jaina

This year's SDCC was kind of a mixed bag for me. I wasn't able to go the whole time, for one (stupid work), and for another, it was just so damn crowded. They capped registration beforehand, which is great, but I think they need to set the limit even lower. Ten thousand less people would be dreamy. The floor was just unpleasantly choked with people, especially around the booths that were selling exclusives, and a large proportion of panels filled to capacity with people still waiting outside to get in.

This makes it sound like I had a bad time. Which isn't true at all, I had fun, definitely-- the con itself just wasn't quite as cool as in previous years. But the company was EXCELLENT and involved lots of quoting Robot Chicken and cat macros. ("I'm all sparkly glowy, Annie! Yaaaaay!")

Wednesday

I left work a bit early and scooted downtown to get to Preview Night. Picking up our pro badges was a breeze-- they have really got the prereg pickup down to a science. I called

sirrogue so he could let me into the hall and give me my Exhibitor badge. Weirdly, my Lucasfilm badge had disappeared, although Tim and Christine swore they'd seen it earlier in the day. Best we could figure, somone else accidentally picked it up and then went around the whole con unknowingly impersonating me. *g*

I spent all of Preview Night doing line control for the Star Wars Shop and giving out swag to people in line. Easy enough, and I got to see

kay_dee70,

miana_dude, and Mike and Alli! My voice and arms were pretty tired by the end of the night, though. Tim suggested I ask trivia questions, to the crowd, but I'm crap at trivia, so instead I asked people to tell me the weirdest, most obscure thing they knew about Star Wars. Some of those answers were pretty funny. When the floor closed, we packed up and went home, because I still had lots of sewing to do.

Thursday

No Comic-Con. Dratted work. More sewing.

Friday

Got to the con a little before 9 to stand in line for the Stargates autograph raffle. Sadly, neither of us won, but the girl in front of us won for both SG1 and SGA. Lucky. Rogue had booth duty, so we went back to the floor and I wandered around a bit since I hadn't actually seen any of it on Wednesday. There was a little line outside the POTC pirate ship, which I wanted to see anyway, and con mentality took over: "Oooh, a line, let me stand in it!" Turned out to be a good thing, because they were giving away POTC bags and posters to the first 20 people! Sadly my poster was a little crunched, and they didn't have any more. Inside the pirate ship was pretty cool; they had photos and costumes and toys and such.

I'd planned to go to B20 for the Reaper pilot screening, but it'd been cancelled and attached to the Kevin Smith panel later in the day. So I went to the Pixar shorts panel instead, which turned out to be great. They showed this really cool documentary about the history of animation at Pixar, which will evidently be released on DVD in the fall, and then they showed three shorts-- For the Birds (best ever!), One Man Band, and Lifted-- and brought out three people associated with those shorts. Very fun. After that, I immediately went back to B20 to snag a seat for the Stargates panel. I knitted a little while I was waiting, and Rogue joined me when he got off-duty downstairs.

The Gates were about the same as always-- high on entertainment, low on content other than some very brief trailers. Highlights:

Chris Judge's intense fear of polar bears. Sorry, his intense fear of being *eaten* by polar bears.
Ben and Amanda making snow angels in the Arctic
JohnJoe saying he wanted to cross over with the Daily Show
And my favorite-- Chris, Amanda, and Ben spontaneously morphing into Randy, Paula, and Simon when a particularly persistent fan tried to sing his (very bad) parody song at the microphone and was drowned by a chorus of "BOOOOOOOO" from the audience. (Don't be stupid during a Q&A at SDCC. The audiences will eat you alive.) I have to say, Amanda's Paula Abdul impression is terrifyingly good.

After the Gates, we just barely squeaked into Hall H for the New Line panel, because I wanted to see the Golden Compass preview. The clip they showed was not terrific, but it didn't matter, because the rest of the panel was devoted to Shoot 'Em Up, with Clive Owen, who was THERE! OMG! I hadn't heard of the movie before, but basically it's 90 minutes of Clive Owen shooting eight million bad guys in awesome and hilarious ways. They showed three different clips, and each was better than the last. It's probably still too violent for me, but maybe I can do like I did with Sin City and go with someone who's already seen it and can tell me when not to look.

I tried to get into the pilot screening of Chuck, but it was full. So Rogue and I went back to the floor and drooled over Jason Palmer's artwork for awhile before we got in the Hall H line for Steve' Star Wars presentation. We ran into

miana_dude on the way in, so we sat next to her and Tony, and

jawajames joined us shortly thereafter. The panel wasn't so much Spectacular, but it didn't suck. Yay for Lego Indy!

I had gotten a call from

ladyamaryllis during the SW panel, so I called her back and made arrangements to meet up so she could get my extra badge for a guy in her Masquerade group. (My dad had planned to come, but ended up not. Next year!) When the floor closed, we met back up with everyone at the SW booth, and a few of us headed for Subway because I was *starving*. We had just enough time to eat before it was time to get the car and go to the airport to get

kelbebop and Corli! Yaaaaay!

We picked them up with out incident and headed for home, which of course was a total (and glitter-covered) disaster area. I had mostly finished, but I still needed to make my belt. Like the total angels they are, Kel and Corli's only reaction to my non-finished-ness was "how can we help?" Between the three of us, we knocked out the belt in record time, and they glittersprayed my boots, too. I still needed to stay up to finish stoning the Falcon on Rogue's vest, but everyone else was able to go to bed at a reasonable hour.

Saturday

I wore my Elizabeth plum dress, and Corli wore her DMC version of Will, because she'd only had a chance to wear it for Halloween. But sadness-- the boombox we were bringing for rehearsal had old, leaky batteries in it, so now my Lizzie shift has horrid yellow stains all over it that won't wash out. D: We got to the convention center by 9:30 so Rogue could start his booth shift and the girls could pick up their badges. Turned out to be a good thing, too, because the floor randomly opened around 9:40! I grabbed a ticket for one of the Scholastic Harry Potter bags, then rushed over to Jason Palmer's booth because we wanted to buy the last matted Serenity print he had. He really liked my Elizabeth dress and asked me to pose for a few pictures, because he might be doing a piece of art with that dress in the future. He also took my info for a possible future photoshoot! Eeeek! He and his wife, as everyone else has noted, are just the sweetest people ever. And it's kind of funny, because he's just as into all the costume details as we are.

I found Kel and Corli upstairs at Masquerade orientation, which went about as usual. Lots of newbies this year, and we were missing several familiar faces. I got to properly meet

laragoth, finally! I called Rogue to see if he wanted to try his luck in the Heroes/BSG line while we finished orientation and got our costumes from downstairs, but they capped the line about 20 people in front of him. Boo. So instead we rested a little and had lunch, and then we had our first all-together rehearsal in the empty dressing room, to work out spacing and unison issues. (Kel and Corli live 500 miles away from us, so they learned the choreography by video.) We were alone in there for awhile, but then the Sandman group came into rehearse too, so we had a dance-rehearsal-off! Well, sort of. Not really. But close enough! When we were satisfied with how everything was working, Rogue went to go collect some more autographs, and I sat down in the rehearsal room to chat with people and do some last costume fixes. It's always fun to watch people do their skits when they're not in costume-- or even better, when they're in an entirely unrelated costume.

Things chugged along pretty quickly after that. We got checked in, claimed a dressing room, and started getting ready. We signed up to get our makeup done by the professionals who were there, so that was nice. It's the same every year-- I always think I have so much time, and then before I know it they're calling "ten minutes!" I started freaking out when I couldn't figure out how to fasten my Leia puffs over my real hair (because like an idiot, I hadn't done a trial run). Luckily, we had acquired a dressing-room-mate, Marty, who was marvelously levelheaded and said, "Here, do you have bobby pins? Hold still," and proceeded to pin right through the hair puff to secure it, which of course was the obvious solution. I was just too freaked out to think of it. Marty was the Indian Medusa who won Best Original Design-- it was really funny, because she was covered in gold glitter, and we were covered in silver and bronze glitter, so you can imagine what the floor of our dressing room looked like!

I think the green room was bigger this year, or at least it felt bigger. We sat near

ladyamaryllis and the rest of the Greasy Potter Undergrounders and made friends, yay! We also ran through our choreography a few times, to the amusement of those around us. We exclaimed over young Boba Fett in the first row; his whole costume was really well detailed! Rogue took some pictures with him. (I asked his father what would happen when he grew out of the costume. "Oh, his sister's already claimed it," he assured me.) AJ, Judy, Aimee, et al were very carefully sitting at a table in the back of the room-- they wore their headpieces and costumes the whole time! Crazy people!

We were number 38, so we got to see about half of the 51 entries before we had to go line up. Luckily, Courtney and her group were in the early 20s, and they were SO great, as you've all already seen. I think our performance went really well. I felt, if not quite calm, at least very much under control during our time on stage. And we got a good reaction from the judges and from the audience. Then we went back to line up for pictures, where we chatted a bit with Josie and the Pussycat Dolls. I had been wanting to ask them about their audio, because it sounded so professional and impressive. They were really nice.

When we got through pictures, it was back to the green room to watch the rest of the "halftime" show, which was a pirate-vs-ninja martial arts battle. Pretty fun and impressive! Then they finally announced the awards, and they called our number! The way it works is, they read off the numbers of the winners, but they don't tell you what you've won-- you only find that out when they announce it on stage. When it was our turn, we saw the Star Wars stuff on the other side of the stage and quickly worked out that we'd won the Lucasfilm prize. As it turned out, they had decided to award two prizes, and as the runners-up, we received an R2-D2 cooler. This is hilarious, because while it's a rare and very cool collectible, I actually already own one. My mom got it through a raffle at her work when I was in high school, and he's since been outfitted with casters and has starred in all three versions of Star Wars: Musical Edition. (Upstaging bitch.) R2-New2 is living with us for now, until such time as Kel and/or Corli decide they want him and we take another driving trip to the Bay Area. (So, Thanksgiving.)

Back to the photo stage for more photos with our prize, then we got to go home and sleeeeep. We stopped for Carl's Jr on the way home, because we were starving!

Sunday

We didn't need to be there until eleven on Sunday! Oh, blessed sleeping-in-ness. We got back in our Masq outfits, because part of the fun of Sunday is running around in the costumes you weren't allowed to wear before Saturday night! We made quite a sight, getting breakfast and riding the trolley in full costume. I was on-shift at the Star Wars Shop from 11-2, but since the R2-KTs were sold out and there wasn't really any line, the most useful thing I could do was stand by the aisle, hand out free swag so we wouldn't have to deal with it after closing, and get my picture taken. A lot. So that's what I did! I don't think I've ever been photographed that much in any of my costumes, not even Sikozu. Corli, Kel, and Rogue alternately joined me and roamed the floor. We got some great feedback on our costumes and our Masquerade performance, which made us feel all warm and fuzzy. My favorite comment came from a guy, maybe late teens or early 20s, with the whole backwards-baseball-cap-and-baggy-pants thing going on, who said, "Yo, were you the Dreams last night? That was *awesome.*"

At 2, I went up to Masquerade Playback, where Corli and Kel were already waiting, having gone up earlier to get good seats for filming the screen. I love Playback, because not only do you get to see everyone you missed, but you get to hear the reactions of everyone in the room. When we're watching the feed in the Green Room during Masq, everyone cheers and claps for the other contestants, even though we know they can't hear us. So that way, when you're onstage, you know that the green room is cheering for you. But it's fun to actually get to hear it! :)

Afterwards, I hung out with the Undergrounders for awhile, and we walked back to the floor, which was nearly ready to close. I had one last look-round, then we retrieved our stuff from the SW booth and found K&C, who'd changed back into street clothes. (Smart girls; I didn't even think to bring any!) We decided to walk back to the car because the shuttles and trolley were crammed with people. Rogue and I got some funny looks, and one random girl at an outdoor table wanted a picture with me, which was cool.

Back home, we went for a yummy dinner (with margaritas! woo!) at On The Border, and I drank a bit too quickly on my empty stomach, which was evidently greatly amusing for everyone else. Afterwards we all relaxed in our apartment complex's hot tub and brainstormed for next year, because OMG! It's only 364 days away!

And that was SDCC 2007! Much love to Kel and Corli for being AWESOME in every way, and to Rogue for so patiently putting up with my frantic preparations and near-trashing of our apartment. And also for being awesome.

Dragon*Con, here we come!