Eat Your Heart Out, Walter Koenig

[kevin_standlee]

There are photos behind the cuts in this message. I'm posting it out of order because I didn't get the photos cropped and cleaned until after Lisa left, and I wanted to write about that while it was fresh in my mind.

At L.A.con IV, I went by the Autograph Tables one afternoon and saw Walter Koenig sitting there with not one person talking to him while nearby was a large queue for David Gerrold. I actually went and talked to Koenig for a few minutes because I felt a little bad for him, but it did seem like a funny situation to me at the time.

I figured I'd be like Koenig at my scheduled autograph session at Noon today. So people could recognize me by my picture in the program book, Lisa and I put on our WSFS uniforms, and we set up at the tables outside the Dealers Room.



Here I am all set up. The program book had a convenient space below each Guest bio for photos, so I practiced by autographing my own book. I actually feel a little bad about not getting all of the other guests' autographs -- those who could attend, naturally -- but the only place I saw most of them other than Rebecca Forstadt was at the Opening Ceremony.

After running a short errand for johno into the Dealers Room, I settled down to wait for not much to happen. Lisa came and sat next to me and we talked.

Then, out of nowhere, amazingly, an autograph seeker appeared!



It was controuble, who very kindly asked for my autograph in her program book. I was happy to oblige, after which we talked about convention issues.



Here's a photo of me, Kuma Bear, and Lisa posing with the MARCon program book, with all three of us in WSFS uniform.

My 45 minutes complete, I moved on to my final panel, where I was joined by Mark Evans and we spent an entertaining 75 minutes talking to an audience of 18 people on that old favorite subject of "Convention Disasters." We talked about the lines at ConFranciso, the 14-hour ballot count, the SWAT Team at Disclave, the DripClave fiasco (mentioning the first tends to trigger memories of the second; I freely admitted that I had been present at neither), and many others. Not all of them could be considered disasters as much as annoyances, I guess. At the end, I summed up by suggesting that the disasters were of two major types: Ones that could have avoided by better planning, and those that would have been difficult or impossible to avoid. I also pointed out that one of the reasons we tell these tales is to try and keep the memory alive so that other people will not repeat the avoidable errors.

My duties as FGOH now formally complete, I headed over to the Feedback Session, as I describe elsewhere.

Edit, 27 May 0800: Fixed an error pointed out in comments.

Comments

Re: No-body brought a WSFS constitution?

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

Well, I guess so, but if you're looking for authorship, it's the Westercon Bylaws whose text is nearly all mine. Every word of it went through my hands in the mid-1990s rewrite. It's timill who has done the rough equivalent to the WSFS Constitution. OTOH, I did completely rewrite the WSFS Standing Rules in the late 1990s.

Clever idea, though, at least for a staged photo.