Saturday I met Christine and shook hands with Sarah to
make sure we knew
each other so I wouldn't accidentally forget her. I also met Heresy who
was
working the HLOFC booth with Wesser and Mike Ownby. I must say that the
fan club booth is quite impressive with posters and a couple notebook
computers running as kiosks and a couple of photo albums with some
really
nice photographs of Ms Leick. There were also badges for HLOFC members
and
I got a fan club t-shirt for some reason. Heresy said I was supposed to
get
one but I don't know why. Sure, I'm listed as being in the HLOFC
Maintenance
Team, but I always feel uncomfortable with that since I do so little.
In terms of physical space the convention is quite small. There were
probably
less than 500 attendees which is probably about right for the smaller
Xena
conventions (the main Xena Con in Pasadena is huge). There was one room
for
retailers (about the size of the retailer room in DunDraCon), one room
for
the main convention (about the size of all of the open
gaming/retailer/swap
meet/anime rooms in DunDraCon if the dividing walls were removed), a
wide
hallway with the photo table and registration table and scripts table,
and
outside there were some tables and a concession stand. The Hyatt Rickey
is
very spread out with most building being one-story so we were off in
one
building.
First was a trip to the photo table, which is very popular before the
convention proper starts. A long line that snaked outside and moved
quite
slowly past the photo table with 8x10 glossies spread out about six
high
(and most people can only reach the first 3-4 rows so if you want a
hard to
reach photo you need to get the one attendant's attention). At Memphis
I
ignored the table until late and then I realized that they had photos
that
you can't get from Creation or Power Star, so this time I made sure
that I
went through early and I bought half a dozen photographs of Ms Leick,
at
least four of which I'm sure I don't have and I'm not too sure about
the
last two.
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There's a script table where you can buy scripts (mostly
from Xena, some
Hercules and Farscape) and most scripts also include an exclusive
photograph.
The dealer room had one stand of people selling Star Trek jewelry,
another
stand of someone selling swords and knives, another stand selling movie
posters, one stand selling Xena items, one selling framed autographed
pictures,
and one stand for the USS Defiance fan club (based out of Sacramento)
who
it seemed provided volunteers for the convention (or they gave out
t-shirts
that all the convention staff wore).
The woman who runs the script table looks to be about 40 and has this
great
Xena costume on. She was also at the Memphis convention and she enters
into
the costume competition. I heard her say that she's a Universal
employee, so
I guess the scripts table at least is stuff from Universal Pictures
rather
than Creation Entertainment. Would explain the photos table too since
they
have some unique photographs.
I missed some of the early stuff. Creation shows a lot of music videos
that
fans created and submitted to Creation. Personally I'm not sure how
legal
that is as I doubt Creation has rights to use the music at least, even
if
they have rights to show clips from the tv shows. There was the usual
trivia
competition and auctions and costume competition that I've seen before
with
different participants. Some of the new videos I saw where clips from a
Xena
documentary that included in the Xena fan club kit #4, there were a
couple of
new videos (one for William Gregory Lee's Virgil character, one for Meg
Foster's Hera character, and the season 5 blooper tape which is
hilarious.
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