Sunday started out much too cold and early for me. San Francisco is eerily quite in the morning hours, especially if you're used to seeing it only in the daytime or at night when it's full of people and you can't find parking. I picked up Sarah, drove to Oracle and called Christine to get directions, then went and picked her up and we got to the breakfast at 10:00.

The room was long and narrow, with ten circular tables, each seating ten people, and the buffet table at the back of the room. It was already full when we got there so we got to the last table in the back which ended up with seven people. Sure we couldn't see what was going on at the front of the room (where there was a podium and a large screen television) but it did mean that later on we had less people talking when the guests dropped by.

The people at my table were Sarah and Christine, Chance and his friend who drove 13 hours from Phoenix to be here and had to leave after the breakfast to drive back to Phoenix, Nicole who lives in Fremont and works at a garden center, and a woman who lives in Montana and flew here for the Con. It took us a while to get to the buffet table, which had the usual scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage, home-cooked potatoes, donuts, fruits, pancakes. I didn't really notice anyone going back for seconds, especially once the activies started. I didn't get any more food either.

Anita Ellis organizes the breakfasts, which are charity events with the money going to the James W. Ellis Scholarship Foundation, in honor of Anita's father who died from cancer. The scholarship is for Hofstra University students with either have/had cancer or who have a parent that has had/died from cancer. There was a speech by one of the Hofstra students, not one of the scholarship students. This student, from Hawaii told us of her family and how her dad raised the kids by himself and put them through private school. She already has a scholarship for Hofstra but her dad recently contracted cancer and Anita graciously gave her $1700 for plane tickets and expenses to Hawaii for Christmas. It was a moving speech. Anita herself was a good hostess and kept talking and kept everyone participating.

The guests arrived a bit before 11:00. There was Willa O'Neill and Ms Leick and Ebonie Smith. They ate breakfast first and then went around the room, spending 6-12 minutes at each table talking and getting pictures taken. Willa was quite animated saying that she hadn't really slept last night. I don't remember what else we talked about. Ms Leick was rather subdued with our table and Christine told her about her fundraising efforts, to which Ms Leick said that she would be interesting in helping so she got contact information from Christine. Ebonie shook each of our hands and asked us our names (later on when she appeared at the Con she did remember most of the names of people she met at the breakfast). Ebonie's mom was there and once Ebonie moved on we talked to her mom for another 10 minutes. Her mom is quite proud, gushing about Ebonie's roles (she was in all four Lethal Weapon movies) and what a great kid she is.

It was relatively civil for half of the time that the guests moved around and chatted. Ms Leick started climbing on tables and making poses, which of course attracted a crowd of people and disrupted things a bit. Mike Ownby and Heresy and Wesser and Kara followed Ms Leick around. They're a bit overprotective at times, which is good. Some fans get a bit out of control and it's nice to know that Ms Leick has people looking out for her safety. Someone gave Ms Leick a big stuffed animal tiger, which Mike Ownby carried the rest of the breakfast. Try to imagine that sight (a 6' tall off-duty police officer with this serious face holding a stuffed animal tiger in both arms) because I don't have a good picture of it.

So that was the breakfast. Certainly a great experience and it's much more effective than the actual Convention if you want to spend time with the guests. It's a worthy charity (I fully support educational causes) and Ms Ellis has done a good job virtually by herself, raising over $121k since she established the charity in 10/97. I couldn't find any information about it on the web though, which is too bad since I wanted to donate money to it.