Dramatis Personae:

AnaKhouri: Your friendly neighborhood Yellow Menace poster

Shapiro Keats: husband to AnaKhouri

Captain Carter: best friend to AnaKhouri

Togusa: friend to Captain Carter, someone else to help pay for the room, a nice guy

Thursday

Thursday we left for Atlanta, roughly a 6 ½ hour drive. You can always tell when you enter Georgia: suddenly the landscape becomes littered with carpet outlets. Why carpet outlets? Does anyone know? Along the way Captain Carter introduced us to Your Vegas, a nice little British band that is struggling to make it. I liked their CD (sort of a mix of Duran Duran and Coldplay, only not lame like Coldplay) so I am giving them a shout-out here.

The con doesn’t technically start until Friday, but to avoid missing anything we always arrive Thursday night, check in, register, and relax until the next morning. As the years pass more and more people seem to be having this idea, so the registration line was hella long. It wrapped all the way around the block where the Marriott is. We got in line, but luckily for us they were letting people who hadn’t pre-registered (and were paying at the door) go in first because that line wasn’t nearly as long. Hooray! It cost us a little extra but I think the time we saved was worth it. There was kid walking the line, selling candy bars for his school. I thought that was brilliant and I hope he made tons of money.

Togusa had pre-registered, however, so even after we breezed out of the registration room we had to wait for him. As we were hanging out in the Marriott Jerry Doyle (Garibaldi from Babylon 5) walked right past us! He is taller than I expected, completely bald and was wearing white pants. According to Shapiro Keats, who attended one of his panels, he also has a mouth like a sailor. A pissed-off sailor who just stubbed his toe. More on that later.

Friday

Friday…time to start having a blast, right? Well…maybe not.

See, I was sick Friday. Really sick. Sicker than a dog your mean old neighbor poisoned with antifreeze. Puking my guts out sick. My friends blamed a certain Wendy’s franchise in Tennessee; I am inclined to think it was bad luck. I work in retail and am often sick from the unbearable amount of human contact I mist endure each day.

Here is a list of the things I missed while I was sick:

Q & A with Lance Henriksen

The Fiction of Robert E. Howard

Babylon 5 Reunion

Selling Your Fiction

What Editors Want

Mind-Melting Anime

The Peelander-Z Concert

Shapiro Keats also missed Friday, as he refused to leave me (except for the B5 panel, where he heard Jerry Doyle call William Shatner a motherfucker), and instead sat by the bed shoving Sprite and Gatorade down my throat.

In the evening I felt well enough to sit up and watch Dragon*con TV, the con’s in-house channel that is broadcast to all the host hotels. I was able to watch a live feed of the Battlestar Galactica panel, featuring about eight guys from the show. I learned that Edward James Olmos (Captain Adama) thinks North Korea has been cloning people for years, and that once Aaron Douglas (Galen Tyrell) accidentally smacked a sound guy in the face with his penis. Oh, the humanity!

After sleeping twelve hours, I felt much better and was determined to trek outside the hotel room on Saturday.

To be continued…

http://www.yourvegasmusic.com/

http://www.jerrydoyle.com/

http://www.lancehenriksen.info/index.htm

http://www.rehoward.com/

http://www.peelander-z.com/