Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! This weekend my wife Anne and I attended the second edition of Fan Expo Chicago at the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center in the suburb of Rosemont, Illinois. Last year they arose from the ashes of the late Wizard World Chicago, which we attended eleven times and whose already-shaky financial standings didn’t fare any better during the pandemic. Fan Expo threw such a great inauguration party, and invited such a staggering guest list this time that we agreed an encore was in order…

…and what a guest list it was! Beyond the actors we wanted to meet, FCE invited close to two dozen animation voice actors, a pair of Academy Award-winning actresses, and sizable casts from assorted classic movies and TV shows from your childhood. The most fascinating part was how most of the guests couldn’t talk about any of that.

You may already know from ongoing Hollywood headlines that the Writers Guild of America has been on strike since May 2nd. The Screen Actors Guild and the Associated Federation of Television and Radio Artists has been on strike since July 14th. In an age where heads of multinational TV/film studios and worldwide streaming services routinely thrive on eight-to-ten-digit compensation packages (salaries plus cumulative fringe benefits) — i.e., not just entire companies, but ludicrously wealthy individual humans hoarding that much moolah apiece — some 160,000 SAG-AFTRA members and 11,500 WGA members are asking for 21st-century upgrades to their 20th-century contract conditions. If you thought Spotify was the only company that thinks it’s cool for an entire artistic medium to subsist on penny-sized earnings while executives wine-and-dine daily like a coked-up Gordon Gekko, the billionaires and multimillionaires in charge of the screen-based entertainment industry have just five words for you: “Hold our Château Lafite, peasant.”

Hence the strikes. Until and unless all sides work things out, that means no new American movie/TV writing or acting. Naturally folks in charge are looking for workarounds. Networks are stalling for time by filling their programming holes with reality shows (ugh ugh ugh ugh NOPE), checking out materials from streaming-service libraries (e.g., ABC’s recent airing of Disney+’s Ms. Marvel), or borrowing used products from other countries (as The CW did during the pandemic when their lineup became 75% Canadian). Not even game shows are immune — the makers of Jeopardy! plan to spend their writerless months reusing old categories and non-winning contestants, assuming any of the latter are willing to cross the picket lines.

As part of the guilds’ strike rules, in addition to closeting their talents for the duration, writers and actors aren’t permitted to promote any of their “struck” works, past or present. They can’t plug shows they’re currently contracted to do, nor can they plug any past works from those “struck” companies, no matter how many years or decades ago they were released. That includes any appearances at comic conventions. They can still show up, autograph stuff, pose for photos, and hold panels as long as they don’t chat up a single specific film or TV series they’ve done. WGA members almost never do cons anyway (except when writing is secondary to their primary acting career), but much awkwardness ensued during the first few days of the SAG-AFTRA strike when actors who were already scheduled for cons, where promotion is one of their main objectives, were momentarily unsure if they could keep those commitments without being labeled scabs.

As it happens, for many actors their other main objective is the alternative income source that comic-cons cheerfully provide them, thanks to fees earned from con showrunners and Viewers Like You. Hence the compromise of showing up but not talking about your favorite things. I have no idea how well this hopefully temporary procedure worked in previous large-scale shows post-July 14th, like San Diego Comic Con or Creation’s annual Las Vegas Star Trek convention. (Those two did share one side effect: COVID infections afterward among their attendees, as reported on Bleeding Cool and the Okudas’ August 12th Facebook post, respectively.)

As for Fan Expo Chicago…we rolled with the changes and had fun anyway.

Friday morning, we left home shortly after 6 a.m. our time (5:40 Chicago time), endured a few dozen miles of road construction, stopped twice for breaks, came to a half-hour near-standstill for a collision in Merrillville that sent one car into a deep roadside gully, and eventually arrived in Rosemont over 3½ hours later. A couple dozen fans were already lined up inside, not too much competition for the attention of whichever actors might show up at their autograph tables first.

At 9:30 the attendees who’d shelled out hundreds of dollars for VIP badges were allowed inside the exhibit hall, right on schedule. Ten minutes later, so were us sensible shoppers, twenty minutes early. We headed straight for the autograph area, bypassed the couple dozen animation actors’ tables, and were first in line for a very special guest: Steve Burns, the very first host of Nick Jr.’s Blue’s Clues. My son watched the show a lot when he was a kid, often with me in tow. This wasn’t always easy considering I worked nights at the time and Nick Jr. was for early birds, but I hung in there awake enough that I still remember snatches of song lyrics, including all the words to Steve’s mail-time jingle.

Fun trivia: in 1998 Steve guest-starred on one of my all-time favorite shows, Homicide: Life on the Street. In a season-six episode called “Full Court Press”, we see a very different side of Blue’s pal when Richard Belzer and Peter Gerety realize he’s the troubled teen who murdered the high school basketball star that wouldn’t stop bullying him. At no point during his interrogation in The Box did Steve break out into song. I never forgot how those two shows crossed the streams.

While we waited, four VIPs showed up and were permitted to cut in front of us. We understood. It’s all in the game. We’ve done VIP admissions ourselves, though maybe twice at most. And four high-rolling cutters isn’t that much of an inconvenience. Steve walked in at 11:30 and the time spent ultimately didn’t matter. The VIPs came and went, as did a deaf fan with ADA clearance. Steve was exactly as congenial as one would expect as he enjoyed discussion with the fan, his family, and their interpreter. (That’s my younger sister-in-law’s line of work, though she does it for schools rather than conventions.)

And then it was time for our favorite comic-con photo motif: jazz hands!

Fun trivia: that episode wasn’t Mr. Burns’ first attempt at appearing on the show. He’d previously auditioned for the role of Brodie the weaselly videographer who followed Our Heroes around, videotaping crime scenes and generally getting in everyone’s way till he disappeared around season 6. Burns auditioned for that and for Blue’s Clues around the same time. Fate pointed him one way, Max Perlich the other. And here he is today, a legend to millions of former children out there. Burns, I mean, not Brodie.

During our wait for Burns, two tables down sat the next actor on our list: Todd Stashwick — best known to us as a delightful breath of fresh air in the third and final season of Star Trek: Picard. He’s previously appeared in such series as Syfy’s 12 Monkeys and The USA Network’s The Riches (not to mention an episode of NBC’s Revolution back when I was doing TV recaps), but we loved his Picard portrayal of Liam Shaw, a gruff, sardonic Starfleet captain who has the shameless audacity to look living legends like Picard and Riker in the face and shut down their sketchy requests. If Shaw could pop up in more Trek projects, that’d be great.

He was at his table bright and early, but didn’t have much of a line. We hoped more Picard fans would show up, though we realize Paramount+ isn’t necessarily among the most massive streamers. Our worst fear in that moment: what if he got bored and left the show early? (This isn’t impossible: we’re told by a few attendees this happened for at least one Friday guest. Jason Patric, whose career highlight The Lost Boys was 36 years ago, allegedly had such a low turnout that he left early for the day, and pre-sales of his afternoon photo ops had to be refunded. He returned for the next two days, but anyone who’d hoped to whittle down their to-do list on Friday came away stymied.)

Stashwick did leave his table at least once for a few minutes, but returned. He also killed a few minutes doing an interview for someone’s podcast or whatever. Thankfully after completing our Steve Burns experience, he was right there ready for all comers. Mindful of the SAG-AFTRA strike, Anne had her opening line ready to go and rattled it off in a single, quick breath: “I really enjoyed your performance in the most recent installment of a long-running sci-fi franchise, the name of which I will not mention.”

Stashwick threw back his head for a single, mighty “HA!” The ice was broken.

She then maneuvered into non-struck material: a quick chat about game nights, which are very much a thing for us (lately we’ve been consumed by the sprawl of Terraforming Mars) as well as for Stashwick the RPG superfan. He reconfirmed his love of Dungeons & Dragons and pulled back a sleeve to show us a bicep tattoo of the cover of the original AD&D Player’s Handbook. As a former Dungeon Master who once owned that very book, I was bowled over.

Our next stop was for Anne. At last May’s Indiana Comic Con she’d gotten an autograph from ubiquitous voice actor Dee Bradley Baker, whose work we’ve dug on various Star Wars animated series — including most of the main cast of The Bad Batch, each with their own distinct manners. Now she wanted a selfie to go with her autograph. A few tables down the other direction from Steve Burns, his line was longer than Burns’ and Stashwick’s combined, but moved briskly and gave us the chance to say hi to a couple we’d met at a previous con. (We should really do better about exchanging names with other recurring fans.)

Once at the table, we’d planned for our usual routine — she poses with the actor while I snap the “selfie”. Baker wasn’t having it: for possibly only the second or third time ever, we were faced with an actor who stuck to the “selfie” ethos. I demurred as he commandeered Anne’s phone. My camera and my phone handily best her phone’s camera, but, well, he didn’t ask. How do you tell a legend “Uh, wait…”?

The next couple hours were a mix of just-okay convention center food (hot dog for Anne, overpriced tuna burrito for me), shopping and browsing. We’ll come back to that in Part 4.

Our next firm appointment was a photo op with the esteemed Mr. Stashwick, this time with all three of us in frame.

As we wandered away from the photo op area in high spirits, we swung by the far end of the autograph alley and found one of the “maybe” names on my to-do list without a line. Geeks might known Garrett Hedlund best as the star of Tron: Legacy, the video-gamerrific sequel that not only was his big breakthrough, but also moved director Joseph Kosinski toward the major leagues and brought Bruce Boxleitner back to a character no one ever expected to see revisited. Since that time, Hedlund has enjoyed a variety of roles at every level, from costarring in the harrowing post-WWII drama Mudbound to the Netflix action flick Triple Frontier (where he and Charlie Hunnam played brothers taking orders from a haggard Ben Affleck in search of a treasure of sorts) to a season-2 guest part on Hulu’s confidently grade-A Reservation Dogs.

For autographing purposes I’d brought my Criterion copy of Inside Llewyn Davis, a Coen Bros drama in which his mostly silent driver shares a car and some scenes with Oscar Isaac and John Goodman. Frankly, Criterion costars are a rarity on the convention circuit.

By this time our feet were dying, so it was cool to have a panel to attend. We made our way out of the exhibit hall and upstairs to the main theater, where our next presentation would feature Danielle Panabaker, Carlos Valdes, and Tom Cavanaugh, erstwhile stars of the recently concluded The Flash. SAG-AFTRA strike rules were upheld to the utmost: whenever they began to bring up The Show That Must Not Be Named During the Strike, they chose instead to refer to it as “Voldemort”. By and large, they came up with other topics of discussion. Valdes and Cavanaugh each have live-stage experience, including musicals, which came in really handy and enthusiastically entertained the lot of us.

To our surprise, the floor was indeed open for questions, whether about acting or what-have-you. At one point the question, “Which Hogwarts house would you be in?”, required much deliberation as Valdes asked the audience to explain to him, “What’s a Hufflepuff?” (Much overlapping shouts of random adjectives ensued. Taken together, their word-cloud might add up to “mostly harmless”.) If a fan asked a show-specific question, they rejected it with cries of “VOLDEMORT! VOLDEMORT!” and moved on to the next questioner.

As the end of the panel drew near, and then passed by, and as the next event’s moderator congenially loped toward center stage in extreme slo-mo mode, they kicked off a Lightning Round (Flash pun intended?) and vowed to get through every last fan in line at the microphones, whether answered with a short-‘n’-snappy retort or yet another “VOLDEMORT!” abstention. Somehow the final seconds led to Cavanaugh and Valdes running laps around the stage and singing one last wordless ditty. But through brevity and wit they got to everyone.

Frankly, this was one of the most entertaining panels we’ve sat through in ages. The “talk about anything except your works” concept was a bold dare that this trio executed with panache, but I’m not sure it’s for every actor out there. We grant 500 points to VOLDEMORT House.

The trio’s antics were so energetic that I allowed myself high expectations for our last appointment of the day: a photo op with Cavanaugh himself. I’d already had the honors with Panabaker six years ago and with Valdes last May, but this was our first time at a show with Cavanaugh on the roster. Based on their panel, I was surely expecting nothing less than the Best Jazz-Hands Photo of the Year.

His op wasn’t till 5:30 p.m. I’d been up since 5 a.m. our time (4 a.m. Chicago time), had driven over 3½ hours, stood in hours’ worth of lines, walked the entire show floor’s length two or three times, and was yearning to collapse. So I perhaps felt my spirits get at least a little trampled when we fans entered the photo booth — right on time, to their credit — only to see Cavanaugh was keeping his hands firmly behind his back the whole time for every photo — no poses offered.

His enthusiasm levels nevertheless remained off the charts. He complimented my season-1 Flash shirt, which I referred to as “Old Voldemort”, which got a laugh. He began talking some more, but by this time the photographer was ready to shoot and herd me onward. So I did my thing, and mentioned my thing per my usual courtesy, and as with the preceding photo subjects, he didn’t follow my lead. I debated whether or not to even post this online anywhere at all whatsoever, but I do try to keep things candid here, often to a fault.

Hence my least favorite photo op so far this year, in which you can see the letdown break my concentration and suck all the zest out of me.

Adding insult to emotional injury: the next day, I saw fans posting their Saturday ops, in which Cavanaugh did perform poses.

So…I don’t get it. Did he have COVID concerns that subsided after a good night’s sleep? Was his manicurist’s flight delayed? Were his hands covered in peanut butter after eating a really messy sandwich between events? Whatever the case might’ve been…he’ll also be at Dragon Con in a few weeks, which we’ll be attending for our third time. Anne suggested I give him a second try. I’m still debating whether or not the additional cost is worth the risk.

Anyway. Friday was a long day. The next two would be far shorter and engender no further whining from me.

Saturday morning we arrived at 7:30 and took the Skybridge from the parking garage, across River Road and into the convention center. We were stopped short at the entrance to Hall F, where the indoor gamut would commence. There was no line inside yet and F’s lights were out. The security guard on duty looked puzzled and told us the show didn’t open till 10. We told him what we were used to. He didn’t complain as we sidled up to the nearest column, sat down and waited. Ten minutes later, a high-ranking official came up to us, whom I’m 98% sure was the same stentorian young lady who heroically took charge of last year’s photo-op mess and canceled that teeming apocalypse, and had to inform us fans weren’t allowed inside yet. We hadn’t realized our entry, free of obstacles and without a single locked door in our way, had amounted to a Leverage-style security penetration test.

So we gamely went outside and helped start the Saturday line.

At 8:45 they led us inside and through the same breezy gauntlet we’d walked Friday morning. While we waited on plush ballroom carpet instead of harsh sidewalk, Anne met up with a Little Mermaid fan that she’d been exchanging messages with, who’d never been to a con before and needed every lesson and tip she could get. Anne did what she could to provide a crash course till, once again, they threw open the exhibit hall doors at 9:40 for us budget-minded General Admission folks, a mere ten minutes after the VIPs. Later we confirmed the lady’s Jodi Benson autograph experience was everything she’d hoped for and then some, up to and including showing off her cool Princess Ariel tattoo.

As to our own wants: because this show had so, so many guests appearing all three days — as opposed to the average Saturday/Sunday commitment most actors manage — that over half our want list was finished. Chalk it up to the SAG-AFTRA strike freeing up those actors’ schedules. Our Day Two was therefore refreshingly light on appointments. That gave us much-needed flexibility to see the rest of the show floor we hadn’t reach yet, retrace our steps over some key areas such as Artists Alley, and not really care how long our few remaining lines took. One rare side effect: we didn’t have a single photo op scheduled Saturday.

Our first stop was at the table of a celebrity even our oldest, least geeky Facebook friends would recognize: Christie Brinkley! You might remember her from such works as Sports Illustrated, countless ladies’ magazine covers, innumerable ad campaigns, and the final 10-15 years of Billy Joel’s Top-40 career, when she famously appeared in his video for “Uptown Girl” and painted the cover to his final pop album, River of Dreams. Brinkley was part of Fan Expo’s attempt to reunite the cast of National Lampoon’s Vacation. That plan took a bullet when former star Chevy Chase canceled due to illness. Everyone else made it to the show, including even Beverly DeAngelo, who I’m pretty sure had never done a con before.

While I loved Vacation as a teen, in our household she’s more highly regarded for her four episodes of Parks & Rec, in which she guest-starred as Gayle Gergich, the sweet and improbably hot and younger wife of dumpy, klutzy, undervalued, put-upon Parks Department employee Jerry Gergich. (In the show, Jerry looks twice Gayle’s age. In reality, her screen husband Jim O’Heir is eight years her junior.) Their sweet chemistry flummoxed the other characters and stood out to this married pair of fans who just so happen to love seeing happily married couples on TV, which are rarer than you think. We’d met O’Heir four years ago at the final Galaxycon Louisville and wanted to complete the set.

At 9:40 we bolted straight toward her booth and found ourselves at the front of her GA line. A few attendees with VIP passes lined up on the other side of her section. The rather quiet con volunteer on duty told us she was expected in ’round 10:15 or 10:30, using a rather apologetic tone as if this would somehow infuriate us. Quite the contrary: at past shows we’ve waited on actors who didn’t show up till well after 12 noon. In our experience, anyone who shows up before 11 a.m. is a workhorse who’s spoiling us with the royal treatment.

Case in point: at 9:55 her table-neighbor Anthony Michael Hall showed up ready to go, keeping a steady stream of visitors and at one point FaceTiming with one fan’s relative on their phone. Not long after came Dana Barron in a Santa hat, who sat down at a much lower table at the far end of the Vacation block. At 10:30 the con welcomed a Santa-bearded Randy Quaid on the other side of Brinkley’s table. That very day we learned Quaid is a 6-foot-5 man-mountain who towers over one and all. Minor point of annoyance: whenever someone in his line or at his table said “Randy”, I kept looking up every single time. His name is my name, too!

Brinkley’s handler popped in at 10:40 to oversee her setup. The star herself arrived shortly after 11, which was still perfectly fine by us. We then had to keep waiting patiently as the VIPs were ushered up to her table ahead of us GAs, as was the rule at this con. VIP admission cost hundreds, so yeah, they get perks. We’ve done VIP passes a couple of times for past events, but we can’t do that all the time. We recognize that it’s all in the game. That understanding didn’t make it any less frustrating when more VIPs kept joining the line and enjoying their permissible cutting in front of us. Some fans behind us in the GA line got agitated. We kept ours bottled.

Somehow the VIPs dried up and we got our turn before 11:30. We approached, she cosigned the same Parks & Rec set that O’Heir had autographed for me, and we all agreed he’s a very, very, very sweet man. As I set up for our selfie and began to go for the ol’ jazz hands, a split-second of confusion led to her trying to remember the Gergich family’s daffy breakfast song. She and I both blanked on the exact words, but laughed together as we tried anyway.

…so that was a blast. From there we headed straight toward the booth of Michelle Hurd, costar of all three seasons of Star Trek: Picard. We previously saw her last year at Star Trek: Mission Chicago, where she and her castmates expressed surprise at my Hot Topic T-shirt bearing most of their faces. At that point they were still new to SF fandom and apparently weren’t used to appearing on merchandise. Fast-forward to today, and Hurd is now vice-president of SAG-AFTRA’s Los Angeles chapter. As you can imagine, the strike was at the forefront of her mind as she spoke at the table.

Some actors like Hurd had only non-character head shots available at their tables for autographing. For fans who wanted character photos, supplies of those were stacked dozens of feet away at a sort of pre-table, where a con volunteer handed them out with proof of intent. According to the volunteer, some fans had been simply walking up to the pre-table, thinking “Oh hey, freebies!”, grabbing handfuls of 8-x-10s and walking away. Not cool, cheapskates.

After Ms. Hurd finished recording a few minutes’ interview with a journalist or podcaster about the strike, we stepped over for our turn. Anne once again speedily led off, “I really enjoyed your performance in the most recent installment of a long-running sci-fi franchise, the name of which I will not mention!” This led to much cheery discussion about diversity, individual worth, and how cool it can be to be “weird” by boring ordinary standards. Also, there was the matter of the strike. Despite past roles in such series as Law & Order: SVU, Ash vs. Evil Dead, Blindspot, and more, she and her husband still live in a one-bedroom apartment. Acting is not a get-rich-quick scheme for the majority of guild members, who may have appeared in some of your favorite shows yet aren’t remotely millionaires. You might even make more than they do. It doesn’t help when your husband’s career is trapped in limbo because he was in the main cast of a streaming series on a service whose bigwigs keep stalling on whether to renew or cancel it, which means he has to remain available until and unless they make up their minds.

(Hurd didn’t mention her husband’s name. Not until this very minute did I look him up and learn he’s none other than Garret Dillahunt, whom we met four years ago at HorrorHound Cincinnati. She’s awesome. He’s awesome. Makes sense.)

I found an online article that nicely recaps the talking points she shared with us:

“Those actors are working-class actors. We’re literally working paycheck to paycheck,” she said. “It takes $26,000 to qualify for your health insurance for SAG-AFTRA. A guest star on a show, producers will do ‘top of show’–this is a verbiage that they created, it’s not in our contracts, it’s what they created–they’re not going to budge over whatever their top of show is. Top of show could be generally anywhere from $5,000 to $7,000 or $8,000 an episode. Maybe that sounds great. So say I cobbled together two or three guest [starring roles] during a year. Our audience sees me on three or four different shows and they’re like, ‘Wow, that actress is working, she’s doing all this stuff.’ I still, by doing that top of show, I still [have] not qualified for my health insurance. We literally are going paycheck to paycheck.”

After a tiny taco lunch and a comics-related panel we’ll cover in Part 4, we also attended Hurd’s 3:30 panel, which was decreed a no-photo zone after the first couple minutes.

Fans nationwide have been wondering how actors might handle Q&As in light of the strike. Methods have varied. For the aforementioned cast of The Flash, the “VOLDEMORT!” approach hilariously worked. For the much-ballyhooed Back to the Future cast reunion, in lieu of a Plan B they just canceled their panel. For Hurd the guild VP, they kept hers to a lean half-hour and took no audience questions. The first twenty minutes or so were an encore delivery of nearly everything Hurd had already said to us at her table, point by point, stat by stat. In the remaining minutes, she and Dandridge covered a little more about acting in general and her life in particular. We learned her dad, Hugh Hurd, was an actor who once starred in a John Cassavetes film called Shadows.

By 3:30 our short Saturday to-do list was done. Another option or two presented themselves on the Fan Expo app’s helpful Schedule section. Instead we enjoyed slightly more Artists Alley shopping, took more cosplay pics, and adjourned for an early supper. We’re rarely up for dawn-to-dusk partying, though in our defense such invitations are rare. As a pair of married old squares, we understand.

Next day was a major departure for us because we almost never do Sundays at cons. Two days is usually more than enough to meet everyone, see everything, and overspend until our consciences catch up to us. Sometimes one day is time enough. And we’ve posted in the past about cons so small that our total time on the show floor was less than the time spent waiting in line for it. The last time we overextended ourselves for a three-day extravaganza, Wizard World Chicago 2016 physically broke us and mentally exhausted us. We’ve held ourselves to a two-day max ever since.

The exception this time appears next to us in our lead photo. Andy Serkis has never done a convention within 300 miles of our house until now. He agreed to appear Sunday only. When such a rare, rarefied name pops up on a comic-con guest list, you have to ask yourself: how likely is it that they’ll show up at other cons, or even become one of those frequent mainstays appearing anywhere and everywhere, like William Shatner? When all is well in Hollywood, no one ever leaves Serkis alone to get bored and have time for soirees like this. We pounced on what we thought might be our one big change to say hi to the true face behind Gollum, King Kong, Caesar, Ulysses Klaue, Snoke, an Alfred Pennyworth, Kino Loy, and the creepy millionaire Red Room perv who recently threw down with Idris Elba in Luther: The Fallen Sun.

After we committed to full weekend badges and pre-purchased autograph and photo-op tickets for Serkis, then we learned that he, like us, would also be doing Dragon Con shortly…though he’ll be a Sunday-only guest there as well. Given the choice, Sunday in Chicago was far easier for us than staying one extra, extremely expensive day in Atlanta.

Sunday, then, our grand finale: they changed things up a little, but not really. We arrived in front of the Stephens Center at 7:40 (not inside this time). At 8:05 they let us through the front doors. At 8:30 the remaining lights came on and we ran the pre-show lap one last time. The chitchat among fans in line was far livelier now that we’d all accumulated new anecdotes to tell and wanted to sustain that convention thrill for as long as we could. What broke the most ice for us this time was a few folks noticing my T-shirt (as seen in our lead photo), which was a souvenir from our recent trip to Disney World. This isn’t the first time we’ve found people really, really, really super-love Disney World. (Someday I’ll find time to write about our Disney World experience. It’d help if I could go back to blogging seven days a week.)

Yet again we commoners were unleashed early upon the exhibit hall, practically on the heels of the VIPs who’d only been given a two-minute head start. As Anne and I had discussed in advance, I promptly left her choking on my dust as I sprinted to Serkis’ autograph table, which had been newly set up near the far opposite end of the exhibit hall. (I believe he took over the table of Katee Sackhoff, who was only there Friday and Saturday.) I was maybe twelfth in the GA line, with Anne joining me minutes later on her cute tiny legs. Next to us was a limited row of about a dozen VIPs. While the GA line snaked around per standard booth format, the VIPs were cut off at the end of their first row; other VIPs were asked to go wait at a staging area elsewhere. The plan was to escort VIPs from there to Serkis’ table in groups of five, alternating with handfuls of us GA rabble at a time. After our slightly inconvenienced Christie Brinkley experience, I approved of this more balanced scheme. I can’t say whether the VIPs were calm about having one of their favorite perks compromised.

Also compromised were Serkis’ services. As had been done for a few other big-name actors in the house (e.g., Gen-X idol Kiefer Sutherland), Serkis’ autograph line had extra rules. No selfies were allowed at his table, nor would he sign any movie quotes on items. He’d go as far as adding his character name, but that’s it. Management was well aware of his stature among multiple fandoms and wanted to keep his processes as streamlined as possible. We felt bad for the Arwen cosplayer behind us in line who’d brought some lovely sheet-music art already adorned with autographs and lengthy handwritten quotes from Hobbit players, and who’d hoped to have Gollum/Smeagol do the same.

One last time, a few early-bird actors showed up at 10 a.m. or a few minutes after to commence with pleasantries. We could see across the way where true gentleman Henry Winkler was already wowing folks before the clock struck 10. Jodi Benson, paragon of punctuality, hit her mark for a third straight day. As for Serkis, bless that wonderful man, he strolled in smiling at 10:05.

He signed for a wave of VIPs. He signed for an equal wave of GAs. He signed another wave of VIPs. One last wave of GA fans included us at the end. He was cordial as I complimented the beautiful Norwegian scenery where his wretched Luther sleazebag had kept his lair; he congenially acknowledged those two extremes; he signed; we bolted so others might likewise get a turn in record time.

We’ve had our share of bad con experiences. We’d feared a full-on Serkis circus. We thought we’d be there for hours. I’d worried about the possibility of still being in line when our 2:00 photo op came around. Instead we exited his area at 10:25.

We responded with the first sane idea that popped into our heads: we took an early lunch. Or, if you will, second breakfast. Our first breakfast had been our Saturday night leftovers. That wasn’t nearly enough.

Funny thing about eating lunch at a comic-con at 10:30: you have your choice of empty tables because everyone else is still trapped in lines. On the downside, not all the food stands were open yet. The ol’ Robinson’s barbecue stand were on top of things, but Anne had to wait another 15-20 minutes for the cheaper hot dog stand to do the same.

The next event in the big Andy Serkis experience was his 12:45 panel. Between him and lunch, we wandered the show floor one last time and allowed vendors and artists another shot at tempting us to splurge on precious objects. A few succeeded. Again, that’ll be a Part Four thing.

Due to excess autographing, Serkis didn’t take the stage till 1:00. Same as Michelle Hurd, he was limited to 30 fleeting minutes and took no audience questions, all the easier to maintain SAG-AFTRA compliance. He spoke of the joy of meeting his favorite famous people, like Tom Waits and Horace Silver. (Waits’ name drew considerable applause; Silver’s, silence. Kids these days.) He talked about his early stage work, and of the difference in today’s actors (or non-actors, for that matter) who covet the fast track to instant fame versus the storied concept of “paying your dues”, as he did with years in the biz before Lord of the Rings came along (not that he mentioned that “struck” work by name, which he didn’t). Naturally the subject of MOCAP was covered. We learned he’s an avid mountain climber whose accomplishments have included the Matterhorn. (The actual mountain, not the ride. Probably.)

That left us very few minutes to kill before our 2:00 photo op. As you plainly see in our lead photo, that happened. Once again, everyone involved was on time. No, he didn’t do jazz hands, instead giving a polite response we’re used to getting: “You two can do jazz hands!” Nevertheless, like Tom Cavanaugh, at least you can see his energy level was all-in. This time, I didn’t screw up my part.

One thing that didn’t occur to me till days later: we never once had any real issues in the photo op area whatsoever all weekend long. Nary a moment of disorganized misery befell us. I can’t recall the last time we sailed through an entire con’s worth of photo ops without at least one guest arriving late or some overcrowding pandemonium threatening to suffocate or stampede us. We have to applaud that. Then again, it helped that we avoided some of the bigger-ticket superstars on the guest list. (Oh, how we’ve heard stories about the Back to the Future cast reunion and plans gone awry.)

That said…we concluded our Fan Expo Chicago extravaganza and were out the doors shortly after 3:00 Chicago time. The long drive home sucked, but that wasn’t the con’s fault. They can only organize so much. If they were that omnipotent, I imagine their first god-tier act would’ve been to end the strikes and get these good people fairly paid.

To be concluded! Other chapters in this very special MCC miniseries:

Part 1: Cosplay!
Part 2: More Cosplay!
Part 4: Comics, Shopping, and Other Hobbies
Epilogue: The Food After the Fan Expo Chicago 2023 End Credits