Saturday Commentary

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.

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.