Musings from Miami

I just got back to Florida from attending Dragon*Con in Atlanta, Georgia over Labor Day weekend with my friend, Ahryantah. We had a great time! We saw all kinds of people dressed in incredible costumes and saw dozens of celebrities. I went in costume as Indiana Jones. We met or got our pictures taken with Cliff Simon, Beau Bridges, and Jewel Staite (Ba’al, General Hank Landry, and Dr. Jennifer Keller from Stargate: SG-1) as well as Nathan Fillion and Alan Tudyk (Mal and Wash from the series Firefly and the movie Serenity). We attended panels featuring actors from Stargate (Jewel Staite, Torri Higginson, David Nykl, and Rainbow Sun Francks), Firefly (Nathan Fillion, Alan Tudyk, Jewel Staite, and Morena Baccarin), and Star Trek (Avery Brooks and Michael Dorn). We went shopping and picked up some action figures (from Stargate and Indiana Jones), and we attended events for the Stargate track, including a Stargate party and Stargate TWITS (excerpts of Stargate actors guest-starring in other, often obscure, TV series and movies). We stayed in an incredible hotel – the Marriott Marquis in downtown Atlanta. The largest and most centrally located of four host hotels, the Marriott housed several of the convention events including some of the large panels and the dealers and was quite impressive. I loved the architecture; it was at least 40 stories tall with an atrium that rose through all 40 stories to a skylight at the very top, with gracefully curving walkways lining the atrium in organic lines that gave the atrium more the look of a cathedral or a giant sculpture than a building. We made several new friends, including our two roommates, MeridianRising and Honkie_McGee. Probably the highlight of the event, though, was dinner Sunday evening. Ahryantah was attempting to explain “Slash fiction” to me – stories involving homosexual romantic and/or sexual liaisons between main characters of a TV series or movie – using Stargate as an example. We got into an in-depth discussion of the literary merits, gender and sexuality dynamics, and prejudices surrounding slash writing during dinner. As we got up to leave, Ahryantah noticed that a man was sitting in the booth next to us with his arm up on the back of the booth, almost like he might be half listening in on the conversation, and as we passed by, she realized that it was Robert Picardo! (Richard Woolsey from Stargate: SG-1 and Atlantis and The Doctor from Star Trek: Voyager). He had just sat down and likely didn’t hear any of our conversation, but the irony (and Ahryantah’s reaction once we got out of the restaurant) was priceless!

 

All in all, we had a great time, and we’ll probably go again next year. I’ll post pictures from this year’s Dragon*Con convention to Photobucket soon.