Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! This weekend my wife Anne and I attended the tenth edition of the Indiana Comic Convention at the Indiana Convention Center in scenic downtown Indianapolis. They’ve stopped calling themselves “Indiana Comic Con” on paper for tiresome legal reasons that aren’t their fault, but to us they’ll always be Indiana Comic Con. This year the showrunners reserved more than twice as much space as they did for last year’s edition, a noticeable attempt to scale back up to their pre-pandemic size. Geek life had more space to thrive, but we still had no elbow space in the aisles on Saturday…

…which we could’ve dealt with as we normally do, if anything about this weekend had come to pass exactly as we’d hoped or imagined. To be fair, I can’t blame all our travails on the show. Adulting obligations overruled our original plan to attend Friday, which we thought would be a great day to speed through most of our to-do list amid smaller crowds. We were later told by a fellow attendee that Friday was in fact not a desolate cakewalk. The Indiana Convention Center had anticipated 30,000 attendees this year, but apparently a much greater number showed up on Day One than usual.

Our primary objectives centered on special guest Hayden Christensen, an unsurprising choice to longtime MCC followers or anyone who searches this very site and sees how many times “Star Wars” comes up. We ended up moving all our other wants and photo-op appointments to Saturday and Sunday, trying our best to work around his narrow Saturday-only schedule and gritting our teeth a little because we almost never do cons on Sundays. ICC 2024 joined our short list of exceptions. Given how Saturday ultimately flew off the rails, there’s absolutely no way we could’ve done it all in a single day.

Christensen had a packed schedule for his single day at the con, segmented into very specific session times. Anne had jumped on the ticket sales the very hour they were released, but we’re neither hackers nor scalpers. Doing the best she could, she got us into his Photo Op Session 2 at 1:30 p.m. and “Autograph Session D” at 4:30 p.m. Certain kinds of items could be signed only during certain sessions. Session D wasn’t his fourth signing session of the day; it was the fourth session for those who only wanted him to sign one (1) 8-x-10 photo. Fans who wanted anything else signed were grouped into other, presumably more bogged-down sessions.

We did our part to start the day off right. We parked a half-mile down the street at my workplace — blessedly free to me, thus avoiding the NCAA Tournament event-parking prices that had overtaken downtown Indianapolis this very same weekend, some charging as much as $35 or more a day. As a monkey’s-paw compromise, that meant a longer walking distance to and from, which gets no easier as we keep aging. We walked into the Convention Center at 7:40, early per our longstanding comic-con procedures. Registration opened promptly at 9. We picked up our green weekend wristbands (badges were only for VIP and highest-upcharged “Ruby” attendees) and adjourned to the exhibit hall doors on the far east end. The con’s entry schedule deviated from acceptable Midwest norms: dealers and exhibitors weren’t allowed inside till 9; VIP and Ruby badgeholders could run amuck at 10; we General Admission commoners had to contain ourselves till 10:30.

Once unleashed, we and hundreds of stampeding competitors headed directly to the autograph area on the far west end of the hall. VIPs and Ruby’ers had already formed colonies at several booths, including for fellow Saturday-only superstar Charlie Cox, who wasn’t there yet. Among those already in position, Chris Sarandon was one of two masked actors signing merrily away and Supernatural‘s Mark Pellegrino was just kinda chillin’, letting folks discover him in steady numbers. Next door to Pellegrino was our first stop: the John Rhys-Davies. (You know him, right? Cool!) We previously met him at ICC 2016, but I failed to add his signature to my Tolkien-film collection for reasons I’ve since forgotten. I aimed to correct that omission.

His booth happened to be next to the exit lane for Christensen’s large, fully curtained booth that would be used for his photo-ops and autograph sessions all Saturday long. One by one, smiling Star Wars fans would emerge and pass by us with their newly written-upon treasures. So we knew the erstwhile Sith Lord had arrived and started interacting right on time.

The esteemed Mr. Rhys-Davies manned his station at 10:45, in jolly spirits and ready to commiserate with us hoi polloi. We had to vie for his attention with a stream of VIPs and Ruby’ers who were allowed first dibs by dint of their statuses, but that’s part of the game. Once their lot were winnowed down a tad, Gimli’s handler commendably alternated between us and them. At 11:40 came our turn and our encore with him, enjoyably as expected.

By then a lot of lines had gotten massive. We headed straight over to join a line of 15-20 other folks for the next name on our want list: Robert Patrick! You might know him from Terminator 2, Peacemaker, Scorpion, and more. Anne and I had just finished binging all four seasons of The Unit, which was canceled unexpectedly in its time and ended with Patrick’s Colonel Ryan being promoted to general for orchestrating heinous acts in the name of American security. When our turn came at 12:05 we didn’t have a chance to hold him accountable for that jaw-dropping heel turn because he was too darn nice a guy…though things went a bit awry with his handler, who snapped our table photo before asking for money, and may have overcharged Anne for our privileges. It was hard to confirm because his table had no posted pricing list and therefore no evidence as to whether or not he was offering selfie/autograph “combo” pricing.

We had a little time to kill before our Christensen op, so we wandered some of the vendor aisles on the west end, then at 12:30 decided to grab lunch. The map listed a “food court” on the same end of the hall, which implied certain promises of mealtime content, if not necessarily nutrition. The “food court” was just Wild Bill’s Root Beer, Chocolate Moonshine fudge, a Dippin Dots stand, a cash bar, and one (1) purveyor of any kind of main dish: a south-side Indy pop-up called PB&J Factory. They sell a variety of sandwiches, most of which are variations on peanut-butter-and-jelly. Anne ordered the Classic, which is exactly that plus honey. Determined to have a meal that didn’t scream “school lunch for kids who forgot their lunch money that day”, I ordered the Peso Pesto, which omitted their trademark ingredients and instead came only with basil pesto and mozzarella on Parmesan-crusted bread. Mine was tasty and surprisingly filling, far from the worst basil sandwich I’ve ever had. Other options in stock included the Chuck Berries (PB&J plus mixed berries and chocolate syrup), the Izza Pizza (i.e., Pepperoni Pizza: The Sandwich), and the Fluffer Nuffer (PB& bananas, marshmallow fluff and chocolate syrup).

Admittedly we could’ve left the exhibit hall and availed ourselves of the Convention Center’s other concession stands or left the building and hit other nearby restaurants, which is what we’ve normally done at past cons. I wanted to minimize our steps, which were already adding up and inflaming Anne’s plantar fasciitis, and the aforementioned Facebook group was reporting some issues with the exhibit hall’s sole reentry point. As it was, a 12-minute wait wasn’t that bad for a convention-center eatery booth considering the high volume (for lack of any protein-forward competition in the vicinity), and we had entertainment while we waited, by which I mean we watched their staff searching for patrons whose food was ready for pickup, requiring the nice lady at one point to keep shouting at top volume, “A FLUFFER FOR GREG!” until poor Greg finally got off his duff and fetched his grub.

After a much-needed round of sitting down, we figured 1:10 was a good time to head over to the photo-op area and join the line for Christensen’s 1:30 photo op. We proceeded to do so…only to hear a few moments later from Celeb Photo Ops’ stentorian emcee over the mic that all of Christensen’s appointments were now running at least an hour behind. The tracking boards at the photo-op area’s entrance kept listing upcoming times for photos and for the con’s two biggest guests, both from the Star Wars galaxy — Christensen as well as Ahsoka star Rosario Dawson — but his listings were now all seemingly obsolete. Many later sessions were now labeled “DELAYED”. We were confused, considering we demonstrably knew he’d commenced his day without any problems. We’d remain clueless for the next several hours; for the time being, we had little choice but to hold our spot and await further updates.

Well, check that: Anne had little choice. As time kept rolling on, I had another appointment to keep. I temporarily abandoned her for a 2:15 photo op with a star from another universe: Mary McDonnell, a.k.a. President Laura Roslin from Battlestar Galactica. You might know her from Dances with Wolves, Independence Day, The Closer, its spinoff Major Crimes, and more.

I finished that brush with greatness at 2:30 and, along the path, thanked a lady who shouted about my shirt as I darted past, “HAWAIIAN MANDALORIAN! LOVE IT!” I rejoined Anne in Christensen purgatory, where nothing had changed. We remained locked in position for another hour. Eventually movement became a thing again and we lurched forward when it was our lane’s turn. At 3:35 we met the man, the myth, and the legend himself, well over two hours late. As you can tell in our lead photo, he seemed perfectly fine, though he fell into the category of actors who, when asked if we can do jazz hands, politely responded, “Sure, you can do jazz hands!” The photo is nevertheless a nice one, and garnered a shocking surge of approval from Hayden superfans when I Instagrammed it.

For a while we wandered back and forth between the autograph tables and the photo/auto boards, wondering if and when our 4:30 autograph session would truly begin. By 4:25 there’s been no updates and I took a Dippin Dots break with some bonus sit-down time that we both desperately needed. At 5:05 some lines had calmed down ever-so-slightly, so we committed to our next name on Anne’s to-do list: Smallville‘s Jonathan Kent himself, John Schneider! Anne previously met him at Wizard World Chicago 2010, which was a fun moment. Then at Indy’s World of Wheels 2017 we met his Dukes of Hazzard costars Tom Wopat and Catherine Bach, who each cosigned a cast photo. Anne decided she wanted to add his signature to the same photo, complete the set, and get an updated pic.

We’d been eying Schneider’s booth, which had had a long, steady customer flow all day long (as did his former TV son Tom Welling two booths down). At 5:05 we threw caution to the wind and joined it anyway. It moved pretty regularly, but at one point his manager came out from behind the table, rearranged our line to create a little standing space for himself, and joined Schneider’s assembly line as pre-table greeter and cashier, leaving the con volunteer at the table to put away the cash and distribute 8-x-10s. I’m not sure things moved any more quickly, but a little value-added congeniality goes a long way toward helping us forget about some of the weekend’s other, drearier lines.

Schneider was extremely friendly and chatty with each and every guest, especially with the couple in front of us who’d brought pics from him from a 1980s concert. He laughed at the memories of his youngster self and hopped two booths down to show them off to Welling. Fun times.

By 5:50 all of Christensen’s remaining autograph sessions were now permitting lineups while his final photo sessions 7 and 8 were still in progress. Thus we reentered the area, joined our curiously short line, and waited a good while as his appointments were running much more than an hour behind. This would’ve been especially worrisome for any fans who’d also paid extra to attend his joint Star Wars panel with Dawson scheduled at 8:15 p.m. “Premium” panels are a relatively recent invention that we do not encourage, so that part wouldn’t affect us…assuming he got to us by then. Nevertheless, we waited. Anne was among many who sat on the unforgiving concrete floor after so many hours of foot punishment.

I believe it was around this point, with plenty of time on my hands, that I checked the FB group only to have drama explode in my face.

According to reports in varying levels of reliability — none of them directly from the Indiana Comic Convention administration themselves or any verified firsthand witness testimony that I’ve viewed as of this writing — at some point between 11:40 (when we bade farewell to Mr. Rhys-Davies and vacated the vicinity of Christensen’s booth and exit lane) and 1:10 p.m. (when we joined his second photo-op line within on the other side of said vicinity) a fan had allegedly approached Christensen and done something “inappropriate”. It may have been verbal comments; it may have been touching. The latter seems the most common claim. The fan was allegedly asked not to do this. The fan allegedly persisted in “inappropriate” and/or uncooperative behavior. Christensen himself allegedly asked the fan to knock it off. When it was not knocked off, yadda yadda yadda, police forcibly ejected the offender from the premises. The ensuing confrontation was allegedly loud enough that we would’ve heard it if we were nearby.

In what may or may not have been a totally unrelated development, a few hours later a female user who claimed to be with one of the show’s vendors (possibly Amy’s Baking Company) took to the FB group and began posting all-caps complaints about the police and ICC forcibly ejecting her from the premises. One post led off, “PURE HARASSMENT OF BOTH CHRISTIAN AND MELISSA!” followed by the word “HARASSMENT” hundreds of times in a row (no spaces). Virtual screams of “HARASSMENT” continued. A few cries of “Defund the Police” ensued. She swore she’d be seeking a restraining order against them. Attempts by dozens of other group members to seek clarification, offer gentle behavioral disincentive, or post their best memes as a deescalation tactic were rebuffed with further insults, profanity, and her personal acronymous catchphrase “KMMRA”. That one got used a lot. At one point she posted “KMMRA” hundreds of times in a row — still no spaces, like abstract ASCII art.

When the perpetrator’s tantrum reached its peak, she just kept replying “KMMRA” to anyone who dared question or call her out on anything, or asked what the heck that was even supposed to mean. She insisted it wasn’t a typo, wasn’t a misspelling of “karma”, wasn’t anything the rest of us would ever guess, a bit like when a toddler proudly makes up their first nonsense word. She just kept spamming “KMMRA” in reply to every guess until the thread was deleted and she stopped posting. One member took a video of most of the thread before the Mods or Admins zapped it (I snatched a few screen shots from that for personal recordkeeping), but to this day no one has the foggiest clue what KMMRA means in her mind and literally no one else’s. Not Google. Not Urban Dictionary. Not even Robert Stack on Unsolved Mysteries. The group responded in the only appropriate way: instant KMMRA memes.

Sure, it’s entirely possible these two extremely memorable events were unrelated. Maybe the police ejected more than one attendee from the premises within an awfully narrow time frame. Correlation isn’t always causality. Coincidences happen, we hear. Nevertheless…it maybe didn’t help her case when someone dug deeply into the group’s archives and found she’d also broken down during last year’s ICC in exactly the same manner. The line between coincidence and pattern is a thin tightrope.

All that internet drama kept me going for a while and distracted me from my aching limbs for a short time. Hurray for small favors. Eventually the KMMRA jokes waned a tad and my exhaustion and muscle aches regained my full attention. At 7:00 came the P.A. announcement that the exhibit hall was closing. Hundreds of fans remained hopeful that something positive would soon come our way. Lines continued slowly creeping into his booth one by one.

After a few more minutes, the photographer’s light stand was moved off to the side and stopped flashing. This was our first real sign that photo op session 8 had finished at long last. Per the original schedule, autograph session D was supposed to be his very next thing after the very last op. Slowly, lines on the other side of us began creeping in, one by one — most likely VIPs and Ruby’ers.

At 7:25 our line inched ahead, and there was much rejoicing. We entered his booth to find him accompanied by no less than seven different assistants, not including the Celeb Photo Ops staff pulling line-management double duty. One took our ticket; one recommended a pen color; one scolded me to put away my phone (I was taking notes for this very paragraph, not calling a friend or shooting video, I do hereby pinky-swear); one was a spare or something; two stood on either side of the star as he signed. As we got a turn, he seemed unflappable and smiled politely as Anne complimented his performance in Shattered Glass, my favorite of his works to date. And with that, the seventh assistant maintained a firm yet gentlemanly decorum as he used congenial words synonymous with “GET OUT.”

We were all too happy to oblige. At 7:40 p.m., three hours over schedule, we exited his booth, the exhibit hall, and the Convention Center in that order and limped the half-mile back to the car as quickly as possible. It was finished.

Well, for us, anyway. As we understand it, he kept signing until it was time for his premium panel with Dawson. Still more lines had to wait in that hall while he left, did the thing, posed for pics with her for ICC’s Facebook page, then returned to the hall and resumed signing. Based on comments I saw, he was there till at least 10:30 p.m., probably longer. By that point some folks had abandoned ship and gotten refunds instead. If anyone stuck it out to his very last marker stroke, I’d be curious to know whether he did indeed make good on that whole “Saturday-only” agreement.

We fiftysomething geeks were beyond trashed. We couldn’t even go directly to bed afterward. We fetched a fast-food drive-thru dinner, then had to deal with a couple hours’ worth of lingering aftershocks from Friday’s aforementioned adulting obligations. Couldn’t be helped. Even setting that aside, the part where we kept doomscrolling the FB group in morbid curiosity also did us no favors.

…

Sunday morning came far too soon. We parked far away for free again, trudged on down, entered the Convention Center at 8:30 a.m., were permitted back into the hall at 10:30 sharp, returned to the autograph area, blew twenty minutes in a line for an actor who hadn’t shown up yet, decided instead to peruse the couple dozen exhibit hall aisles we hadn’t seen, and bought next to nothing. The place was mercifully less crowded than Saturday had been, bordering on deserted. Quite a few actors showed up bright and early and already entertained lines — Welling, McDonnell, Edward James Olmos, Lou Ferrigno, a masked Wil Wheaton, et al. Their Artists Alley, once my favorite part of every comic-con in every city in every state, may have been ICC’s tiniest yet. The participants were largely people I’d already met and hopefuls selling prints, stickers, buttons, and anime merch I don’t recognize yet.

I did buy one new item: frequent Midwest comic-con vendor Drew Blank, who has a knack for creating fan-merch based on some of my favorite shows of this century, has built upon the success of his “Pillo Pascal” pillowcases and expanded his burgeoning geek fabric-product empire into the world of tote bags. I saw one I simply had to have — had seen it the day before, in fact, being carried by a Christensen fan exiting his booth while we were in Rhys-Davies’ line.

At 11:45 we’d basically seen all the vendors and declared early lunch. We tried the Convention Center’s own concession-stand fare over on the east end behind the 501st. My prepackaged ham sandwich was exactly what such things tend to be, but Anne wholly approved of her freshly refried, extra-large tenderloin sandwich, the most Hoosier item on their menu.

We had one last photo op at 1:25. We were the second and third folks in its general-admission line at 12:50. We commenced exactly on time and within minutes were privileged to meet Arthur Darvill, whom we’ve seen in such TV shows as Doctor Who, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, and Broadchurch, whose first season tore our hearts out.

I’d been going back and forth on whether or not to get one last autograph. While I tried to clear my head, we walked back to Gem City Books, always one of my favorite comic-con discount booksellers, and picked up a couple of trades I didn’t know existed. Then I decided to go for one last line.

At 2:00 sharp we returned to the booth of comedy legend John Cleese, he of Monty Python fame and countless other works from A Fish Called Wanda to the Harry Potter series and numerous animated features of varying quality, not to mention one of the best episodes of Cheers. We’d seen him perform live here in Indy last November alongside his daughter Camilla, but we missed out on any meet-and-greet options offered at that event, if any. We and lots of other fans were shocked to see him hitting the comic-con circuit in addition to the comedy circuit.

Cleese’s Saturday line kept infinitely regenerating, so I’d passed on him. He wasn’t there upon our first try Sunday morning, for which he had a tricky schedule with an 11:25 photo op and a 1:00 panel. For reasons of exhaustion and logistics we simply never committed to a single panel for any actor all weekend (I mean, we’d just paid to see him on a stage already). So he’d be our grand finale. We’d been told earlier he would return around 2:30.

Thus we waited and waited and waited again, hoping against hope he’d return early. We watched other actors around us with continuous lines. Michael Rooker exchanged a few fun shouts with someone before concluding his weekend and whipping out a big bottle for company. The delightful Steve Burns from Blue’s Clues kept fielding Nickelodeon fans with fond memories from back in the day. By 3:00 George Takei had no one left in line, thus freeing up a few minutes for his husband Brad to come over and chat with our line (“George will sign your autographs!” he offered) till another round of Trek fans dropped by. Wil Wheaton autographed his booth banner before grabbing his backpack and heading out. Somewhere down inside, a budding frisson of anxiety began to blossom and a voice in my head began screaming that we absolutely cannot take one more hours-long line. I kept my breathing steady and looked to my phone for further distractions.

A few minutes after Brad left us, Mr Cleese arrived behind the curtain via golf-cart chauffeur, played a few rounds of peek-a-boo with us, then took his seat and proceeded to be his elderly yet witty self. He signed my Fawlty Towers DVD set and appreciated compliments for the November gig, including for Camilla, whom he insists gets all her best qualities from her mom.

…and at 3:35 we were officially done. On the other side of the hall, John Rhys-Davies’ line was still going strong. Hopefully by the time you read this he’s been allowed to go home.

I bought a few snacks to-go from the Asian snack stand conveniently in our path. We exited the place and limped the half-mile back to the car as quickly as possible once more with very little feeling left in our legs. It was finished. Again.

We got home, collapsed, made the mistake of casually checking the FB group from the comfort of our own chairs only to have drama explode in our faces again.

The same perpetrator, whom we’d all assumed had been banned and who still showed no grasp of basic netiquette that some of us have been advocating for well over two decades now, had returned to the group and resumed her complaints, her all-caps rants, and her continuous invocation of the magic word KMMRA, still bereft of any meaning other than what we observers chose to imbue within it, mostly through more memes. She now claimed she never met Christensen, none of that was related to her, cops still suck, ICC still sucks, ad nauseum. Such is the my-way-or-the-highway attitude common to folks who make scenes in large crowds and reap the consequences of their sowing. Eventually that thread was deleted as well, along with our meme-rich Saturday thread in which KMMRA was named our Word of the Day. (R.I.P., my li’l Thundercats joke.)

It’s been ages since Anne or I walked into that sort of meltdown. It wasn’t our first. Between the two of us we’ve survived Usenet trolls, flame wars, Star Wars message boards, fanfic sites, the social media era, and far worse in-person comic-con disasters. We’re the Goldens. This is who we are and what we do.

The End. Thanks for reading! Lord willing, we’ll see you next con…hopefully one that has a weekend cleared all to itself. Then again, that’s what I said last year, entirely in vain.

…

…

…

[wizened sage appears from behind a tree, whispering]

…KMMRA…

[disappears into the shadows]