only con I go to that focuses on fandom as a culture.

I'm half kicking around the concept of an audio party, where I'll play one of the shorter BFs from end to end while knitting is done and nibbles are available.

This was the most relaxed Shore Leave I've had in years! Mostly because every time I had to fill a niche, I was able to keep successfully fobbing the job off on other people. I can't keep that up and keep getting badged in, but for this year? It was lovely.

I knew there was going to be a good Who presence when I saw the "Vote Saxon" flyers going up among the usual posters and advertisements. The morality in Who panel - bolstered by a last-second essay on "Wartime Morality in Doctor Who" by thanatos_kalos went well. It wasn't like Media*West's panel - the audience wasn't as eager to interact, and since we drew spoiler lines, there were a couple of times when someone speaking suddenly realized they couldn't finish their sentence. And a disconcertingly large group of people got up in the middle and left (it could have been boredom, it could have been that they were getting somewhere in the main room, which had slid off schedule by half an hour) but more people came in and stayed. So we started and ended with a full room, but not all the same folks.

I went to the "Doctor Who, Sarah Jane, Torchwood" panel later, but oy! The interest was there - it was a larger room than mine and standing room only - but the panelist who did most of the speaking was getting shouted corrections from the audience almost every other line, since he couldn't remember episode names, couldn't remember title names, and kept presenting rumor as fact. No, Freema was not fired. No, Christopher Eccleston did not suddenly quit mid-season because he didn't want to be typecast.

I've told the person who runs panels that I want to be the one running more Who panels next year. Thanks to having been on the concom and puppetmaker40, terri_osborne, and tiggerallyn's having rushed to sign up to Morality in Who (That really impressed her, guys, thanks!) I think I'm going to get it.

The other big thing of the day was, of course, the Masquerade. bill_leisner, I'm sorry I missed you - they said you'd dropped by at the signup desk - but the one part of the con that I really worked my ass off alongside everyone else was that flat-out race between end of signup and opening of the doors. Four hours seems like a long time until you have to edit the entry database, print out the paperwork for all the positions, get it to the appropriate people, get the food and repair kits to the green room, get the trophies to the main room and set up, wrangle judges & volunteers, and organize a small army.

My "padawan," as one of the tech dubbed Tom (his name's on the Shore Leave page), did brilliantly against an uphill climb. He lost all his usual photo area people (that's one of the jobs I accepted and then stuck someone else in - whew!), most of his costuming-expert judges had to drop out suddenly for personal reasons before the con and then one of his celebrity judges had to drop out minutes before the show started and the one that went on was drunk off her ass.

Claudia Christian should note that conventions don't touch Terry Farrell with a ten-lightyear-pole and she's going to end up the same damn way if she doesn't straighten up NOW. Dragging the show with random monologues by grabbing the stage got old fast; groping fellow judges and support staff on stage was inexcusable, and starting to swear in front of the children - *about them* as she handed out the awards to them! - is not going to be forgiven. And her handler isn't going to last long at her job either, if she can't keep her charge sober enough to handle her contractual duties.

One of the biggest cheers of the night was when our stage ninjas herded CC offstage after the children's awards and she didn't come back.

But the rest of it? Fabulous. Tom had a mammoth show - 28 entries, close to 40 bodies on stage - and it started exactly on time, clipped along with only Claudia dragging it for a tidy hour, had a high-energy hour with The Chromatics while the judges deliberated, and then awards went out quite fairly I think. There were three costumes that I really loved out of the pack, and they all got two awards each.

The first was a Jack Sparrow so good you'd think Johnny Depp just walked by. He won best in his category and one of the special awards (forget which now).

The second was "A Chorus League" where all the Justice League characters basically re-enacted A Chorus Line as run by Superman and Kara. ("Okay, the routine is punch, punch, block, kick, pow!" WONDER WOMAN "Please God, I need this job. I've got to get this job...") They got Best Presentation and I think one of the awards in their category as well. (Sorry, I'm a little fried. Drove home far too late without rock music to keep me awake - damnit, I had the case but it was empty! - and, fangirl that I am, am typing this up before I get breakfast.)

Best in category and best in show went to a group that always does the most fantastic ideas, but have been missing Best in Show by the smallest fraction of a vote for years. This time it was finally their time to shine, and they shone like a megawatt spotlight.

Titled "Beauty and the Beast," it started with Belle in her yellow gown waltzing to "Tale as Old as Time" with a very nice recreation of the Disney Beast. That alone was enough to get them something in the awards. But as he spun her out in a turn, out came Vincent! Vincent danced with her a bit, to the fury of the Disney Beast, and as the movie and TV beasts got into what can only be described as a catfight, The Beast from the X-Men came out and swept Belle away. (Words do not do justice to what was a beautifully building visual pun.)

I'm driving back up, but I'm not sure how long I'm staying. I'd like to see the Boogie Knight concert at four and wave at boogiebabe_smap and kradical but it's going to depend on how long my brain is capable of functioning and getting me home safely on so little sleep last night. Bill, I'm going to try to make a second shot at seeing you, too.

P.S. Bento
The thermos bento performed as advertised: they don't claim to keep *everything* hot or cold as there is little insulation at the top of the cannister, but six hours after packing the sandwiches and strawberries in the "soup" and "rice" containers were still very cool; the sandwiches in the middle container were cool enough to eat (peanut butter; I didn't mind if it got room temperature) and the cheeses and chocolate at the top were room temp.

It wasn't until I was putting the week's shopping into the pantry - too late to ask anyone staying at the hotel - that I noticed that the tiny little jam jar that comes with room service breakfasts would be *perfect* to put into bentos to hold sauces and things. And since it's glass, it's washable and won't pick up flavors.

I plead the fifth on whether I'm going to do a hall crawl when I get back to the hotel today.

The Morality in the Whoniverse panel kept wandering off topic (note to self - next year suggest a "Your theories on the Time War" panel to bleed off that whole thread) but it was well attended and people seemed to really like it. Major topics covered included "Does the Doctor have the right to enforce his morality on us?" (He has one; even though he has adopted the Earth, is he always correct, and what do we do if he isn't? With side trips into "Was Harriet right to do what she did?) Gwen's moral downfalls regarding Rhys (and if they are a parallel to Suzie's slow slide downwards), and "genocide and the Doctor: did he know what he was going to do to Gallifrey and was it the only choice? What about the Racknoross?"

The Sarah Jane panel was the only one where I lost a fair amount of people, but it wasn't as informative as the others - I basically squeed like a chipmunk on crack for an hour and encouraged everyone else to do likewise, which they did with great enthusiasm. Much love for the Sarah!

I don't know if I'll be able to catch up with everything that's being said on LJ since last night - the router at the hotel was nowhere near powerful enough to deal with the number of fans trying to get the episode. Let me put it this way - I was pulling the *mp4* dialup version and it took over 3 hours to come down! (And I was walking through the halls with my laptop open, dowsing for signal. Ended up walking into the wrong room...)

When I finally got it I was tempted to run through the halls screaming "I have it! I have it!" This put a cramp in my attempt to hold an impromptu "new Who/SJA" airing party with friends and folks from LJ I'm meeting for the first time. I stuck a note up on the room door that I'd hold an airing in the lobby in *checks clock* half an hour. We'll see who comes.

PS - It was cryptile who commented on my LJ "Doctor Who: Even our canon isn't canon." I had that made up into a button which has been VERY popular!