DAY 1:

LET THERE BE GEEKS
I arrived in Indianapolis at about 9:30 this morning, way too early to check in to my hotel.  So I just parked the car, gathered up some basics and headed for the RCA Dome (grumbling about double-parking assholes the whole way).  By the time I got to the line, it was about a block long, but only a half hour later that length had more than doubled, so all things considered I guess I was lucky to have gotten there so early.


"GOULÈ!"
Conventions such as these always seem to draw out the most interesting people.  Unfortunately, and strangely enough, they also seem to attract the LEAST interesting people at the same time, resulting in a truly amazing and sometimes frightening mish-mosh of humanity.

Shortly after taking my place in line, I made casual acquaintence with my immediate neighbors.  Little did I know that we would soon be laughing ourselves to tears, and keeping each other well entertained for the 3 hour wait we had ahead of us.  It started, simply enough, with off-hand (and sometimes off-color) comments about the quality- or distinct lack thereof- of the various fan-made costumes that were in dense abundance.  What started as general ribbing and color commentary evolved (or perhaps devolved) into a series of running jokes and obnoxious taunting of any and all passersby.  Although, I do have to admit that my own part of it consisted largely of laughing myself to pain, holding my sides, and wiping the occasional tear from my eye.  I did manage to stop laughing long enough to make a stray comment or two, though, but these guys didn't make it easy for me.

Talk about fun.

I feel I should take a moment to describe a few of the costumes that most fueled this purple geek haze we had fallen into.  First, there was the costume that came to be known amongst us as the "Mario Jade."  This person had designed and put together their own costume based on the character Mara Jade, a character from the Star Wars novels and such.  It was not bad enough that the costume was poorly executed, which it was, and how.  Oh, no, that would have been too easy.  What lodged this image into our minds for all time was one simple yet unredeemable contradiction:  The character of Mara Jade is a toned, athletic, and quite lovely female.  This person was male.  Big, dirty, hairy, fugly, and most assuredly male.  We saw the costume and all did a simultaneous double-take, then tried desperately to rid ourselves of this nightmarish image, but to no avail.  It is ours to bear, forever.  And ever.  The large, badly-dyed green spandex and bed linen costume enveloping this bear of a human being...  We will never suffer from a shortage of nightmares again.

But wait!  There's more!

The second one of particular note was wrong one so many levels that I can scarcely fathom it.  First, take note, this is a STAR WARS convention.  There were no representatives or guests from any other movie or work of fiction.  This person, however, saw fit to attend opening day in a homemade Batman costume.  Batman, in case the name isn't quite enough to make it clear to you, is male.  This person- this bad, bad person- is most decidedly female.  Or perhaps a male with a glandular problem.  But in any case, I never want to see Batman with boobies again.  Granted, I can appreciate boobies.  I like them very much.  I am what one might call a "booby officianado" if one were so inclined to call me by something other than my name or the ubiquitous "hey you!"  But there was a dire contradiction here.  It would have been simple enough to call it a Batgirl costume, were it not for one decidedly nasty detail:  This female person had seen fit to stuff her jock.  Yes, she had an armadillo down her trowsers!  I've never seen a woman with such a generous batch (not since Chyna's Playboy layout, anyway), and frankly would have been quite happy to have never seen it at all.  Bulges that size are the type to cause embarrassment if a boy's been having naughty daydreams in class and is suddenly called to the front of the classroom.  She wanted to appear male, and felt it was necessary to... shall we say... aim high.  One sock?  Nooooo.  How about two?  Nah.  Three then?  That aughtta do it.  This "Batchgirl" costume, with its generous breasts and even more generous area, will forever hold a place of infamy in that subconscious part of our minds where nightmares come from, right next to our dear hairy friend, Mario Jade.

Suffice to say, our subsequent obnoxious behavior could easily be explained away as psychological self-defense.

Being terrible with names, I doubt I'll ever be able to recollect the names of these fast friends I'd made, but I won't ever forget those few hours together.  For better or worse, I'll always remember it.  And that's probably a good thing, as it will make it easier to recount it to a shrink later in life when they try to figure out what went so terribly wrong.

At one point during our long and slow tour of the sidewalk queues, a documentary crew worked its way down the line of attendees.  Well, perhaps "crew" isn't the right word.  There were two people: a guy with a camera, and a woman with a microphone.  They were interviewing people standing in line, for official Lucasfilm webdocs (ohhh, yeah).  By this point our little play group had reached such a fervor that people in the parking garage 100 feet away were finding themselves subject to the occasional shouted taunt.  Needless to say, when the camera crew reached us, they stopped.  What happened over the next few minutes blurs together in my mind (from the laughing), but by the time it was done, one these new friends (names, names, names) had succeeded in embarrassing poor Amy (the very petite and cute mic girl) to an extremely deep and rich shade of red.

And then his friend offered her a "Thank the Maker" button (long story... well, not so long really, but of little consequence given what else was going on).  Don't be surprised if some of the footage ends up in one of Lucasfilm's web documentaries, especially if they do one on the twisted psychoses manifested in the Celebration 3 attendees.  It would fit right in.

Of course, there were a few people who didn't attract complete derision from the Peanut Gallery, such as the travelling Jedi Minstrel (click for a pic), who sang us a lovely Star Wars-themed derivative of an old classic, and was generally a good sport about the ribbing he received.  There were also the official costumes of the convention workers, most notably the awesome Stormtrooper uniforms, that were really sweet, right down to the voice changer built into the helmet.  That was very cool.


"BUT YOU WERE JUST RIGHT HERE!"
I didn't come to Celebration 3 alone.  No, 2 friends came with me.  Actually, truth be told, we drove separately because they don't plan on staying the entire weekend as I do.  So we met up as soon as we could.  By that time, I'd been in line for some time already, and was already waist deep in post-juvenile delinquency.  So when they arrived, they stopped beside the line to let me know they'd arrived, then went to the "Will Call" line to pick up their passes.

After ten minutes, my cell phone rang.  That call went something like this...

"Hello?"
"Hi, Eric.  Guess what."
"What?"
"We're inside already."
"WHAT?  You just walked past me!  How the hell did you get inside already?!?"
...and so on.

It would seem that the event security wasn't very secure, because after picking up their passes and lanyards, they had quietly slipped into the incoming crowd, effectively jumping to the front of the line to get in.  And nobody noticed.  I'm not sore about it.  No, not at all.  I just would have liked to have gone with them.


WELL ARE THEY GOING TO TELL ANYBODY?
The lines at this convention are from Hell, and bound to get worse.  This is especially true of the line going into the official convention store.  Outside the arena doors, the wait may be several hours.  And from what I've heard, once inside the doors one can expect a 4 or 5 hour slow meander to the counter.

Toward the end of the day, we (my friends and I) got into this line hoping to get our purchases out of the way so we could enjoy the remainder of the convention.  After about an hour or so of standing, we were informed that the convention officials had closed the doors to the store, and were not allowing anyone else in.  The truly odd thing was that we did not hear it from any of the convention employees or volunteers.  We heard it from other people as they were walking past.

I can understand why they would cap the line at the door (otherwise they would never get out of there on time), but this really begs the following question:  Why the f**k didn't they send someone down the line to let us know the doors had been closed?  That would have been very helpful information.  Very sloppy, and enough to put a damper on my day (albeit a small and temporary one).


SINGING AND DANCING STORMTROOPERS
After being on our feet for the entire day, we decided to sit in on something where we could actually sit down.  Something with no lines.  Something mildly entertaining and possibly informative and funny.  We decided to try our luck with the "Star Wars in Pop Culture" reel that was being looped in room 205.  I am somewhat jealous of the person who actually owns the collection of media snippets, as there were some true jems in there: Mark Hamill on the Muppets, C-3PO and R2-D2 on Sesame Street, and oodles upon oodles of classic Star Wars toy commercials.

But there were two flies in this soup of Star Wars references gleened from pop culture...  The first was somewhat difficult to watch.  It consisted of Carrie Fisher making an appearance on Saturday Night Live.  The sketch seemed to be a spoof of old beach movies (complete with the ever-present ambiguous dude running by and yelling "surf's up!").  This was certainly not one of the better SNL sketches, for a multitude of reasons.  Among them: It was ponderous and utterly unfunny.  Too much build-up and not enough comedic delivery.  And even more painful was the fact that we got to hear Carrie Fisher's singing voice.  I will say that I admire her acting talents (not to mention the 2-piece bikini she was wearing), but Julie Andrews she is not.  It was difficult.  And yet, it pales beside what was to follow.

Imagine if you will, the most tortuous of tortures.  Imagine having rusty nails pressed slowly through your eyeballs.  Image having hydrochloric acid dripped slowly into your ears.  Imagine sitting through a live taping of a Barney video.  To me, this would have almost been preferable to having to watch this nugget of joy extracted from an episode of Donnie and Marie Osmond's thankfully long-defunct variety show.  Donnie, of course, played the Luke Skywalker character, while Marie played the Leia character with her usual toothy aplomb.

I'm going to pause a moment, to let the image of Leia kissing Luke from Empire Strikes Back settle into your minds for a bit...


...


Are you in tears yet?  Wretching up bloody chunks of lung?  Good.

Hot on the trail of our intrepid heroes (with the ever-present C-3PO and R2-D2) are Stormtroopers.  Check that.  Singing and dancing Stormtroopers, which demanded- nay, required- the comment, "no wonder they can't hit anything.  They've been spending all their time in dance class."  Luckily, Kris Kristofferson is there to be their Han Solo in a time of crisis of Rogers and Hammerstein  proportion, saving them from the Crack Community Musical Theater Stormtrooper Squad, and their THX-1138 Backup Dancers.

The clip got applause... after my friend Keli made a "thank God it's over" comment.  I think if MST3K's Doctor Forrester had used this clip, his experiment could very well have been successful.

This has certainly been a very interesting day.  And there are 3 more to come.  If it continues like this, I may take up drinking before the weekend is done.