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MediaWest*Con 23
The con report, at last! In honor of its overall Rattiness (i.e., emphasis on Rat Patrol fandom), and to celebrate my new paid-account status, I have added a new icon of my favorite RP character. *happy sigh*
MediaWest*Con 23: A Very Ratty Convention!
May 23-26, 2003
Report by Amedia
Introductory Remarks
About a week before I left for MediaWest*Con, I got a message on my voicemail from my ofttimes roommate Dorothy Hartel, who was about to leave early so as to visit an embroidery convention on the way. "There is a God!" she said, somewhat cryptically. It turned out that she had heard from the hotel: we had been on the waiting list, and we got a room in the convention hotel! Good news indeed.
As part of my preparation for the convention, I finally got around to a project I'd been planning since last December, when I bought some Harry Potter fabric scraps on eBay. I dreamed of making a patchwork vest with them, and managed to finish it a couple of days before the convention! My sewing area (a good-sized niche in the basement) was messy, which doesn't bother me, and smelly, which does: the man who installed air conditioning last summer had knocked over some old plates waiting to be given away (not his fault, they were in the way), which had fallen where I couldn't reach to pick up the pieces. The kitties had recently discovered the mess and decided to add to it (yuck!). I kept meaning to clean it up, but… well, I was in a hurry to finish this project, so I held my nose. No one else uses that part of the basement, so I knew it wouldn't bother anyone else if I waited until I got back. I was quite happy with the lighting in the area, which used to be dark; I got a very nice lamp with multiple moveable lights for $2 at a yard sale. The only problem was trying not to trip over the cord, which I had to step over to pass from the ironing board to the sewing machine, outlets being scarce down there. Nonetheless, I was very pleased with how the vest turned out!
Since Dorothy was taking such a roundabout route to the convention, I didn't travel with her as I often do. I didn't want to fly because I wanted to bring along leftover orphan zines (more on that later) as well as my laptop and printer (more on that, too!) and the small TV/VCR I bought specifically to take to cons. On the other hand, Lansing is a very long drive from Central Pennsylvania, and I didn't consider it safe to drive the whole way in one shot alone. Fortunately, one of my Ratty friends, Ruth Kittner, lives in Pittsburgh, an excellent halfway point, and invited me to stay overnight with her on my way to the convention. I left a day early, on Wednesday, and it took me about five hours to reach her house, which is in a lovely old tree-lined suburb. Her kitty Gretel and terrier Thorin made me feel right at home; indeed, Thorin made it very clear that the entire purpose of my trip was not to attend a fanzine convention, but to visit, pet, and pay attention to him. Ruth fixed me a delicious dinner and tucked me up in a very nice guest room. I also got to chat with some fellow Ratties online, using her laptop while she used her desktop. (Hooray for wireless networking!) And as promised beforehand, I also got to see beautiful pictures from her recent research trip to Germany.
Thursday
Thursday morning Ruth saw me off with extra directions printed out from Mapquest and bottled water for the journey. I stopped on the way for lunch, and about seven hours after I left, I arrived just in time to join Agel and company for a noisy reunion and dinner at the Ponderosa. A trip to MW*C is never complete for me without a visit to the smorgasbord across the street! Dorothy was there as well and had already checked in. As we headed back to the hotel after dinner, we were delighted to run into our other roommate Judith Wolford, who had just arrived and was on her way to dinner. We were glad to tell her that there were still members of our group there for her to eat with.
Our room was in the Preferred Section, but owing to new management it did not include the usual free candy bars. It was technically a smoking room but thankfully did not smell of smoke. We had a glorious view from the window of the new Lowe's, a huge billboard for Tile Mart, and a gas station.
This year I did something I hadn't done before; I brought along leftover orphan zines from Eclecticon and ConneXions and sold them out of my hotel room. Once people at the con found out I was doing this, I had a couple more consignors: Kim McCarthy, an old friend from Doctor Who fandom, brought a big stack of used zines, while Tish Wells, whom I know chiefly from Rat Patrol, dropped off the last few copies of her excellent RP novel The Normandy Raid and her story compilations Wadis & Oases and Hedgerows & Minefields. Judith also brought reprints of Desert Dispatches, a collection of 1960's magazine articles about the Rat Patrol and its actors, compiled by Bobbie Williams.
I was concerned that being in our room most of the time to sell these items would isolate us from the con, but in fact the reverse was true: the con came to us! Judith put up signs for Desert Dispatches all over the hotel, bringing us quite a few Ratty folks. We were also very fortunately situated next to Demon Bunny Press and across from In Person Press/Martha's Mugs, so we got plenty of traffic. My roommates were kind enough to keep the room open and "mind the store" when I wanted to take a break and do a little hall-crawling.
The laptop I inherited from my late dear friend Elaine was especially valuable this weekend, chiefly because Elaine had bought a mini-printer to go along with it. I typed in all the orphan zine titles, fandoms, and prices, sorted them by fandom, printed two copies of the list and put one outside our door with masking tape. People could thus see at a glance what zines we had. I crossed off zines as they were purchased, and periodically updated the list on the computer and reprinted it.
Now, I had last used the printer to do the programming schedule at the Long Range Desert Convention two years earlier, where it had proven to be a godsend. The first time I tried to print a list Thursday evening, the page came out blank, accompanied by chunks of dried ink! I was afraid I'd have to run out and buy a new cartridge, but it improved slightly when I ran the self-cleaning program, and Judith suggested popping the cartridge out and cleaning it manually. Dorothy turned out to have Q-tips with her, just what I needed. The printer behaved beautifully from then on.
Brief digression here: at various points throughout the weekend, Dorothy produced not only Q-tips, but a can opener, a pad of post-it notes, scissors, a calculator, a knife, and a flashlight. We were all pretty impressed!
Friday
I particularly liked this year's design for the con merchandise, which was a riff on Harry Potter: a crest similar to Hogwart's with the motto: "MediaWest*Con 23 - School of Fancraft and Zine-Edry." I meant to pre-order myself a tote, but forgot. Such things tend to run out quickly, but Friday morning I was still printing out updated orphan zine listings and didn't feel I had time to stand in the long registration line. Dorothy, who was going down to register in the morning, very kindly agreed to get me a tote and let me pay her back, and I was very happy. I didn't actually use it during the con because it might have gotten mixed up with someone else's, as many people had them. Instead, I carried the LOTR bag that I custom-ordered at MW*C last year (it has Legolas on one side and Gimli on the other), and I now use the MW*C 23 bag to carry my stuff when I go to martial arts class.
Friday afternoon was the only panel I attended. Kathy Agel, Deb Hicks, Judith Wolford and I held a panel on Rat Patrol slash. Judith did a great job keeping the discussion going with well-timed questions, and the audience participated enthusiastically. We got into a discussion of suggestive lines of dialogue in the series. I volunteered how Sue Collins, a very sweet person and as dedicated a gen fan as I know, found the line from "Chain of Death": "I missed you at the oasis last night" awfully slashy despite her non-slashy perspective. Someone else mentioned an exchange during "The Last Chance Raid," but we couldn't remember exactly how it went.
We did a little more selling and lots of hall-crawling Friday evening, and I stayed up past midnight. Which wouldn't have been a problem, except….
Saturday
Saturday morning began much too early! At 6:19 in the morning, our phone rang and a strange voice asked for Marilyn. I assured the caller that there was no such person here, received an apology, and went back to sleep. Having stayed up late the night before however, this left me rather sleepy for the first part of the day.
I did manage to get up only a couple of hours later and enjoyed breakfast in the hotel restaurant with Dee, Erika, and Julie, friends from Houston and St. Louis. We had a good time talking about Lord of the Rings and other fannish topics.
I wore my Harry Potter vest on Saturday and found a curious side-effect. When I visited the art show, perfect strangers would come up to me and point out HP-related artwork. Actually I was glad they did, or I might not have noticed one of the spiffiest pieces, a Quidditch game represented by a mobile!
I gave blood that afternoon – this year the Red Cross gave us T-shirts, which was very cool. They had a patriotic red white and blue design, and I wound up wearing mine for the trip back from Lansing to Pittsburgh on Monday. This event was open to the public, and indeed there was a mundane, an older gentleman, who came in and gave blood about the same time I did. I was a bit concerned when I reached the cookie table, but far from putting a damper on the conversation, he was cheerily relating tales of how, in retirement, he had returned to his early love of jazz and now plays in a band. I told him about how I did a radio show of big band music when I was in college, using my dad's records, and he told me about a jazz radio show from Texas that one can get over the Internet.
After giving blood, I found myself with an appetite for chocolate! I remembered that one of the rooms I visited while hall-crawling Friday evening was selling chocolate as a fundraiser; armed with this vague memory, I set out to find it. When I finally found the room, folks therein were chatting about the upcoming Thunderbirds movie. I like Thunderbirds a lot, so I joined in the conversation, and learned that one of the women there was a big fan of UFO, which I like too. "Doesn't it have the greatest credit sequence!" I said enthusiastically. One of the other people there hadn't seen UFO and was curious. So this woman I'd been talking to whipped out a portable DVD player – like a laptop computer, only smaller – and a complete set of UFO on DVD, popped in a disc, and played the credits for us! It was fun to see it again, and of course we also oohed and ahhed over the nifty tech toy she showed it to us on.
I headed back to my room for a nap, determined to shake the sleepiness that had plagued me since my wake-up call. We had been letting people know about the informal Rat Patrol party we were planning for the evening, and as I neared my room, Martha called me from across the hall. Among the custom design services she now offers are custom-made food products; she can put photos and other designs on edible icing. She said, "Why don't you get some Rat Patrol cookies for tonight?' What a great idea, I thought! I looked at the designs and the baked goods that she had available and settled on ordering cupcakes with Dietrich's face on them.
I took my nap and, much refreshed, went down to the restaurant for the Ratty dinner gathering. It was fairly small this year, as there were several RP fans who couldn't make it to MW*C this time around. But it was a cozy group, nonetheless! It was very nice to see Christina from Philadelphia again, whom I had met briefly at Eclecticon the previous year. Jean Coleman, Tish Wells, Kathy Agel, Dorothy and I made up the rest of the group (if I've left anybody out, please let me know!!!).
After the dinner, we went back to the room and got ready for our Rat Patrol party. Martha brought over the cupcakes, which were a huge hit. Some of them were frosted with regular icing, but the chocolate ones wouldn't stick properly and she used whipped cream instead. Naturally this unleashed a plethora of naughty jokes about licking whipped cream off of Dietrich! We watched several episodes with an ever-shifting group of guests: Trial by Fire, Kill or be Killed, Chain of Death, and just the last scene of The Wildest Raid of All (the one where they trade Hitch for water). Of course, we just had to watch the Last Chance Raid to see the slashy lines we had tried to remember during the panel. The scene turned out to be even better than we thought! Dietrich, who has just captured the Rat Patrol during an audacious raid on a radio station, is scolding Troy and Moffitt. He says to Troy, "What am I gonna do with you, Sergeant?" Troy replies, "Are you open to … [sexy pause] new ideas?" Dietrich's eyes slide over to Moffitt, as if wondering whether to shoo him out or invite him to join in a threesome, and finally Dietrich says, "I'm sure I"ll think of something." As one of the watchers observed, the whole tone of the exchange is highly flirtatious. Slashy goodness indeed!
Sunday
Erika and Dee kindly invited me to join them for breakfast again Sunday morning, but I am SO not a morning person. Taking advantage of the fridge in our room and the nearby grocery store, I got myself a healthy breakfast of skim milk and chocolate donuts to have whenever I woke up, and slept in.
Judith headed out on Sunday afternoon; Dorothy and I were sad she had to leave early, but glad that she was there as much as she was. We also nagged her to write up her own con report, so we'll look forward to that!
In the afternoon, I stopped in the dealers' room to show Paulle and Tami Alexandre the latest photos of my son, whose progress they have followed since he was a wee mite. Paulle was away from the table, but I left the photos with Tami, and discovered while chatting with her that she is a huge LOTR slash fan, so we wound up having a long fun conversation. She's into Frodo/Sam, while I'm all about Legolas/Gimli, but we are each sympathetic to the other's pairing and agreed that Sean Astin's performance as Sam in Two Towers was brilliant and heartwrenching. I got the photos back from Paulle later, who exclaimed most gratifyingly over how much the young fella has grown.
Sunday evening is traditionally a night to have Chinese food at Charlie Kang's with Agel and company. The buffet was great as usual and the conversation lively. Agel had come straight over from the Fan Q awards and brought good news: Judith and Cindy had won an award for their Rat Patrol story "The Just Friends and Brave Enemies Raid," while Agel herself had won for her Rat Patrol poem "My Enemy, My Friend." She also brought a surprise: a Fan Q for me! Progress Report #3 had arrived just before I left, and I had tossed it in the back seat without reading it; I didn't know that enough Barney Miller stories were nominated this year to have their own category! I won for "Once and Future," a two-part story that appeared in Diverse Doings 9. Agel also told me that my fellow Barney Miller author Python had won a Fan Q for her Law & Order story "Lifting You Up." And there was much rejoicing.
During the day, we had promised various people that we would have more Rat Patrol episodes in the room after dinner. Our first Ratty pal to drop in was Tish, who began chatting with our next customer about Highlander – we wound up watching a batch of music videos before we got around to Rat Patrol, but no one seemed to mind. We started with the hilarious Richie tribute (?) by the Woad Society, "Pretty Fly for a White Guy" and then the Media Cannibals' delightful alternate-universe Highlander vid "Opportunities." We got to talking about the capabilities of computers in vid-making, so of course I just had to show Woad Society's stunning SG-1 vid "Language," and then we wrapped up with their wonderful ST:TOS vids "Momma Told Me Not to Come," "You're So Vain," and "When I'm 64." Then we settled in to enjoy Rat Patrol episodes.
Once our Ratty guests had shuffled sleepily off to bed, Dorothy and I were thinking of turning in ourselves, but found ourselves with more customers! A gal named Lisa came in and bought the Barney Miller marathon tapes, which I was selling at cost, and we began chatting. I admitted warily that I write Barney Miller slash. The usual response is either an astonished, "WHAT?" or a heartfelt, "Just tell me it's not Fish." Her response was, "Of course!" It turns out that, like me, she had thought there was something going on between Harris and Dietrich even before she had ever heard of slash. It was that definitive fannish feeling: "You too? I thought I was the only one!" It also turned out that she is a budding songvid maker, and with very little prompting showed us her three new Buffy vids, which we enjoyed very much. We got to talking about the use of media in the classroom, an area in which she is very interested, as a teacher and researcher, and I promised to send her materials from my Star Trek class. A fortuitous meeting, to be sure.
Monday
Dorothy and I packed up at our leisure and left around lunchtime on Monday. Although we were each driving separate vehicles, we decided to form a mini-convoy as far as Ruth's house. Ruth had invited Dorothy to stay the night if she would like, but Dorothy wasn't sure; if she found herself wakeful enough, she wanted to drive on through and get home a little sooner. We followed each other to Pittsburgh, proceeding a little more slowly than either of us had originally arrived, thanks to the obvious presence of numerous vigilant representatives of the law. Ruth fed us a yummy dinner when we arrived, and invited Dorothy to stay, but she decided to travel on. She did join us to walk Thorin, however, which was a fun way to see the neighborhood.
Tuesday
After another very pleasant stayover at Ruth's house, I set out for home. Hubby greeted me at the door with a bouquet of flowers, the really good ones from the florist. I felt so warmly welcomed! I wasn't surprised by how clean the house was – our son was also away that weekend at a martial-arts camp, so the forces of chaos were absent and cosmos was bound to triumph. I also wasn't surprised that he had remembered to buy me a pincushion on sale as I requested. I was a little surprised, however, when he asked me to put the pincushion downstairs with my sewing supplies right away.
So I went down the basement stairs – and stopped in my tracks. The floor in the sewing area was spotless – no broken dishes, no kitty effluvia, nothing. Closer inspection revealed that it had also been swept and scrubbed. Everything had been put neatly away. An old boombox and our small record player had both been moved into the space and both were plugged in,. as was the lamp, to a new extension cord that was held neatly against the ceiling rafters with cup hooks. A note next to the sewing machine said, "Welcome home. I love you."
What a great convention – and what a great homecoming!
MediaWest*Con 23: A Very Ratty Convention!
May 23-26, 2003
Report by Amedia
Introductory Remarks
About a week before I left for MediaWest*Con, I got a message on my voicemail from my ofttimes roommate Dorothy Hartel, who was about to leave early so as to visit an embroidery convention on the way. "There is a God!" she said, somewhat cryptically. It turned out that she had heard from the hotel: we had been on the waiting list, and we got a room in the convention hotel! Good news indeed.
As part of my preparation for the convention, I finally got around to a project I'd been planning since last December, when I bought some Harry Potter fabric scraps on eBay. I dreamed of making a patchwork vest with them, and managed to finish it a couple of days before the convention! My sewing area (a good-sized niche in the basement) was messy, which doesn't bother me, and smelly, which does: the man who installed air conditioning last summer had knocked over some old plates waiting to be given away (not his fault, they were in the way), which had fallen where I couldn't reach to pick up the pieces. The kitties had recently discovered the mess and decided to add to it (yuck!). I kept meaning to clean it up, but… well, I was in a hurry to finish this project, so I held my nose. No one else uses that part of the basement, so I knew it wouldn't bother anyone else if I waited until I got back. I was quite happy with the lighting in the area, which used to be dark; I got a very nice lamp with multiple moveable lights for $2 at a yard sale. The only problem was trying not to trip over the cord, which I had to step over to pass from the ironing board to the sewing machine, outlets being scarce down there. Nonetheless, I was very pleased with how the vest turned out!
Since Dorothy was taking such a roundabout route to the convention, I didn't travel with her as I often do. I didn't want to fly because I wanted to bring along leftover orphan zines (more on that later) as well as my laptop and printer (more on that, too!) and the small TV/VCR I bought specifically to take to cons. On the other hand, Lansing is a very long drive from Central Pennsylvania, and I didn't consider it safe to drive the whole way in one shot alone. Fortunately, one of my Ratty friends, Ruth Kittner, lives in Pittsburgh, an excellent halfway point, and invited me to stay overnight with her on my way to the convention. I left a day early, on Wednesday, and it took me about five hours to reach her house, which is in a lovely old tree-lined suburb. Her kitty Gretel and terrier Thorin made me feel right at home; indeed, Thorin made it very clear that the entire purpose of my trip was not to attend a fanzine convention, but to visit, pet, and pay attention to him. Ruth fixed me a delicious dinner and tucked me up in a very nice guest room. I also got to chat with some fellow Ratties online, using her laptop while she used her desktop. (Hooray for wireless networking!) And as promised beforehand, I also got to see beautiful pictures from her recent research trip to Germany.
Thursday
Thursday morning Ruth saw me off with extra directions printed out from Mapquest and bottled water for the journey. I stopped on the way for lunch, and about seven hours after I left, I arrived just in time to join Agel and company for a noisy reunion and dinner at the Ponderosa. A trip to MW*C is never complete for me without a visit to the smorgasbord across the street! Dorothy was there as well and had already checked in. As we headed back to the hotel after dinner, we were delighted to run into our other roommate Judith Wolford, who had just arrived and was on her way to dinner. We were glad to tell her that there were still members of our group there for her to eat with.
Our room was in the Preferred Section, but owing to new management it did not include the usual free candy bars. It was technically a smoking room but thankfully did not smell of smoke. We had a glorious view from the window of the new Lowe's, a huge billboard for Tile Mart, and a gas station.
This year I did something I hadn't done before; I brought along leftover orphan zines from Eclecticon and ConneXions and sold them out of my hotel room. Once people at the con found out I was doing this, I had a couple more consignors: Kim McCarthy, an old friend from Doctor Who fandom, brought a big stack of used zines, while Tish Wells, whom I know chiefly from Rat Patrol, dropped off the last few copies of her excellent RP novel The Normandy Raid and her story compilations Wadis & Oases and Hedgerows & Minefields. Judith also brought reprints of Desert Dispatches, a collection of 1960's magazine articles about the Rat Patrol and its actors, compiled by Bobbie Williams.
I was concerned that being in our room most of the time to sell these items would isolate us from the con, but in fact the reverse was true: the con came to us! Judith put up signs for Desert Dispatches all over the hotel, bringing us quite a few Ratty folks. We were also very fortunately situated next to Demon Bunny Press and across from In Person Press/Martha's Mugs, so we got plenty of traffic. My roommates were kind enough to keep the room open and "mind the store" when I wanted to take a break and do a little hall-crawling.
The laptop I inherited from my late dear friend Elaine was especially valuable this weekend, chiefly because Elaine had bought a mini-printer to go along with it. I typed in all the orphan zine titles, fandoms, and prices, sorted them by fandom, printed two copies of the list and put one outside our door with masking tape. People could thus see at a glance what zines we had. I crossed off zines as they were purchased, and periodically updated the list on the computer and reprinted it.
Now, I had last used the printer to do the programming schedule at the Long Range Desert Convention two years earlier, where it had proven to be a godsend. The first time I tried to print a list Thursday evening, the page came out blank, accompanied by chunks of dried ink! I was afraid I'd have to run out and buy a new cartridge, but it improved slightly when I ran the self-cleaning program, and Judith suggested popping the cartridge out and cleaning it manually. Dorothy turned out to have Q-tips with her, just what I needed. The printer behaved beautifully from then on.
Brief digression here: at various points throughout the weekend, Dorothy produced not only Q-tips, but a can opener, a pad of post-it notes, scissors, a calculator, a knife, and a flashlight. We were all pretty impressed!
Friday
I particularly liked this year's design for the con merchandise, which was a riff on Harry Potter: a crest similar to Hogwart's with the motto: "MediaWest*Con 23 - School of Fancraft and Zine-Edry." I meant to pre-order myself a tote, but forgot. Such things tend to run out quickly, but Friday morning I was still printing out updated orphan zine listings and didn't feel I had time to stand in the long registration line. Dorothy, who was going down to register in the morning, very kindly agreed to get me a tote and let me pay her back, and I was very happy. I didn't actually use it during the con because it might have gotten mixed up with someone else's, as many people had them. Instead, I carried the LOTR bag that I custom-ordered at MW*C last year (it has Legolas on one side and Gimli on the other), and I now use the MW*C 23 bag to carry my stuff when I go to martial arts class.
Friday afternoon was the only panel I attended. Kathy Agel, Deb Hicks, Judith Wolford and I held a panel on Rat Patrol slash. Judith did a great job keeping the discussion going with well-timed questions, and the audience participated enthusiastically. We got into a discussion of suggestive lines of dialogue in the series. I volunteered how Sue Collins, a very sweet person and as dedicated a gen fan as I know, found the line from "Chain of Death": "I missed you at the oasis last night" awfully slashy despite her non-slashy perspective. Someone else mentioned an exchange during "The Last Chance Raid," but we couldn't remember exactly how it went.
We did a little more selling and lots of hall-crawling Friday evening, and I stayed up past midnight. Which wouldn't have been a problem, except….
Saturday
Saturday morning began much too early! At 6:19 in the morning, our phone rang and a strange voice asked for Marilyn. I assured the caller that there was no such person here, received an apology, and went back to sleep. Having stayed up late the night before however, this left me rather sleepy for the first part of the day.
I did manage to get up only a couple of hours later and enjoyed breakfast in the hotel restaurant with Dee, Erika, and Julie, friends from Houston and St. Louis. We had a good time talking about Lord of the Rings and other fannish topics.
I wore my Harry Potter vest on Saturday and found a curious side-effect. When I visited the art show, perfect strangers would come up to me and point out HP-related artwork. Actually I was glad they did, or I might not have noticed one of the spiffiest pieces, a Quidditch game represented by a mobile!
I gave blood that afternoon – this year the Red Cross gave us T-shirts, which was very cool. They had a patriotic red white and blue design, and I wound up wearing mine for the trip back from Lansing to Pittsburgh on Monday. This event was open to the public, and indeed there was a mundane, an older gentleman, who came in and gave blood about the same time I did. I was a bit concerned when I reached the cookie table, but far from putting a damper on the conversation, he was cheerily relating tales of how, in retirement, he had returned to his early love of jazz and now plays in a band. I told him about how I did a radio show of big band music when I was in college, using my dad's records, and he told me about a jazz radio show from Texas that one can get over the Internet.
After giving blood, I found myself with an appetite for chocolate! I remembered that one of the rooms I visited while hall-crawling Friday evening was selling chocolate as a fundraiser; armed with this vague memory, I set out to find it. When I finally found the room, folks therein were chatting about the upcoming Thunderbirds movie. I like Thunderbirds a lot, so I joined in the conversation, and learned that one of the women there was a big fan of UFO, which I like too. "Doesn't it have the greatest credit sequence!" I said enthusiastically. One of the other people there hadn't seen UFO and was curious. So this woman I'd been talking to whipped out a portable DVD player – like a laptop computer, only smaller – and a complete set of UFO on DVD, popped in a disc, and played the credits for us! It was fun to see it again, and of course we also oohed and ahhed over the nifty tech toy she showed it to us on.
I headed back to my room for a nap, determined to shake the sleepiness that had plagued me since my wake-up call. We had been letting people know about the informal Rat Patrol party we were planning for the evening, and as I neared my room, Martha called me from across the hall. Among the custom design services she now offers are custom-made food products; she can put photos and other designs on edible icing. She said, "Why don't you get some Rat Patrol cookies for tonight?' What a great idea, I thought! I looked at the designs and the baked goods that she had available and settled on ordering cupcakes with Dietrich's face on them.
I took my nap and, much refreshed, went down to the restaurant for the Ratty dinner gathering. It was fairly small this year, as there were several RP fans who couldn't make it to MW*C this time around. But it was a cozy group, nonetheless! It was very nice to see Christina from Philadelphia again, whom I had met briefly at Eclecticon the previous year. Jean Coleman, Tish Wells, Kathy Agel, Dorothy and I made up the rest of the group (if I've left anybody out, please let me know!!!).
After the dinner, we went back to the room and got ready for our Rat Patrol party. Martha brought over the cupcakes, which were a huge hit. Some of them were frosted with regular icing, but the chocolate ones wouldn't stick properly and she used whipped cream instead. Naturally this unleashed a plethora of naughty jokes about licking whipped cream off of Dietrich! We watched several episodes with an ever-shifting group of guests: Trial by Fire, Kill or be Killed, Chain of Death, and just the last scene of The Wildest Raid of All (the one where they trade Hitch for water). Of course, we just had to watch the Last Chance Raid to see the slashy lines we had tried to remember during the panel. The scene turned out to be even better than we thought! Dietrich, who has just captured the Rat Patrol during an audacious raid on a radio station, is scolding Troy and Moffitt. He says to Troy, "What am I gonna do with you, Sergeant?" Troy replies, "Are you open to … [sexy pause] new ideas?" Dietrich's eyes slide over to Moffitt, as if wondering whether to shoo him out or invite him to join in a threesome, and finally Dietrich says, "I'm sure I"ll think of something." As one of the watchers observed, the whole tone of the exchange is highly flirtatious. Slashy goodness indeed!
Sunday
Erika and Dee kindly invited me to join them for breakfast again Sunday morning, but I am SO not a morning person. Taking advantage of the fridge in our room and the nearby grocery store, I got myself a healthy breakfast of skim milk and chocolate donuts to have whenever I woke up, and slept in.
Judith headed out on Sunday afternoon; Dorothy and I were sad she had to leave early, but glad that she was there as much as she was. We also nagged her to write up her own con report, so we'll look forward to that!
In the afternoon, I stopped in the dealers' room to show Paulle and Tami Alexandre the latest photos of my son, whose progress they have followed since he was a wee mite. Paulle was away from the table, but I left the photos with Tami, and discovered while chatting with her that she is a huge LOTR slash fan, so we wound up having a long fun conversation. She's into Frodo/Sam, while I'm all about Legolas/Gimli, but we are each sympathetic to the other's pairing and agreed that Sean Astin's performance as Sam in Two Towers was brilliant and heartwrenching. I got the photos back from Paulle later, who exclaimed most gratifyingly over how much the young fella has grown.
Sunday evening is traditionally a night to have Chinese food at Charlie Kang's with Agel and company. The buffet was great as usual and the conversation lively. Agel had come straight over from the Fan Q awards and brought good news: Judith and Cindy had won an award for their Rat Patrol story "The Just Friends and Brave Enemies Raid," while Agel herself had won for her Rat Patrol poem "My Enemy, My Friend." She also brought a surprise: a Fan Q for me! Progress Report #3 had arrived just before I left, and I had tossed it in the back seat without reading it; I didn't know that enough Barney Miller stories were nominated this year to have their own category! I won for "Once and Future," a two-part story that appeared in Diverse Doings 9. Agel also told me that my fellow Barney Miller author Python had won a Fan Q for her Law & Order story "Lifting You Up." And there was much rejoicing.
During the day, we had promised various people that we would have more Rat Patrol episodes in the room after dinner. Our first Ratty pal to drop in was Tish, who began chatting with our next customer about Highlander – we wound up watching a batch of music videos before we got around to Rat Patrol, but no one seemed to mind. We started with the hilarious Richie tribute (?) by the Woad Society, "Pretty Fly for a White Guy" and then the Media Cannibals' delightful alternate-universe Highlander vid "Opportunities." We got to talking about the capabilities of computers in vid-making, so of course I just had to show Woad Society's stunning SG-1 vid "Language," and then we wrapped up with their wonderful ST:TOS vids "Momma Told Me Not to Come," "You're So Vain," and "When I'm 64." Then we settled in to enjoy Rat Patrol episodes.
Once our Ratty guests had shuffled sleepily off to bed, Dorothy and I were thinking of turning in ourselves, but found ourselves with more customers! A gal named Lisa came in and bought the Barney Miller marathon tapes, which I was selling at cost, and we began chatting. I admitted warily that I write Barney Miller slash. The usual response is either an astonished, "WHAT?" or a heartfelt, "Just tell me it's not Fish." Her response was, "Of course!" It turns out that, like me, she had thought there was something going on between Harris and Dietrich even before she had ever heard of slash. It was that definitive fannish feeling: "You too? I thought I was the only one!" It also turned out that she is a budding songvid maker, and with very little prompting showed us her three new Buffy vids, which we enjoyed very much. We got to talking about the use of media in the classroom, an area in which she is very interested, as a teacher and researcher, and I promised to send her materials from my Star Trek class. A fortuitous meeting, to be sure.
Monday
Dorothy and I packed up at our leisure and left around lunchtime on Monday. Although we were each driving separate vehicles, we decided to form a mini-convoy as far as Ruth's house. Ruth had invited Dorothy to stay the night if she would like, but Dorothy wasn't sure; if she found herself wakeful enough, she wanted to drive on through and get home a little sooner. We followed each other to Pittsburgh, proceeding a little more slowly than either of us had originally arrived, thanks to the obvious presence of numerous vigilant representatives of the law. Ruth fed us a yummy dinner when we arrived, and invited Dorothy to stay, but she decided to travel on. She did join us to walk Thorin, however, which was a fun way to see the neighborhood.
Tuesday
After another very pleasant stayover at Ruth's house, I set out for home. Hubby greeted me at the door with a bouquet of flowers, the really good ones from the florist. I felt so warmly welcomed! I wasn't surprised by how clean the house was – our son was also away that weekend at a martial-arts camp, so the forces of chaos were absent and cosmos was bound to triumph. I also wasn't surprised that he had remembered to buy me a pincushion on sale as I requested. I was a little surprised, however, when he asked me to put the pincushion downstairs with my sewing supplies right away.
So I went down the basement stairs – and stopped in my tracks. The floor in the sewing area was spotless – no broken dishes, no kitty effluvia, nothing. Closer inspection revealed that it had also been swept and scrubbed. Everything had been put neatly away. An old boombox and our small record player had both been moved into the space and both were plugged in,. as was the lamp, to a new extension cord that was held neatly against the ceiling rafters with cup hooks. A note next to the sewing machine said, "Welcome home. I love you."
What a great convention – and what a great homecoming!