Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

Anne and I enjoy attending entertainment and comic conventions together, whether in our hometown of Indianapolis or in adjacent states (or sometimes beyond). She’s been doing them since the early ’90s, and invited me to tag along as our relationship evolved from classmates to coworkers to neighbors to BFFs to husband-and-wife. We’re the Goldens. It’s who we are and what we do.

Last year we attended the inaugural GalaxyCon Columbus in Ohio’s very own capital, which had arisen from the ashes of the top-notch yet short-lived GalaxyCon Louisville. We were happy the show went over well enough to merit a return engagement, with another lengthy guest list for fans of all media across the pop culture spectrum…

Saturday was a much different day for us than our hectic Friday had been. We had only one more photo op to go, one actor’s autograph to acquire, quite a few intriguing panels on the short-list, and a deep desire for as much sitting as possible, which would dovetail nicely with our panel-attending goals.

We were awake by 6 a.m. despite our pains and fitful sleep because I really wanted to ensure we got the best possible parking space. Friday’s spot had been an advance purchase before we left Indy, but Saturday was sold out several days before. We settled for free hotel breakfast and availed ourselves of their sub-fast-food proteins, waffle makers and toppings. It would prove to be our second-most nutritious meal of the day.

The city threw a monkey wrench into what should’ve been a painless five-minute drive back to the garage. Several empty blocks of High Street had police cars cordoning each end, presumably in preparation for some unrelated event that morning. After a few unhelpful detours around neighboring streets, we came at High Street through a side street that was only “cordoned” by a delivery truck parked in the right-hand lane. We went around it, hung a right onto High, and learned the forbidden section’s end was one more block down. We crept slowly, avoided the one (1) gentleman walking in the middle of the street, gently weaved around a cone, and likewise coasted past the final cop-car without incident or law-enforced threat.

We pulled into the garage shortly before 8:00, with over 600 spaces as yet unclaimed. I didn’t expect that to last. Once again we enjoyed the luxury of leaving our jackets in the car and skybridged across in climate-controlled harmony. A couple dozen attendees had nevertheless beaten us there and formed our first line of the day. To our surprise, our segment ran past some convenient seats, which gave us two hours’ worth of relaxation to compensate further for our crappy night’s sleep. We whiled away the time swapping comic-con war stories with a younger couple from St. Louis, one of whom is a streamer whose followers likely outnumber this site’s true head count. As always, at cons the real advantages of lining up early are the friends you make along the way.

We entered the exhibit hall at 10:00 sharp and marched straight to the booth of our last remaining signer on our autograph want list. Several general-admission attendees had beaten us there, as did a handful of VIPs. A few dozen more lined up behind us, including the St. Louis couple. As 11:00 came and went with no star at the table — only a con volunteer who wasn’t given an ETA — over the next 10-15 minutes everyone in line ahead of us gave up and left, as did the couple, who gotten word that a much higher-profile guest was in the house and waiting in his curtained booth for boxing fans to come give him money in exchange for stony glances.

Shortly after 11:15 our star arrived at last! Except then we had to hold off because she had no markers, only a single black Sharpie, which wouldn’t have worked well for the first VIP’s item of choice. Then we had to wait for someone to bring the con volunteer an official money bag to contain all the cash coming his way soon. At 11:25 signing began…except the volunteer let most of the VIPs by first. Their game, their rules, but it was a letdown after the fairer handling we’d had in Evangeline Lilly’s Friday line.

Anyway, eventually we met Emilie de Ravin! She was Belle in ABC’s Once Upon a Time, she was on Lost (which I haven’t watched yet), and a Facebook friend helpfully vouched for her role in Michael Mann’s Public Enemies. For my purposes she was also in Rian Johnson’s first film, a stylized teen-noir gem called Brick. Her eyes lit up to see my copy of the DVD and she shared some background from her experience, such as the part where filming the scene where she lays dead in the water gave her the flu.

We left her line at 11:45 elated. We only had one firm appointment to go. To pass the time, we browsed the far west end of the show floor that we hadn’t reached Friday. Anne bought a Star Trek ornament from a vendor she’d patronized last year, whose name we failed to catch for the second straight year. Then, because we are responsible adults, we had milkshakes for lunch. Yes, just shakes. The kindly tempters at Udder Joy Milkshakes offered five different toppings to load into them (I added graham cracker crumbs and chocolate chips to my Oreo-flavored shake) and could’ve paid extra to have a variety of boozes mixed in (deeply not our thing). Milkshake lunches seemed like a good idea at the time. Well, no, it didn’t, but we did it anyway. At the very least, it helped our budget.

At 1:00 was our final photo op of the weekend, up there as our lead photo, starring Denise Crosby! She’s fondly remembered as part of the original cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation, unfairly murdered in the lousy season-1 episode “Skin of Evil”, only to return in the fourth season as her own half-Romulan daughter Sela and recur for six episodes in all. (I also remember that time she was briefly on The Walking Dead but didn’t last as long as I’d hoped.) We first met her at Indy Trek Con 2001 (pre-MCC era!) the weekend before the all-Trek episode of The Weakest Link aired, but we couldn’t get a decent photo. Once again GalaxyCon let us compensate for a Trek omission from our past. And ’twas a pleasure doing jazz hands with Bing Crosby’s granddaughter.

Crosby was the final name on our prepaid to-do list for the weekend. Technically we could’ve left then and there, but we hadn’t done a single panel yet. We only had one must-see on our Saturday afternoon list and a few hours to kill till then. So we spent the rest of the day doing nothing but panels.

We exited the exhibit hall, walked down to the far north end of the convention center, and at 1:45 joined an in-progress Q&A with voice actor Peter Cullen. Gen-X-ers and all subsequent generations venerate him most as the one true voice of Optimus Prime, from the original cartoons to the live-action films (for which he was asked to audition, which seems insulting). From 1997 through at least 2018 he’s also been the voice of Winnie-the-Pooh’s mopey donkey pal Eeyore, which we somehow never learned till this weekend even though we’re old and cherish Eeyore.

As our first panel of the weekend, this was our first chance to notice the showrunners had dispensed with deaf interpreters and replaced them with live text-to-speech software, with captions displaying on screens adjacent to the stage. Results were as mixed as you’d expected, of the same quality you’d get from an average local news broadcast, probably judged “eh, good enough” by many folks who didn’t need to care much. One of Anne’s sisters is a deaf interpreter, so…let’s just say this development stood out to me.

Other discussion topics included the Saturday morning cartoon cult quasi-classic Mighty Man and Yuk, which I loved for the ten minutes it lasted when I was 7. A fan request to recite the Green Lantern oath in his stentorian Optimus voice was denied by moderator Victor Dandridge Jr. (whom we met at last year’s GalaxyCon and have seen moderating quite a few times) on the grounds that this would be too mind-blowing, not to mention a few other unspoken etiquette-based reasons. Dandridge gave Cullen the go-ahead to do only the first line, as a taste of what might’ve been. Admittedly now I do want to hear him say the whole thing.

At the end of the panel everyone posed for the GalaxyCon traditional end-of-panel selfie with the entire audience (to be posted on their social media someday TBD) and he granted the wishes of many an audience member by bidding us farewell Optimus-style, “AUTOBOTS…TRANSFORM AND ROLL OUT!”

To our delight, unlike some other cons, volunteers were not clearing out the ballrooms between every panel, so we were free to stick around for the next panel and fight our way toward better seats. Thus we ended up in the second row for the 2:15 Q&A with Academy Award Winner Richard Dreyfuss. We met him at last year’s show and listened to him speak passionately for several minutes on a subject near and dear to him. We figured he’d be a fascinating panel participant. We were correct.

The panel started ten minutes late with Dreyfuss and three hosts from a podcast called “The 4:30 Movie”. I don’t listen to podcasts and had never heard of it, nor did any of the gents introduce themselves during this particular panel. (We’ll come back to their identities later.) In the moment, all I knew was here were three strangers whose first question was a direct follow-up to a previous podcast episode in which Dreyfuss guested, regarding a stage play whose name they barely mentioned, acting as if we were all up to speed. This assumption was flawed. Later we figured out the topic at hand was The Shark Is Broken, a comedic fictionalization of the making of Jaws that in Dreyfuss’ indignant estimation gets pretty much everything wrong about his relationship with Robert Shaw during filming, including endorsing and embellishing false rumors of a feud between the two. (He blames those rumors on the film’s co-writer Carl Gottlieb and on Steven Spielberg himself.) There was also a digression involving Adolf Eichmann and the 30 Years’ War, which I think was related to some writing project Shaw was working on during filming. Or something. That part might’ve made more sense if we’d listened to the podcast that no one told us was a prerequisite for attending.

Within five minutes Dreyfuss was already worked up and vitriolic, the perfect mood for our mystery hosts to segue into a question I’d wondered myself: what was it like working with Bill Murray on What About Bob? The question came from one gent who’d worked in the art department on that film and had witnessed a few things firsthand. I pretty much predicted Dreyfuss’ answer with no real foreknowledge except other Bill Murray horror stories. On set the superstar comedian acted like an “Irish drunken bully”, had no problem screaming at people to their face, and acted precisely like the sort of multimillionaire man-child who knows no one can or will tell him what to do. Therein lies the paradox for Dreyfuss and many viewers far less forgiving of boorish actor behavior in the #MeToo era: Dreyfuss still considers Murray funny “even though I despise him.”

Other topics included varying interpretations of Close Encounters of the Third Kind and how Dreyfuss loved the script so much that he badmouthed other actors to get it; the fact that he never met his quarry Suzanne Somers while filming American Graffiti, but that chasing the idea of her was more the film’s point anyway; and that George Lucas may not have given himself a secret cameo in that same film, but he did give Dreyfuss and other castmates one-tenth of one of his gross points on the box office returns, which was the best back-end deal he ever got.

Between the late start and the trio of nameless dudes holding court, only three fans got to ask questions before time ran out: one about John Williams’ Jaws score, one about Stakeout (good choice for a surprise deep cut), and one about roles he regrets passing on, which he declined to specify. The fourth fan in line yelled, “WHAT?”, and was permitted to go after all…except her question was to ask if Dreyfuss would say hi to her pastor, the sort of request that would’ve been shot down even if we’d been given an extra hour. The panel ended once again with an audience selfie, which I’m 80% certain we’ll be visible in once it’s posted online someday.

We left the room and made the long, crowded journey to the Main Stage at the polar opposite end of the convention center. We arrived late for the highly anticipated Daredevil Q&A panel with special guests Charlie Cox and Vincent D’Onofrio, each of whom reprised their Netflix roles in Marvel’s more recent Disney+ shows (in Hawkeye and She-Hulk respectively). We ended up in terrible seats on the far right end of the room, with distant views of their side profiles and their moderator (who seemed familiar from past shows, but whose name we were too late to catch).

We arrived as D’Onofrio was telling the story of a serious injury he incurred on set, which later sorted itself. Other topics:

• Their inability to discuss Daredevil‘s MCU relaunch in the works or its tone, though D’Onofrio pointed to the recent Echo trailer, either as a hint or as a diversion
• How D’Onofrio can still disassemble a rifle blindfolded in sixty seconds, so Full Metal Jacket hasn’t fully left his system
• A hilarious story about Cox’s recurring role on Boardwalk Empire and how he decided to practice building and un-building a dynamite bomb in his spare time
• A bizarre digression in which D’Onofrio tried to explain to the England-born Cox what a “mule” is (as in the animal)
• Kingpin’s great “I AM THE ILL INTENT” speech, one of his Daredevil highlights

…and more, more, more, but I was tired of taking notes and decided to lean back and enjoy the actors’ camaraderie.

We totally missed out on the post-panel selfie in the cheap seats, and had a much harder struggle to walk against the flow of traffic and acquire slightly better seats for the next panel. Promptly at 4:00 would come the Q&A for the veterans of Star Trek: Picard.

A few minutes before showtime, actor/director Jonathan Frakes took the stage and began to sing “Volaré”. A few in the audience joined in, only for him to cut it short. (We got his autograph at Wizard World Chicago 2014 and jazz hands at Louisville Supercon 2018, a GalaxyCon ancestor.) Soon he was joined by Brent Spiner (a pre-MCC Wizard World Chicago, Indiana Comic Con 2022, and Cincinnati Comic Expo three months ago); season-3 MVP Todd Stashwick (Fan Expo Chicago five months ago), and showrunner Terry Matalas (the day before).

Along with all the Trek talk, this panel confirmed the identity of one of the mystery mods from two panels ago. The tall gent with darker hair and glasses is Mark A. Altman, a longtime fandom writer with several geek-centric books to his name (Anne has one or two in our library) who parlayed that into some TV-series credits. Through the mention of a first name, the next day I figured out his associate at both panels was Daren Dochterman, a Hollywood artist and set designer with dozens of credits to his name. Together they’ve hosted still another podcast called “Inglorious Treksperts”.

(Their other associate from the Dreyfuss affair, who didn’t say a word that entire time on stage and who didn’t return for the Picard panel, was screenwriter Ashley E. Miller. His credits include amazing SF shows such as Fringe and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. He also co-wrote such films as Thor: The Mighty Avenger and X-Men: First Class. I wish we’d known who he was at the time. I’d cheerfully attend a panel where he gets to tell career stories.)

Several fans got the chance to participate at the mic. The funniest one was a young gent who praised Stashwick up and down for his acerbic, touching performance as a Starfleet captain who didn’t back down from the two rock-star space celebs who boarded his ship and asked for ridiculous favors…then ended his preamble, “…but my question is for Brent Spiner.”

A crushed Stashwick consoled himself by muttering “12 Monkeys!” again and feeding on his fans’ enthusiasm.

Sadly Terry Matalas tried dashing the hopes of Trek fans who keep imagining that Star Trek: Legacy might be a very real series that will totally exist soon and take place after the events of Picard and bring back Shaw and be super awesome. This pipe dream, alas, is not in active development. Nevertheless, Altman invoked the specters of Galaxy Quest and of past Trek-fan make-a-wish campaigns that impossibly came true, and encouraged everyone to nag Paramount relentlessly into complying.

I might be visible in the post-Q&A group selfie (someday) but Anne was dwarfed. Picard‘s people were on such a roll that they didn’t wrap up till 5:00. At the exits we had to wade through hundreds upon hundreds of Boy Meets World fans waiting their turn for the room. I’m not sure which horde was bigger.

For our final acts of conventioning before departure, I swung by my favorite comic-con retailer Gem City Books and picked up a 1,300-page omnibus for twenty bucks, and Anne tried in vain to grab one last Trek selfie to-go, only to be denied because her target failed to return to his table.

So we called it a day, and a con. By that point I didn’t care how many spaces were left in the garage. Traffic was a gnarly mess, but we escaped, hit the open road, and stopped at a McDonald’s drive-thru outside Springfield to pick up anything more substantial than shakes for dinner. Due to poor street lighting I ran over a median on the way back to I-70 West. So far the car seems fine. IF anything, we were more battle-damaged from two days’ worth of walking. Sitting through four panels helped, but it wasn’t a miracle cure. Maybe someday the science will be there, but not yet.

I’ve since updated our master list of famous people we’ve met so far, will update our jazz-hands Pinterest board sometime this weekend, and keep saying “12 Monkeys!” aloud at random times to see if it magically produces happy cheering. So far, no luck. I’m no Todd Stashwick.

The End. Thanks for reading! Lord willing, see you next con in 2024.

…

…12 Monkeys!