Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

In 2019 my wife Anne and I attended our very first Dragon Con in Atlanta, Georgia. As one of the longest-running science fiction conventions in America, Dragon Con had received rave reviews from our internet friends over the past two decades, some of whom recommended it to us more than once and, according to my notes, would never shut up about it. We had so much of a blast that we returned in 2021. Third time was the charm this Labor Day weekend as we repeated the eight-hour drive from Indianapolis to that amazing colossal southern spectacle…

…and it all comes down to this: what else we did at the big show besides meet actors and see thousands of cosplayers swarming everywhere. In keeping with our personal boundaries, we only attended Friday and Saturday, but that experience was more than enough for us aging geeks.

DAY ZERO: Thursday, August 31st.

After an overnighter and some light tourism in Tennessee (which we’ll cover in a pair of distant future prologue entries, if y’all stick around long enough with the patience of saints) we arrived in downtown Atlanta around 5 p.m., just in time for rush hour. As is our tradition, we sat in southbound I-85 gridlock for Lord knows how many interminable minutes. Eventually we took our exit ramp, sat through the same red light three times, then made two left turns into our hotel for the next three evenings. The front desk clerk naturally knew why we were there, as (a) she was Of Atlanta and knows their calendar, and (b) my loud Bioshock 2 shirt may have tipped her off. She informed of us the usual amenities in a voice loud enough for my middling ears to hear her over the beats provided by the live DJ in the lobby. One unusual amenity: a mingling space up on the sixteenth floor where they’d have a bar and finger foods for anyone who wanted to hang out with other guests over the next few evenings. We’re not usually ones for partying, but we kept it in mind.

Awkwardness ensued in the elevator as we rode up and down a couple times before I realized this was one of those 21st-century hotels who’re so security-conscious that the elevators require you to scan your room keycard and push your floor’s button at the same time. We hadn’t seen one of those in at least four years, but I remembered the process without having to go beg for assistance.

We found our tenth-floor room small yet fancy, befitting the extravagant lodging prices all around downtown every D*C weekend.

The room came with no microwave, but had a fridge. We’d hoped to store some of the couple dozen nonalcoholic drinks we’d brought with us, but it was packed with still more alcohol. 99% of all comic-con attendees have their predictable desires, but we don’t drink. Their products were useless against us. If they’d stored some fresh pastries in our room, maybe they’d have gotten us.

This was also the first time we’ve ever had a hotel room with an espresso machine instead of a cheap coffeemaker. I never order those at coffee shops and had never used one before, so I had to Google the directions because it came with none. I got it to work, but had to keep punching the button to get more than two fluid ounces out of it. More than one website tried to tell me it’s supposed to work that way. This practice run did not impress me.

(Luckily for me and my blood pressure, I was practicing with a decaf pod.)

After a few moments of downtime and much-needed, temporary shoe removal, we geared up for the seven-block walk southeast to the same hotel where badge pickup is held every year. Considering this long-running con prides itself on firm traditions and established customs, folks grumbled mightily at the news of unwelcome change: the former Sheraton Atlanta Hotel had transferred ownership (after the previous owners faced multi-million-dollar foreclosure) and consequently had its name changed to the stuffier “Courtland Grand Hotel, Trademark Collection by Wyndham”. Dragon Con fans had the choice of either calling it “the Sheraton” anyway or calling it “the Courtland” with a sneer while rolling their eyes.

Either way, the badge pickup procedure hadn’t changed. In fact, unlike our previous experiences, we’d apparently missed the early-afternoon rush. The line was not around the block for once. We had our badges in hand in about 5-10 minutes. We expected far worse as we wandered through and around the hustle-and-bustle of 70,000+ attendees arriving and wandering downtown in general and around the Courtland (*eyeroll*) in particular.

We stopped at the official convention shop for souvenirs, including a T-shirt for myself, something I hadn’t bought at our last two ATL visits. We headed back outside and perused the numerous food trucks on hand. Anne was still stuffed from lunch and contented herself with a strawberry kiwi slushie from Lil Rhody’s Froz’n Lemonade, while I stopped at Montego Bay Mobile Cafe for a Jamaican barbecue jerk pork sandwich and their specialty drink, cucumber blueberry lemonade served in a pouch, Capri Sun-style. The sandwich was great; the drink was, um, rather cucumber-forward.

We got back to our hotel and shared an elevator ride with a few other, younger attendees who’d only just arrived and hadn’t figured out the control panel yet. I dutifully scanned our keycard and punched ’10’, to a happy green-light response. The youngsters panicked as we passed their floor without stopping. We hurriedly tried to explain it to them, which got awkward because they were relying on the “mobile key” offered by the hotel’s official app, whereas I’d insisted on old-fashioned physical plastic keycards at check-in. (We’ve had issues at past hotels in their chain.) One young lady frantically tried to get a connection on her phone — typically impossible inside an elevator — so she could pull up the app and do the thing. Her partner asked if we could use our card and push ‘5’ for them. I gamely did so, knowing it wouldn’t work because we weren’t authorized for fifth-floor access by the hotel’s crack I.T. security procedures, in case we were murderers. Then again, if we had been murderers, we could’ve killed everyone else right there in the elevator, which was presently obeying only our commands.

We reached 10, we two non-murderers stepped out, and we watched helplessly as the doors closed on everyone else. Hopefully they won the Elevator Action LARPing minigame without us.

Shortly before 8 p.m. we got antsy and decided to go check out the mingling space. We rode the elevator up — taking only a single try this time — and walked into a lonely hallway with an empty bar leading to a deserted pool. Either the party had ended early due to infiltration by squares, or we’d misunderstood the clerk and the party wasn’t every day — unlike all the core D*C hotels, where dancing and schmoozing continue nightly into the wee hours, costumes optional.

DAY ONE: Friday, September 1st.

Breakfast was a combination of granola bars we’d brought from home plus snacks we’d acquired on the journey down from Indianapolis. We didn’t want to waste time with a luxuriously lengthy restaurant visit, and there weren’t any cheap places open nearby. We had to save money somewhere on this trip.

In our walks throughout the long weekend, we took advantage of the skybridges connecting the various downtown buildings as much as possible for the sake of saving steps and avoiding direct summertime sunlight. This method rarely if ever saved us any time because crowds were everywhere, including inside those handy tunnels. Anyone who’s attended enough times knows the skybridges and gravitates to them for the same reasons we do. Our first path of the morning through Atlanta’s unique, steep-hilled cityscape would take us into the west entrance of the Hyatt Regency Atlanta, where their lobby is at street level but is technically their fourth floor; then through a skybridge on its east face that connects to the fourth floor of the Atlanta Marriott Marquis, whose street-level is actually their first floor.

To reach the first, already-populated skybridge, we faced a surprise throng of Every Barbie Cosplayer Ever, all zillion of whom were there for one massive meet-up. We took a few photos but didn’t linger to document all of them. It was tempting, but we had plans.

Our typical comic-con procedure is to begin our day by speeding directly to the celebrity autograph area and joining the line for the most popular actor on our want list, sometimes even starting the line ourselves if no VIPs beat us to the punch. We arrived at the Marriott around 8:30 a.m. under this flawed assumption that our first two times at D*C hadn’t dispelled for us. Before the madding crowds would near, geek-happy flourishes abounded all around us.

To pass the time, we had a lively chat with two other Trek fans named Kevin and Anthony about our various experiences with con-going in general and Trek guests in particular. It was Kevin who had to remedy my shortsightedness and point out the “Walk of Fame” — the show’s snappy name for their autograph area — didn’t open Friday till 1 p.m. That’s when I remembered D*C isn’t like most other cons we attend: at this proudly fan-run shindig, autographs are a feature, but they aren’t necessarily treated as the main event. Such critical details had fallen through the cracks of my pre-planning. We realized we had a lot of time to pass.

After a bit more breezy chitchat, we excused ourselves to stretch our legs a bit and buy some time while I opened the official Dragon Con app and checked to see if we could perhaps kick off the morning with one of the 52 different panels I’d pinned. The winning activity was next door in the Hilton Atlanta Downtown, through the connecting skybridge and two floors down, in the “Galleria Level” (read: basement) below their streel-level first floor.

Shortly after 9:30 we joined the line (which grew quickly) for a 10 a.m. kickoff/preview of the con’s “Trek Track” — i.e., their organized array of Star Trek activities for this entire four-day affair. While we waited for the good times to roll, a Trek Track official named Joe Campbell walked up and down the line barking fake Starfleet orders at us — reminding us “Pon Farr is not consent!” and advising redshirts they don’t need to see the nurse for shots before their impending away mission because that’d be a waste of good medicine. And so on. We loves us some on-topic pre-show entertainment.

The Trek Track higher-ups led the presentation for a while, and stalled until their late boss could arrive — Garrett Wang, best known outside Atlanta as TV’s Ensign Harry Kim from Star Trek: Voyager. He first appeared as a D*C guest back in 2003 and loved it so much that he repeatedly sought opportunities to return. He was granted an encore guest-spot in 2009, then threw his hat into the ring for the Trek-Track director position after the previous, longtime officeholder left under less-than-ideal circumstances (about which I know zip). The Powers That Be gave him a shot, and he’s been in charge since 2010. He still does the occasional acting gig, hosts a podcast called “The Delta Flyers” with old castmate Robert Duncan McNeill…yet, he revealed during the inevitable discussion of the strikes, is one among thousands upon thousands of familiar TV actors who doesn’t earn enough per year to qualify for health insurance under current SAG-AFTRA contracts. (MCC followers will recall we covered much of that terrain at Fan Expo Chicago in August.)

In addition to plugging upcoming Trek events (e.g., Klingon Karaoke!), the overseers also explained how, due to the actors’ strike, the Q&As for any and all Trek actors this weekend would not be part of the Trek Track as they normally are, but instead were filed under “Main Programming” and their official descriptions omitted all references to either their characters or their shows. (Sample description from a Saturday event we sadly missed: “Join Garrett [Wang] as he chats with Anson Mount, Christina Chong, Celia Rose Gooding, Emily Coutts and Ethan Peck about which mundane task they wish they could have done by magic for the rest of their lives, strange purchases, and the best excuses ever heard for being late!”)

All involved in this panel kept things light and let the hilarity freely flow. For value-added entertainment. the room was festooned in Trek-themed decorations, many of them tongue-in-cheek and all crafted by the aforementioned Mr. Campbell himself. I’m usually lousy at retaining names of con employees and volunteers who make great times possible, but we made a point of noting his contributions.

…and as you can tell from our lead photo if you know what you’re looking at, the Trek Track folks were rather generous with handing out free badge ribbons after the panel. All the best Dragon Con panelists give away such ribbons as rewards so attendees can prove how much they did at the show.

Then came a tactical issue: by 11 a.m. we were already starving. Mere snacks had made a poor breakfast. We headed up to the Hilton’s second floor, skybridged over to the Marriott’s second, escalated up two flights, then flitted through the southwest skybridge to Peachtree Center, home of downtown’s most popular food court and our all-time favorite Atlanta restaurant, Aviva by Kameel. We always brake for this delightful Mediterranean-themed establishment at every D*C, where the owner Kameel himself greets guests in line, hands out free samples, and tells us in his booming voice, “I LOVE YOU ALL!” as he goes up and down the line and warms every heart.

We lingered there a bit, then returned to the Marriott for more lingering (and sightseeing, and cosplay photographing) before our Strange New Worlds group photo op down on its first floor.

The photo op went off without a hitch and turned out beautifully. From there we went up a floor to where they’d next be signing at the Walk of Fame. We covered some of that already. Anson Mount and Ethan Peck had been there last year and consequently had shorter lines than expected. Ms. Gooding’s table was around the corner, separate from her three castmates’ tables for some reason. Her line was too, too short, unfairly so in our esteem.

Christina Chong had the longest line by far — so long that it was divided in half, and the back end stretched through a ballroom exit door. While we waited, a fellow Trek fan named Glenn showed us a live video feed of his pet feral cat back home. Y’know, whatever passes the time.

We’d expected this part of our day to take hours, but it blessedly didn’t. Paradoxically, Dragon Con is the busiest con we’ve attended since our former Gen Con days, but its constituents are also way less focused on actor autographs than all our other regular shows. We’ve never seen anyone in the Walk of Fame with a line thousands of fans long. There simply isn’t room for all that, but there also curiously doesn’t seem to be that level of demand. That’s to our advantage whenever autographs are one of our primary objectives. As it happens, Trek main-cast signatures are very much one of Anne’s highest priorities, as she gets into each new series, anyway. By the same token, we’ve also never seen their photo-op area devolve into a dystopic, asphyxiating stampede in desperate need of fire marshal intervention.

One drawback for favoring the autograph/photo-op side of the con: those schedules never line up with all the other panels and events that are more regimented in their slotting, much like a large university schedule. Our photo ops tend to begin in the middle of one block of panels, then conclude in the middle of another block. We missed a lot of those 52 panels I’d earmarked. That’s normal, but still a shame.

We finished the Walk of Fame shortly before 4:00 and decided to head over to Merchandise Mart 2 and perform our customary comic-con march through the entirety of the exhibit hall and Artists Alley. If there’s a fully indoor route to that building, I haven’t figured it out. The best we could do was go up two floors to the Marriott’s fourth, cut west into the Hyatt’s second, exit through its west doors that we’d entered at the start of our day, then walk one block south and one west through the summertime fresh air to reach that shopping hub. The medium-length entrance line took us maybe 5-10 minutes, tops. The Mart’s first floor is empty; the exhibit hall takes up 2 and 3; and Artists Alley is on 4, top level. We started on 2 and worked our way up.

Kudos to the following dealers and artisans who successfully sold us new stuff:

• Starbase Atlanta (a solid source of FanSets pins, which Anne collects)
• Alien Entertainment (Illinois’s own Doctor Who merchants — we see them at our Chicago cons)
• Geeky Girl Stitches (where we also had fun swapping Disney World stories)
• Crystal Bunny Designs

Our walk was interrupted twice by a woman’s voice booming over the building-wide P.A. system. Some party had apparently misplaced a teenager and someone with a name resembling “Julian Hinchell” was commanded to report to a certain area of the building, and to do so “NOW!”, in a rather ominous “OR ELSE” Oz-level tone.

We reached Artists Alley shortly before 5:00. After light meandering, my first stop was at the table of writer Kyle Starks. We previously met him at C2E2 2019, where he was promoting his Image Comics project Assassination Nation alongside artist Erica Henderson. Since that time I’ve also enjoyed his Six Sidekicks of Trigger Keaton, DC’s Peacemaker Tries Hard!, and his latest — Marvel Unleashed, starring various pets of the Marvel universe such as the Falcon’s old falcon Redwing, the Inhumans’ dog Lockjaw, Captain Marvel’s feline-formed Flerken, and more. The first issue introduces a new hero-pet named D-Dog — an abused stray who finds the mask of disgraced comic-relief hero D-Man in a junkyard, wriggles his head into it, and decides to fight injustice with a heart as big as D-Man’s and arguably about the same level of intellect.

I remember D-Man’s early stories and complimented Starks on this clever idea of an inheritor of that mantle. Somehow our exchange got congenially out of control and Starks felt compelled to regale Anne with D-Man’s entire life story. Like, pretty much all of it: his first appearance in the Thing’s ’80s solo series as an Unlimited Class Wrestling opponent; his self-appointment as Captain America’s not-ready-for-prime-time sidekick; his hodgepodge Daredevil/Wolverine hand-me-down costume; his coming out of the closet, which happened years after my time; and more, more, more. He spoke of D-Man with such an evangelistic fervor that I decided not to interrupt when he misremembered D-Man’s original writer (which is some tough trivia: Mike Carlin, during his assistant-editor days at Marvel before he departed for a much longer career at DC). I just stood back while he was on a roll.

Eventually his D-Man sermon ended and Anne, who hadn’t asked for any of this or even so much as made a “what’s a D-Man?” expression, smiled politely. Usually we like taking creator pics for these write-ups, but we’d gotten one in 2019 and we were kind of ready to continue our tour of the floor, with or without the blessing of D-Man, long may his good doggo successor reign.

Next door was one of his collaborators, Chris Schweizer — artist of Six Sidekicks of Trigger Keaton and colorist of another project I bought at Stark’s table, Rock Candy Mountain. Schweitzer’s table doubled as a workshop where he displayed artifacts for sale from another favored medium of his, the art of papercraft — figurines drawn and built like two-dimensional board-game pieces, on cards as thick as game boards themselves.

There was another comics writer I really, really, really wanted to meet more than any other, but we couldn’t find his table. Anne and I split up to cover more ground more quickly, but came up empty-handed. It’s possible he wasn’t supposed to arrive till Saturday. As we searched, I noticed many high-profile guests had already packed up their wares and left for the day. Their absence in and of itself was discouraging. We also wanted to attend a 7:00 panel over in the bottom of the Hilton, now four blocks away. As the Dragon Con populations continued exploding everywhere we went, we were concerned whether we’d be allowed back in the Hilton, or if there’re ever situations in which the con hotels have to begin limiting entry due to extreme overcrowding. (That’s happened to us a couple of times, most infamously at the inaugural Indiana Comic Con 2014.) So we took our leave of Artists Alley and resolved to return sometime Saturday, by which time hopefully the comics writer I really, really, really wanted to meet more than any other might be in the house.

We retraced our steps back the way we’d come — three floors down, exit Mart 2 out the wrong side, three blocks northeast, through the Hyatt, into the Marriott, down two floors, into the Hilton, down one floor, for our next presentation: a 7 p.m. discussion called “Scientifically Getting Away with Murder”. Full disclosure: we knew one of the panelists from way back — dating back to the Star Wars message boards of 1999 and the gatherings they inspired — but had never watched them in that capacity before. I also thought it might be a fun lark for Anne, who’s seen just about every episode of Forensic Files and finds their brand of crime-lab science fascinating. I’m usually doing other things in the same room while it’s on, but I don’t watch it quite so intently. My ears usually perk up whenever they rerun the one about Mia Zapata, the one about a murder in a comic shop, and the one about the wife who poisoned her husband with what she kept calling “antifree”.

To us it sounded like a niche topic that might half-fill a small conference room. We’d seen little of the Hilton during our last two Dragon Cons and had to wander a bit to locate the assigned room, past hundreds of folks lining one hallway that kept going and going and going. Eventually we found the right place and learned all those folks had the same idea we did and beat us there. Who knew D*C hosted so many people preoccupied with killing?

We dutifully joined the distant end of the line, around the point where it’d begun doubling back on itself. We got stuck with lousy seats on the far right side of the room, but at least we got seats, and got them together. Turnout was huge and every seat had to be taken; by the end, couples and groups were split up to fill the last remaining lone chairs. I’ve no idea how many folks were shut out. We’re not used to attending events this popular without at least one famous actor on stage.

Our panelists of the hour, left to right in our least worst photo of them: forensic anthropologist Emily Finke; ethnobotanist Cassandra Quave; data scientist Jamie Bernstein, also our moderator (no relation to the conductor or his daughter Jamie); entomologist Brandon H. Strauss; and chemistry professor Raychelle Burks. All of them were geeks like us, but with years of advancement in their respective fields, above and beyond what comparatively insignificant knowledge we casual laypeople had gleaned from TV and mystery novels, some of it wildly inaccurate.

We were not brought together for an assassination tutorial, which may have disappointed a few dudes. Rather, audience members were invited to volunteer unusual forms of killing they’d run across in pop culture, and the panel in their expertise would judge whether or not said method were plausible and one could truly get away with it. Among the subjects dissected and digressed into:

• The ice bullet from Three Days of the Condor
• Atropine eye drops, used in two different Agatha Christie short stories
• The lamb shank used as a bludgeon in the Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode “Lamb to the Slaughter” starring Barbara Bel Geddes and Harold J. Stone
• The six famous options of Clue (a 15-second bullet point at best)
• The insulin overdoses from Steel Magnolias and Reversal of Fortune
• A lion cave from some Robert Heinlein story, to which a rebuttal asserted zoo animals make lousy proxy weapons
• Poisons in general, which could fill a panel unto themselves
• Whether Dexter works as a metaphor for white supremacy
• The phrase “piranha solution” came up, but the Piranha films may have oversold their penchant for voracious disintegration
• A specifically infamous British case in which the murderer dissolved the corpse in acid and tried rinsing it all down the sink, only to clog the pipes and joints with lots of human fat
• Bugs came up more than once, apropos of the entomologist — not as a weapon, but as nature’s secret li’l murder-evidence storage units
• Veterinarians keep meticulous cremation records, so don’t bother using their pet incinerators on your large human foes

Having thankfully failed to certify a bulletproof strategy for Getting Away With It, the panel concluded with a Moral of the Story: “The lesson is just be kind to one another!” We were all dismissed, but with no offer of free badge ribbons. The delightfully raucous entertainment and “The More You Know” crime-science factoids would be our sole rewards.

By 8 p.m. every square inch of every publicly accessible floor of every participating hotel had been rezoned for nonstop nighttime after-party bacchanalia and/or stentorian loitering. A couple of friends had told us in advance they’d be hanging out nightly in the bottom of the Hyatt if we wanted to come say hi and/or see what D*C nightlife looks like up close. We’d avoided all that the last two times, and in this case were contending with aches and pains accumulated from nearly twelve hours’ worth of conventioning. Thus we retraced our steps through those same three hotels, excused ourselves from all that giddy geek glory, walked back toward our own remote hideaway, and grabbed dinner across the street at Mellow Mushroom Pizza.

…and then we returned to our room and died. Thankfully the hotel was the old-fashioned kind where the housekeeping staff clean the rooms every day. We needed every creature comfort we could get.

DAY TWO: Saturday, September 2nd.

Breakfast was a combination of granola bars we brought from home plus snacks we’d acquired on the journey down from Indianapolis. Two of my items were meant to be reheated, but we had no microwave. I threw caution to the wind and devoured them as-is. In a convention weekend, one survives as one must.

Around 8:30 we staked out our usual spot for the annual cosplay parade, in front of the Marriott Marquis.

Around 9, police shooed us all away from that block, where the paraders were supposed to be able to stop parading, and insisted we go farther up the parade route. We walked less than a hundred feet south and settled in next to a square double-trashcan container whose top half had been wrapped in plastic so no one could throw trash in it. It made a great leaning space, which I had to share with two upper-class non-geeks. One was a local who brought his newbie friend who knew nothing of the spectacle to come. They may have recognized some of the more famous characters. I helped identify a few for them before I got caught up in photography, which you might’ve noticed over our previous ten chapters.

The end of the parade reached our block around 11:20. The stragglers in the last row were followed by thousands of non-parading Dragon Con attendees who were now ready to begin the rest of their day. Too many of us headed straight for the Marriott and clogged all the entrances, but our turn eventually came. We had a short window of free time before our next photo op at 12:20, which we filled with restroom breaks, cosplay pics, and free snacks that some unknown benefactor had piled on a club table on the fourth floor.

After another successful photo op (complicated only momentarily by some hundreds of Lord of the Rings fans filling the area with mild confusion over their impending ops), we figured why not go back to Merchandise Mart 2 and give their Artists Alley one more walk-through. On the way we stopped for free ice cream at a truck promoting Netflix’s live-action One Piece adaptation, which had just dropped Friday. I’ve read some of the manga, but haven’t seen the anime and can’t decide whether to check out the new show.

Two flavors were offered: an orange sherbet nicknamed “Dum-Dum” and a red vegan variety called “Devil” whose specific fruit I instantly forgot.

We reached Merchandise Mart 2 around 1:00. The entrance line doubled up on the nearest side. Then the line kept going around the corner. And kept going. And going. The one-half of the line that was walking in the opposite direction from us also wound its way into the shadowy depths of the Mart’s interior delivery docks. And after a while we realized the entrance line wrapped around the building’s entire block. Twice. We’ve done more than our share of comic-con lines, but we had two more photo ops scheduled after 3:00 back at the Marriott. Also, a line this long just to bypass an exhibit hall we’d already seen and reach an Artists Alley we’d barely stuck a toe into…something in me revolted at the ask here. We stayed in line so I could see how long it’d take to graduate to the second half of the line that would loop back around around the entire building. If nothing else, that would bring closure to this anecdote. I in fact stated this explicitly aloud at the time.

At 1:40 we had my answer as the line hairpin-turned for its second lap. We bailed out. We kindasorta allowed for the possibility of trying again later, but the magic of comics was losing some luster for me.

That wait in vain, as well as the morning spent standing up for the parade, had worn us down. We got back inside the Marriott and collapsed for a spell till it was jazz-hands time again. At some point through all of this section, we deliberated over which panel would be our final event later that evening. We made a choice and committed to it. By the same token, I also decided to return one last time to the Walk of Fame, took out much of the cash I’d brought along for Artists Alley, and instead spent it to meet a Babylon 5 star who did not have an 80-minute line wrapped around the building twice. As it happened, she too had books for sale. I got to take home some new reading matter after all. (Well, that plus Kyle Starks’ books.)

Then we trudged downstairs for our last two ops, which were scheduled twenty minutes apart. At any other con, we’d have freaked out about how that could’ve gone wrong. Thankfully they both worked out without any undue stress or panicky last-minute deadline desperation.

We’d also decided in advance on our next course of action after those ops: early dinner. If you go back and do the food math, our lunch was handheld freebies, and breakfast was hardly a banquet. We figured few attendees would be flooding into restaurants at 4 p.m., not while geekery still abounded everywhere they turned. Advantage: us starving middle-age folks, tenuously grasping at some of our remaining sensibilities.

The Marriott exit nearest the photo ops was only two blocks from our eatery of choice, Gus’s World Famous Chicken. We picked it for two reasons: (1) it sounded good and we’d never been there before; and (2) it was a fun in-joke between us — a nod to the fact that this weekend was actually our third trip down to the southern United States in 2023 and yet, even when we spent three days in one of the most Southern of all Southern states, we’d never had fried chicken for a single meal. We were past due for some, and I don’t mean KFC.

It was a few minutes’ wait for a table. It was a few minutes’ more wait before a waiter said hi. More minutes till another one took over. Plentiful more minutes passed before our chicken and sides arrived. But it was nice to sit down on chairs instead of a carpeted hotel floor, and the food hit the spot. All their chicken is served spicy, which isn’t Anne’s preference, but the sides mitigated some of that. Our biggest complaint: after we finished, they brought out our check without even tempting us with pie. Their menu claimed they had many pies. I wasn’t in the mood to have to plead for pie.

At 5:25 we walked one last time over to Merchandise Mart 2. The entrance line was exactly as ludicrous before, still wrapped around the building twice. I gave up on their Artists Alley. Better luck next Dragon Con, I suppose.

That left us with time to kill before our final panel at 7. We went back to Peachtree Center — upstairs this time — for dessert. At Planet Smoothie I got their Chocolate Elvis, made with peanut butter, banana, and cocoa. In the space next door, a woman had her own tiny pop-up shop with bagged cookies on pegboard hooks. Anne gave them a try, but really would’ve rather had some pie.

At some point throughout all this, between 1 p.m. and now, I learned for the first time from an ad I saw somewhere that several of the higher-profile comics guests would be holding a separate autograph signing at 7:00 over at the Westin Peachtree Plaza Atlanta. The list included the comics writer I’d really, really, really wanted to meet more than any other.

To be honest, this news actually made me more upset about the mess. The description didn’t clarify whether the guests would be dragging all their wares from the Mart over to the Westin, or if you had to bring your own items to sign. I’d been looking forward to buying new books from Artists Alley folks and hadn’t brought anything from home. Moreover, I’d really committed deep down to that 7:00 panel. So I let it go.

I had no regrets as we took the Skybridge northeast from the food court back to the Marriott, down two floors and over to a nook full of conference rooms I’d never noticed before to attend our personal Dragon Con 2023 finale: a fan-run discussion dedicated to the Apple TV+ series Schmigadoon! If you’ve watched a lot of musicals, worked in them all your life, and/or have the heart and fine sensibility to appreciate musical comedy performed by names such as Keegan-Michael Key, ex-SNLer Cecily Strong, Kristin Chenoweth, Alan Cumming, Jane Krakowski, Martin Short, Aaron Tveit, Titus from Kimmy Schmidt, Rogelio from Jane the Virgin, Mal from Disney’s Descendants, and Ariana DeBose (who deservedly won her Best Supporting Actress Oscar for West Side Story between seasons), then Schmigadoon! might be the show for you. Or if you’ve enjoyed the bespoke otherworldliness of Barry Sonnenfeld, who directed the entire first season. Or if you like saving money, given that Apple TV+ is still among the cheapest major streaming services out there, definitely the cheapest ad-free one. Schmigadoon! and several other series are why it’s the only Apple product we allow in our home.

Anyway: a series that satirizes, homages, blends and remixes famous musicals into a hilarious fantasy setting has been quite up our alley, even though we haven’t seen every musical ever — several, but not all of them. Hence the appeal of sitting in an audience full of stage professionals, theater kids, and lifelong aficionados who’ve collected far more points of reference than we have. Our panelists, left to right in our least worst pic of them taken by rather fatigued hands: Sarah Rose Nicolou, our moderator with stage management experience; Kevin Eldridge, who hosts a pop culture podcast called The Flopcast; Felicity Kusinitz, co-producer of The Flopcast, among other past podcast credits (also, Kevin’s her husband); and Caroline LaPorta, a 20-year veteran theater costumer who’s worked in TV and film.

The panelists had fun listing all the influences and tributes they’ve recognized so far in the show. In addition to the titular nod to Brigadoon, other points of reference name-checked throughout this hour included Li’l Abner, Sweet Charity, Godspell, Pippin (Titus Burgess in season 2 is totally doing a take on Ben Vereen), Oliver Twist, Jesus Christ Superstar, Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” (not actually a Broadway show yet), and more. One panelist also theorized the chandelier fall at the end of season 2 may foreshadow a future Phantom of the Opera send-up. That’s all in addition to references we knew on our own, such as The Sound of Music, Oklahoma!, Annie, Sweeney Todd, Cabaret, and Chicago. (It’s perhaps for the best their season-1 parade of Golden Age classics left Show Boat dry-docked.)

The room held its breath for one politely strained debate whether only upper-class kids can afford to become Broadway actors anymore. Otherwise, fun times were had, especially when our hosts brainstormed which shows they’d like to see done as Schmigadoon! moved onward through musical history. The group wish list included Cats (though it’d be tough to top the Kimmy Schmidt episode), Starlight Express, Fame, more Sondheim, more Webber, Little Shop of Rocky Horrors (my own quasi-portmanteau in my notes), and Into the Woods, which one panelist thinks would be a perfect fit if Josh and Melissa’s story is going where we think it’s going next. Whereas season 2 was sub-re-alt-titled “Schmicago!”, my vote for season 3 is “Schmicked!” But that’s just me.

So that was a blast. And our Dragon Con experience was technically done, albeit with one nagging postscript. We wondered if there’d be a chance of catching the two friends we’d missed over at the Hyatt Friday night. Somehow we still had energy left, as well as that dopamine-overdrive sensation you get when you know you’re about to leave a convention but at the last minute you decide you’d much rather drag it out for another two to twelve hours using every possible excuse you can muster. One last time, once more with feeling, we rode up two Marriott levels, took one last skybridge over to the Hyatt, then descended through three straight floors of wall-to-wall geek party zone. Maybe even four floors. I lost track.

We lapped around every floor, half-searching and half-entranced by the kaleidoscopic masses all around and the boomin’ sound system outside on the Hyatt porch. As I said, we don’t get invited to parties. We aren’t used to this scene. “We’ll be in the bottom of the Hyatt if you wanna come join us!” is the closest we sober squares have gotten in years to a bona fide invitation to any group gathering that didn’t center on relatives and grocery-table cake.

At the point where the Hyatt finally ran out of basements, our journey ended in a ballroom holding an entire burrito buffet with no apparent cash register on duty. We had no further room for food, but we lingered for a good half-hour or so around those various floors, maybe more than that, not that I was looking at my watch as I wished for a way we could prolong the magic and forestall impostor syndrome. We contented ourselves with taking still more cosplay pics as we drifted around so much shiny happy chaos. At least three cosplayers gave Anne free stuff after she snapped their pics. Three of them. I guess if you’re cosplaying at Dragon Con After Dark, it’s what you do.

We never did find that other happy couple. Their Instagram evidence tell me they arrived probably 15-20 minutes after we split. But we did have to excuse ourselves at last. We had an eight-hour drive ahead of us the next morning, and a medical issue that caught up with me at the hotel and ruined the rest of my night. But I’m feeling much better now.

And we have all these new memories and literally 1000+ new photos of the experience. We’ll have to hug those tightly and let them keep us warm till the next time we can afford to do all this again. And our next Dragon Con will be even better.

The End. Thanks for reading! Lord willing, we’ll see you next con. Like, really soon.

Other chapters in this very special MCC miniseries:

Part 1: The Stars in Our Galaxy
Part 2: Friday Cosplay (The First Half)
Part 3: Friday Cosplay (The Other Half)
Part 4: Saturday Cosplay (Non-Parade Edition)
Part 5: Our Favorite Cosplay Parade Moments
Part 6: Cosplay Parade Presents Barbie and Deadpool
Part 7: Cosplay Parade Vehicles and Riders
Part 8: Cosplay Parade Presents the Walt Disney Family of Companies
Part 9: Cosplay Parade Animation and Gaming
Part 10: Cosplay Parade Teams Sampler Platter
Part 11: Last Call for the Cosplay Parade