Con Report

[cdybedahl]

If I had made a list in advance of what I thought would be Tanith Lee's first words to me, "Oh, it's you" would not have been on it. So if I ever prophetize, don't trust me.

Redemption '03 has been an absolutely amazing convention. It's certainly the most enjoyable one I've been to, ever. I didn't really expect that. When I signed up for it, it was mostly to go see a bunch of friends over a weekend. None of the guests looked all that interesting. Well, of course, Chris Boucher is if not the God of Scriptwriting then at least a major saint, but he's got a way of speaking that I find tiresome to listen to. Mike Collins I'd never heard of. Damian London I'd seen as a minor character on Babylon 5 (the Centauri Regent, if you didn't know). So, basically, I more or less expected to listen to a few talks and panels with Chris and spend the rest of the time in the bar with friends.

Boy, was I wrong.

The path towards greatness started when Steve Rogerson (on the convention committee) mailed me and said that they'd invited Tanith Lee, she was coming and would I like to interview her?

What a question.

Tanith Lee has been one of my three or four favourite writers for about twenty years now. She's the only one who's been among my favourites for all that time. I answered Steve's question in the resoundingly positive and started looking forward to Redemption quite a bit more. Time passed, we got there (after a tiresome trip from Heathrow to Ashford, but let's not dwell on that), checked in, registered, unpacked and all that. Then, the convention started out with a panel that I think was supposed to be about what the Centauri were like as a race. One of the participants was Damian London. Since not all that many friends had shown up yet, we went to it. Might as well get a look at one of the guests, you know?

Pretty soon the panel degenerated into The Damian London Show. That was not a bad thing. Oooh boy-ee was it not. The guy is absolutely incredible.

Damian London has worked in the American movie industry since the early 1950s. He's been an active member of the Academy Of Motion Picture Arts And Sciences (you know, the people who award the Oscars?) for 37 years. He's seen everything, met everyone and done the lot. He's got stories, I tell you. No, wait. That's not emphatic enough. He's got STORIES. He used to hang out with Martin Landau and James Dean (they were the same age and got into movies around the same time). He was instrumental in bringing Rutger Hauer to the USA. He worked with Gene Kelly.

But those stories came later, mostly. At that panel he mostly talked about how he came to be involved with Babylon 5 and about things that happened when he was working there. And he doesn't just have a lot of stories to tell, he knows how to tell them really, really well. The one hour alloted for the panel vanished in an instant, and we walked out of there quite determined to attend a lot more of the things involving Damian.

The next thing I remember attending was the reading of "Man of Iron", the script that Paul Darrow wrote for Blake's 7. It's not a bad script. It's an atrocious script. The audience nearly fell off their chairs laughing at parts that was probably meant to be dramatic and exciting. Not to mention the probably not intentional slashbait in it ("TARRANT: For once you are on top, Vila. Enjoy it while it lasts."). Oh, and it uses pump-action shotguns a lot. In B7. In a script written by an actor who'd been making it for three years.

Then there was the Freedom City room party. It got sort of spread out in time, since various people kept dropping off to attend programme items and such. Which was a good thing, if you ask me, since it meant that I could actually hear what people tried to say to me and it was possible to breathe the air. I talked to a couple of people whom I hadn't met in years or ever, and I accidentally participated in Snowgrouse's B7 Pictionary. Eventually I left and joined my sleeping wife.

The second day dawned, involving the one program item I'd been getting increasingly nervous about since January. The interview. Me and my wife up on the main hall stage with Tanith Lee, and us responsible for entertaining all the people in the audience. We'd written down a whole bunch of questions that that we hoped would be interesting both for Tanith and the audience, but there was no way we could really know what she would like to talk about. What if she said "No, I don't want to talk about Blake's 7, ask something else"? What if she answered all the questions in monosyllables? Full of trepidation I dressed up a bit and made sure to be there in plenty of time (which was no sacrifice at all, since the preceding programme item in the main hall was Damian London's GoH speech (and talk about tough acts to follow...)).
"Oh, hi," the ever energetic Judith Proctor said when we got up and approached the stage. "Have you been introduced to Tanith?"
"No," we said, since we hadn't. We'd seen her in a panel, but hadn't tried to talk to her. I mean, she was Tanith Lee! Surely mere mortals like us couldn't bother famous people like her?
"Ok," Judith said. "Let's do that then."
We walked over to where Tanith was standing. Judith caught her attention and pointed at us.
"These are the people who are going to interview you," she said.
Tanith Lee looked at us. "Oh, it's you," she said.
If you didn't already know that, I can tell you that it is possible for a sentence to be so unexpected that you can't figure out what it means. By the time it had sunk in what she actually said, I'd already wibbled something incoherent and shook her hand.

The interview went well. Very well, actually. Tanith was quite keen to tell us about her memories of B7 and her involvement with it. She told us about how she came to write for the series, which characters she liked the most, about becoming friends with Jackie Pearce, about what she would've liked to do if the series hadn't been canceled, about her Doctor Who scripts that never got anywhere and a lot of other things. And since we couldn't see the audience at all because of the strong lights pointed at us, I wasn't even nervous. There's a big difference between being quite sure that people are paying attention to you and actually knowing it.

"Can I buy the two of you a drink?" Tanith said when the interview was over.
Would you have turned her down?
We ended up not seeing more than a minute or two of Chris Boucher's GoH interview. We sat out in the bar chatting with Tanith and her husband John (who is very tall, easily a foot taller than Tanith) until she had to rush off to get a bit of lunch before her next scheduled appearance.

I don't really remember what we did the rest of the afternoon. We attended the odd panel, talked with people we mostly know from the mailing lists and generally floated around having a good time. Towards early evening the programme items petered out, leaving a whole in the schedule where people could have dinner before the cabaret and masquerade, and where the people actually performing in the cabaret and masquerade could prepare for it. I and the wife decided to have a quick bit of dinner in the hotel restaurant. Coincidence had it that there were a couple of free seats next to Tanith and John, who waved us over. Since there was no way my ego would let me turn down that, we joined them. The four of us were almost finished when disaster struck, for very pleasant values of disaster. Damian appeared, alone, to eat something. He was promptly invited to join us, and did so.

We never made it to the cabaret or the masquerade. We sat in the dining hall for three and a half hours, talking to Tanith, John and Damian (although, to be honest, mostly we all listened to Damian). For a few milliseconds when I noticed that the cabaret was about to start I considered mentioning it and possibly getting people to leave. But... The cabaret was probably pretty like the one at Redemption '01 and the one that will be on Redemption '05, while dinner with those people is unlikely to happen again any time soon. I shut up and stayed, and I don't regret it in the slightest. I had an absolutely great evening, first in the dining room and later in the bar outside the main hall (turned disco for the night) with my wife, Tanith, John and various other people who ambled by. Eventually, though, it had to end.

Sunday... What the smeg did I do on Sunday? We got up a bit late, and spent the morning mostly talking to people. At noon we listened to Damian explain how the Oscar awards are actually awarded (he should now, he's been doing it for 37 years!). Surprisingly, they go to serious lengths to keep the process fair. After that was the hustings for the Ruler of the Universe election, an item that is always entertaining to watch. This year, some baddie from Stargate SG1 got killed on stage and couldn't stand in the election since it would take several episodes for him to regenerate. Anyway... That passed, we vote and strolled by the signing session. I got Chris Boucher's second Star Cops novel signed by him, and Tanith signed the first one of her books I ever bought for me (it's a copy of Death's Master that I bought back in 1986 or so, and had brought to the con just to try to get it signed). My wife got a signed photograph of Damian London, and are planning to give it to the ex-co-worker who once gave her a signed photo of a very scantily clad Claudia Christian.

A number of chats later, it was time for the closing ceremony. And it came much too soon, it felt like I'd just got to the con. The guests held little speeches and claimed to have had a great time. I don't think they were lying, they all seemed to enjoy themselves greatly. Chris Boucher even claimed to feel slightly better about the human species after the con. The results of the Ruler of the Universe election was announced (the 6th Doctor, who ran on a platform of promising not to do a damn thing). Lots of people were thanked. The results of lots of more or less silly competitions were announced. You know, all the usual stuff.

And then all that was left was the end. We sat out in the central part of the hotel chatting and drinking until midnightish. Tanith didn't want to go home, she said, and the way she kept delaying actually leaving I tend to believe that she meant it.

Monday morning we got up, had another huge English breakfast (I love those, and if I wasn't too lazy to cook them at home I'd be a lot fatter than I am). We hugged people good bye, promised Damian to try to get Judith Proctor a Nobel Prize For Being Judith and then we left.

Heathrow still sucks.

Comments

[manna]

Damian London was just wonderful.

On Thursday night at dinner, we ended up seated with him quite by accident, and he was absolutely enthralling company.

On Friday morning, we were sat having breakfast with Marian, when Damian wandered up and said, terribly politely, "Would you mind if I joined you?"

We assured him that, no, we wouldn't actually mind if one of the guests joined us and was fascinating company for another hour or so. What a sweetheart.

Glad you made it back okay, and I hope the fun you had at the con is enough to keep you cheerful for a while. And I'm sorry I didn't actually say hello and make highly-appreciative Lyst-member noises to you. There were so many people there I wanted to talk to but somehow didn't get time to.

[cdybedahl.livejournal.com]

I know the feeling. I hardly got to say more than "Hello" to several old listmembers, and I missed a few entirely although I knew they were there.

[kannaophelia.livejournal.com]

I am so incredibly jealous. ;)

[osanna.livejournal.com]

Wow, sounds like you had an AWESOME time. Sounds fantastic!

[cdybedahl.livejournal.com]

We did, absolutely. It was.

Tanith Lee is delightful, by the way. She looks like a late-middle-aged goth girl, without being at all silly, and behaves a little like Kiki (from Sluggy Freelance).

Re:

[osanna.livejournal.com]

Ooh! She sounds VERY cool! How long did you spend interviewing her?

[cdybedahl.livejournal.com]

The interview itself was one hour, up on the stage in the main convention hall. But she and her husband seemed to like us, so we ended up spending quite a bit of time with them for the rest of the con :-)

Re:

[osanna.livejournal.com]

That's so cool! I am jealous! *G*

[(Anonymous)]

I was about to apologise for not talking to you more at the con but now I see that I need to be deadly jealous of all the stuff you got up to when I didn't see you about. Still, I got to be a vain tart and pose while Tanith Lee's husband took photos of me for fantasy art Photoshopping which makes me quite smug too.

Gina the Dormouse

[snowgrouse.livejournal.com]

Oh, so *that's* what he's going to do with the photos? He took some of me as well, ulp.

I noticed you were having a great time, Calle! Tanith was great:). Sorry I didn't have more time to talk to you--there were so many people there that I would've wanted to chat with:). I'll scan some of the Pictionary things in if I can--they look pretty frightening when viewed sober. Post your Man of Iron pictures soon if you can!:)

[altariel.livejournal.com]

Great report. I hope you write up more of the Tanith Lee interview - I was in my room panick^^^^^ prepping for interviewing Boucher, and so I missed it.

Hope the weekend has helped alleviate some of your stress, even if just a little.