Parsippany, NJ Con?

[Emberchyld]

Anyone going to the con this weekend? I'll be there (possibly in costume, possibly not... *sigh* must return to sewing) on Saturday! Hoping a few Tri-Silk people might be there!

[justTripn]

Oh shoot! That would have been totally doable. WHY DIDN"T YOU POST THIS LAST MONTH!!!!

Have fun though! TAKE PICTURES!!!! Report back!!!!

[Alelou]

Yeah! Dang. I might have just worked myself up to that one.

[justTripn]

It'd be a 6 hour drive for me. Alelou, looks like it'd be WHAT a 2hr 45 minute drive for you. DO IT DO IT. And bring Beth. I'll call my son J. See if he would go.

[Alelou]

I'm thinking about it, but only because of you. Bether, are you off tomorrow?

This is nuts!

[Bether6074]

Oh bummer. I'm working both tomorrow and Sunday, but I certainly would have loved to go... Maybe if I'd known about it a few weeks ago, it would have been doable. The last time I went to a NJ convention I took the bus and it was pretty painless.

Sigh!

You two can go without me, though. Go and have fun. Sounds like a plan.

[Alelou]

Okay, so we're doing it. JT's up for it, and although my son is disappointed Eric Bana won't be there, he still wants to go.

This is the most impulsive thing I've done in a long time! But hey, every kid needs to experience a Star Trek con once in his life and I'm afraid he might be too cool for it the next time an opportunity comes around.

[Bether6074]

Have fun!

I'll be thinking of you both while I'm trying to make my way through weather-made waterfalls and driving through unfamiliar detours on long, winding roads in the pure blackness of 3 AM...

T_T . She wept, self-piteously...

Have a great time! Wish I could go!

[Alelou]

So do I, especially compared to ALL THAT. We'll miss you.

At least you won't have to listen to Alejandro and I argue about music all the way down...

[justTripn]

PART 1 of the Convention REPORT by jT

jT here, reporting from the con. Don't worry Alelou. It's free in the Business Center here. It won't go on the hotel bill.

Well, I took off from Pittsburgh about 7pm Friday and arrived in early in the morning at the hotel and slept in my car. At 6am I woke up and went into the hotel to use the bathroom. The VERY FIRST PERSON I saw at the convention, THE VERY FIRST was Marc Almo (Gul Dukat) standing alone in front of the hotel smoking. How's that for a good start!!! I stopped and had a short conversation. He asked "Who brought you to this convention? Lenord Nimoy?" I said, "No! It's the whole package. I wish I could have seen you." He said, "Well, you're seeing alot more of me than most people do."

Then after using the bathroom I went back to the car to sleep and at 9:30am woke up and the phone rang. It was Alelou arriving with Alejandro. So I got up got dressed and got in line for tickets. As I was buying tickets, a man turned to me and said, "I like your shirt." I said, "It's our website, Triaxian Silk." He goes, "I know. I know it very well." Turns out it was Middleman! I said, "This is the famous Alelou and I'm justTrip'n" He goes, "I know." I've seen a picture of you in that shirt." LOL . . . . Then we took pictures and he said, "Thank you all for 100s of hours of reading enjoyment." LOL!!! I say conventions don't get much better than that.

Soon we met up with Emberchyld who was a big hit as a Trill wearing a two-peice mirror universe Enterprise costume. It was awesome. It was fun hanging out with her because people kept coming up and asking for her picture. Not to mention it is just FUN hanging out with her. I will let her get on here and catch you up on all the cool activities she is currently involved in, some Trek related.

I better post before I lose this. Then more in the next post.

[justTripn]

Part 2: Saturday talks

Richard Arnold

First up was Richard Arnold, billed as Gene Roddenberry's right hand man, the world's leading expert on all things Star Trek. I gathered he oversaw continutity issues during the Next Generation and the movies, so I went up to ask him about female pon farr. I asked if he was in charge of continutiy issues and what he knows about pon farr. I set up the problem: that T'Pol seemed to have a pon farr-like symptoms in an Enterprise episode, but it wasn't quite definitive because it turned out to be an alergic reaction or virus or something. But how does that work with both the male and female going into heat every 7 years.

He said, "Sadly, no, I was not in charge of continuity issues during Enterprise." That a "wall" had gone up during Deep Space Nine, where the writers did not want to be limited by "what would Gene Roddenberry have said about this." Then Richard Arnold immediately emphasised that this was maybe a good thing and helped the writers go in fresh directions, but that the writers of that particular Enterprise episode probably should have consulted . . . .[then he named two writers I didn't recognize, Alelou knew them] before writing the pon farr episode. His attitude seemed to be: it was a minor problem, oh well.

Connor Trinneer and John Billingsley

The Connor and John Billingsly question and answer session was next. Yes, Connor looked every bit as great as he did every other con. No, I didn't get good pictures. I suppose I will eventually be able to google pictures of this con.

The banter began with John teasing Connor that he had all the screen time, fighting bad guys and nailing alien babes. He said, "In fact, you even got MY babe. Finally I get a wife comes to visit and she wants to sleep with you." *heavy sigh* John claimed to be totally happy about collecting his pay check and not having to work and sang a little song about this.

The questions were mostly about John and Connor's more recent projects. John started up a joke that all the questions were being addressed to Connor (he offered to pay anyone a dollar who had a question for him) he soon started handing out dollars and getting lots of praise and questions. They were lots of fun. There were few Enterprise questions, but relevant to our concerns here, Connor offered that he was so glad in season 4, when the writers finally had Trip get a spine and tell T'Pol to stop jerking him around. He made some whiny immitation of his character being whimpy with T'Pol, prior to that. Alelou may remember the exact words Conor used. Also someone asked if he was upset by the fact that the Trip and T'Pol relationship was left hanging and was not addressed in the final episode. He reiterated that he was flattered to be the center of attention in the final episode and said he would have been grabbing even more of that limited time to also address the Trip and T'Pol relationship, so "No, not really. It doesn't bother me." This does not match my memory of what he's said previously, and Alelou theorized that he might be playing politics. In any case, he seems more distanced from Enterprise at this point (aren't we all) though each time he was asked to name his favorite character he's played he said, of course it was Trip.

[justTripn]

SHOOT! I wrote this long thing about Kate Mulgrew, who was the BEST! But I lost it. I just realized I have to run and check out of my room and get to the LEONARD NIMOY THING! BYE!!!

[Aquarius]

Sounds like a great con! Thanks for the reports.

[Alelou]

Well, I'm home already, and JT gave you a good report. Anderson thought the writers should have asked Dorothy (D.C.) Fontana about the Vulcan pon farr stuff. She was the writer of Journey to Babel and other Spock-heavy episodes and apparently considered the Vulcan guru on Roddenberry's writing team. She also wrote some TNG episodes.

It was fun meeting Middleman and his daughter, especially since Middleman writes really lovely reviews.

It was also nice meeting Emberchyld, who perplexed people a bit by being an MU Trill in an NX uniform. You could just see Trekkie eyebrows drawing together as they tried to work that out, and the occasional fella was brave enough to ask about that -- and for pictures with Emberchyld. The costumes were fun to watch, particularly one Klingon who really got into character. I'll post some pictures if I can get them up on photobucket today.

I ended up not buying any Trekkie tchotchkes for myself, but my kid of course had to have Nero stuff. Oh, and we got to enjoy a very nice Chinese dinner with JT, and some fun just hanging out in the lobby once I could finally ditch my son in the hotel room.

I enjoyed JB and CT -- they were funny and charming together and there were a lot of laughs. They're both clearly quite intelligent and literate and have moved on from the show a lot better than we have. I still think this must be one of the very weirdest ways to make a living any actor will ever run into, and I hope our boy Connor doesn't become an alcoholic just so he can face these strange days of paid appearances and photo-ops and meals with ga-ga fans. Some of them are really pretty weird. There was the guy who wanted Billingsley to explain how come Phlox could cure lung cancer just like that, while in Star Trek the Voyage Home McCoy could use a pill to do something to cure kidney disease, etc, etc... (by that point the audience was groaning and Billingsley tried to find a graceful way out of the thing). There was the woman who proudly introduced her son to Richard Arnold as "Patrick Stewart James Tiberius Kirk" (if I'm remembering the mix of names correctly there). There was the woman who started crying as she told Kate Mulgrew how much it meant to her to have a female captain. (Frankly at that point I ran for the exit, but I'm just not crazy about Mulgrew.)

So it was a fun little adventure, but I wouldn't be planning to do it again any time in the next decade except that my kid is absolutely determined to go in costume as Nero next time (possibly because one little girl won a $25 gift certificate simply by virtue of dressing up as a generic "Star Trek princess," which he felt was patently unfair). We'll see if that resolution lasts through his freshman year, since I believe it would require shaving his head and eyebrows. I certainly won't mind if he forgets about it, unless of course it turns out to be a good gathering of folks from this site.

By the way, the movie was largely a non-presence in terms of programming -- I think it was scheduled for discussion at 5pm today. I also don't know if the fact that both Saturday and Sunday sold out means that the movie has revived interest, or the same old people were just in the mood for a little Trekkie communing. There were a fair number of hands up for the "first time" question Saturday, though.

[justTripn]

Here I am again!

Leonard NIMOY

Well, Leonard Nimoy was off to a good start, accepting the applause with the comment: "You are a particuarly emotional group of humans." Then "So, you seen any good movies lately?" LOL. Belatedly, I thought of a great question to ask him about Spock seeming to be ashamed of his human side in the OS and this reboot having Spock more stand-up about his human side, but I didn't get to the front of the line. There was on interesting issue addressed by Nimoy. He was asked about Vulcan religion and Nimoy said that Roddenberry was oppoosed to mentioning religion in any way. Expanding on that, the questioner asked "Why?" And Nimoy said he didn't know for sure, but he thought it was that Roddenberry was terribly opposed to the idea that in order to get something done humans would wait for help from a higher power. In his story, humans can do it themselves. Nimoy said that the book about "ancient astronauts" came out during the OS, positiing that aliens built the pyramids and other things. Roddenberry was very upset by the book and vehemently opposed saying, "Humans did those things!"

Klingons in costume


I just got out of a presentation in which two Klingons (the actors IN their costumes) got up and goofed and sang songs and told jokes and answered questions: Garon was one (the one with one eye. Not entirely sure who the other one was, but he was sure familiar: Martok? It was great fun, although the black guy beside me cringed and hid his head INSIDE his shirt when they started rapping, lol . . . he was groaning, "it's HORRIBLE"! They sang some Klingon opera and claimed that Shakespeare had stolen from Klingon opera for his stories and did the correct "Klingon" version: "To stab or not to stab. It's not even a question." A good time was had by all. lol

I sat down at a random table for lunch and was joined by a Trekkie who happens to be a member over at HoT. She recognized my name and hers was an acronym with both letters and numbers in it that I might remember. She had been to the $250 wine and cheese thing with Connor and was totally thrilled with it, although she noted with disapproval that "Connor doesn't seem to be a Trip n T'Poler!" (referring to the statements I already related to you from his question and answer session.)