Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

Creation Entertainment, one of America’s longest-running convention companies, runs an annual Star Trek gala in Las Vegas that invites scores of Trek cast and crew members to mingle with fans at Vegas prices and at a considerable remove from more than a few states. As a sort of outreach to us faraway fans, in 2024 Creation has launched a “Trek Tour” comprising much smaller versions of that vaunted Vegas show on the other side of the Rockies. This past weekend it was Chicago’s turn. The location was convenient and the guest lineup included so many missing names on Anne’s Trek-actor checklist, we did something we haven’t done in ages: we attended all three days, from the opening minutes Friday morning to the very end of the final panel Sunday night…

…skipping a Thursday night prelude where early birds could pick up their badges and see the vendors’ room before anyone else. We figured that’d be unnecessary because we weren’t convinced they could keep us occupied for three straight days, let alone bonus hours. Rather than holding court in a convention center, they set up shop at the Hyatt Regency O’Hare in Rosemont, next door to the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center (home of Fan Expo Chicago). They weren’t even using all the hotel’s meeting spaces — one ballroom was reserved for an unrelated neuroscience seminar. I presume those old scientists resisted any takeover bids from Creation and refused to add panels about Starfleet advancements in their field.

“Star Trek to Chicago” (Creation’s official name for the show; official abbreviation “ST-CHI”) was our first hotel-based con in a good while. I had to search the archives to remember our last such show (as it happens, HorrorHound Indy 2017). We also understood Creation handles some con aspects rather differently than the other companies we’re used to seeing annually. For Anne’s purposes, that guest list was worth setting aside our mild concerns and giving it a shot. We’re happy and relieved to report the show far exceeded our hesitant expectations.

DAY ONE: Friday, September 27, 2024.

Admissions were sold in tiers. The top levels above general-admission passes were called VIP, Gold, Captain’s Chair, and Copper, with perks apportioned to each accordingly. (Someone thought “Captain’s Chair” would be an awesome on-topic label, and someone else decided “Silver” was dispensable.) We’re usually fine with General Admission, but the aforementioned mild concerns prompted us to compromise for a Copper upgrade. Badge pickup for that tier was at 10:30 a.m. CDT. We arrived at the Hyatt shortly after 9, well before our turn, because we had no idea what attendance figures would look like or how the Hyatt’s parking situation would pan out. As it happens, finding a space was never a challenge. Their garage is tall and spacious (partly by making the spaces really narrow, like every other Chicago garage), and Creation had consciously designed the show for a smaller scale with no intent of luring the tens of thousands bodies we typically have to wade through.

We wandered into the lobby, got the lay of the land, met up with an acquaintance from a modest Facebook group created especially for the occasion, validated our parking (for half-off, not free), decompressed from the 3-hour drive in comfy chairs, then took our turn at the registration at precisely 10:30, by which time we attendees numbered, at best, a couple dozen.

The vendors’ room was the smallest we’ve ever seen. Over half its contents comprised autograph tables for the majority of the guest list, lining one wall and using the entire center of the room. Lined around the other three walls were approximately eight vendors — Creation’s own merch booth, Fansets, Section 31 Supply (Anne’s favorite pin-makers), The Away Mission, Hero Within, two vintage-geek dealers, and one costumer that also carried vintage items. There may or may not have been a ninth vendor with still more collectibles. The Creation app never listed them and we didn’t think to take inventory at the time.

We alternated between perusing those dealers and approaching each actor as they showed up at their tables. In turn we met DS9‘s Cirroc Lofton (per our lead photo), with whom we chatted about the show’s best villains; the Enterprise tag team of Connor Trinneer and Dominic Keaton, now hosts of the Trek-focused D-Con Chamber podcast; and Discovery chief engineer Anthony Rapp, who showed off a pic of his two sons and was definitely missing them. None of their lines got more than four fans deep, counting us.

That left us plenty of time to grab lunch before our early-afternoon photo ops. A single booth was set up in a meeting room on the opposite end of the hotel. Next door was a tiny room where photos could be picked up when they were ready, roughly 45-60 minutes later. It’s been years and years since we last attended a con where we had to wait longer than a minute for our results to print. Thankfully this old-school waiting period never caused us headaches, apart from the occasional gridlock in that tiny room’s doorway. On Friday even crowding wasn’t an issue — we never saw a line more than ten fans long. So those were a breeze.

Most of the ops wrapped up close to the same time, so stars and fans headed back to the vendor/theater end of the hotel within the same time frame, sharing the singular path connecting them. I grabbed a comfy lobby chair along the route while Anne went to the restroom. While I waited, Anthony Rapp made his way through the hall until a fan stopped him less than twenty feet away and began an anecdote whose setup involved seeing his Discovery costar David Ajala at some previous con. Rapp misunderstood at first and exclaimed with great interest, “David Ajala is here?”

“NO, BUT DOMINIC KEATING IS!” boomed Dominic Keating suddenly behind him, along with pal Connor Trinneer. The actors exchanged warm greetings, and I mentally applauded Keating’s comic timing.

Moments later we entered the theater for our first of what would prove to be many panels over the weekend. (Other cons would call it “the Main Stage” or something similarly prominent. ST-CHI used only the one theater.) Diverging yet again from every showrunner ever, admission for Copper level badge-holders and up included an assigned seat in the theater, for which we held unlimited dibs all weekend long. General Admission appeared to be relegated to unlabeled chairs in the way, way back. Squatters came and went, and were free to grab empty chairs where available, with the understanding that they’d need to skedaddle if and when the true seat-holders showed up. Everyone was generally cool about this, with neither side giving the other any ugly hassles about it. (It wasn’t hard to figure out which couple held Row I, seats 32-33, but those chairs rotated through quite a few unfamiliar faces in their absences.)

We were assigned Row J, seats 31 and 32. Curiously, I saw no Row F, which means we were the ninth row. A walkway ran between Rows H and I, separating us from higher-end attendees and/or whoever reserved the better seats first. The walkway traffic sometimes blocked our already amateurish attempts at taking pics of whatever was happening onstage, as if we weren’t already faced with a formidable obstacle in a longtime comic-con nemesis of ours: poorly lit ballrooms. Consequently, a lot of our panel pics suck. A few didn’t. We did the best we could with the limitations at hand.

We found our seats partway through Cirroc Lofton’s panel. He shared the stage with an actor and podcaster named Ryan T. Husk, who had bit parts in J.J. Abrams’ two Trek films, worked in a few Trek-fan productions, and was one of our official hosts for the weekend. Also onstage was Malissa Longo, the widow of Aron Eisenberg, the jovial actor who played Jake Sisko’s best friend Nog and passed away in 2019.

Tidbits:

• He’s a huge Twilight Zone fan, just like Anne. If we’d known before approaching his table, that conversation would’ve gone very differently.
• His screen-dad Avery Brooks once took him to lunch at Burger King between shooting scenes and didn’t care that they were both still in costume.
• He’s also grateful to Brooks for protecting him from the sort of showbiz abuse that marred countless other child actors.
• He was legally emancipated as a teenager so his mom wouldn’t have to accompany him to the set all the time, which she didn’t want to do anymore. This was technically liberating until he realized it meant they could now legally keep him on set for 16-17 hours a day instead of the firm 12-hour limit for minors.

Our next panel starred the aforementioned Mr. Rapp, who seemed less tired than before and confirmed he’s currently working on a musical in London. A few months before showtime I’d read his 2006 memoir Without You, which chronicled his time in the original cast of the Broadway phenomenon Rent and its deeply unfortunate coinciding with his mother’s final days, so I already knew a few things going in.

Tidbits:

• He sure wishes Discovery could’ve done a musical episode like Strange New Worlds‘ before they ended.
• His character Lt. Commander Paul Stamets and his all-important spore drive were inspired by a real-life mycologist of the same name.
• He’d love to play the MC role in Cabaret someday, though not the current Broadway revival’s interpretation.
• He occasionally played Dungeons & Dragons with other Discovery castmates.
• He never felt he had to “nudge” the writers for representation’s sake; GLAAD had a pretty active presence on hand.
• He’s really only experienced one or two “bad work environments”.
• Yes, he was in Adventures in Babysitting and A Beautiful Mind.
• Yes, Tig Notaro and Michelle Yeoh were pleasures to work with.

Our next panel starred the aforementioned comedy duo of Keating and Trinneer. Unlike me, Anne has seen every episode of Enterprise while I skipped out during the Xindi Wars and never came back (except for Brent Spiner’s mini-arc in season 4), but even in our experiences of differing lengths we agree Commander Trip Tucker and Lieutenant Malcolm Reed were among the show’s best assets.

Half the panel was devoted to showcasing their podcast interview stylings by inviting an audience member to come on stage and be randomly interviewed. The lucky winner was an Andorian cosplayer (the same one we photographed), a retiree who lives half an hour outside Riverside, Iowa (whose Trek-forward attractions we visited fifteen years ago) and is an avid bird-watcher and contributor to bird-watching magazines, which I’ve now learned are still a thing. Keating shared that passion and the two got on famously for a good while.

Serving as their moderator was Lolita Fatjo, who served as script coordinator on The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager, as well as various roles in other Trek-related matters. In more recent times she manages convention appearances for several of the actors on this very show’s guest list.

Among the non-ornithological topics, Enterprise was understandably at the forefront. The cast had expected to get a full seven-season lifespan like their fellow series and were shocked to learn they were being cut short at four. They received the news after filming Part One of “In a Mirror, Darkly”, which may explain why the director assigned to Part Two walked out, necessitating their Director of Photography Marvin Rush to pick up the reins for the conclusion. If they could go back and see all that done differently, Trinneer would prefer not to have died a chump’s death (my words, not his) and they should’ve done right by Captain Archer, as opposed to what infamously happened instead.

Upon their panel’s end we had to take a break from the con for mandatory housekeeping, by which I mean checking into our hotel ten minutes down the road and grabbing dinner from anywhere but a hotel. This departure-and-return meant having to pay twice for parking in the same garage in one day, but this was still cheaper than staying at the Hyatt.

We normally don’t avail ourselves of late-night con activities, but had a great reason to make an exception this time: Anthony Rapp in concert!

Rapp has been singing and performing on stages since childhood, from starring in four different productions of Oliver! on up to various incarnations of Rent and beyond. He’s a year younger than Anne and seven months older than me. I wasn’t a theater kid and wish I’d tuned in to Broadway history earlier (though I did watch Rent on the Broadway on YouTube channel during the pandemic), but his other musical interests intersect fairly well with our own respective tastes.

Concert admission was included in the price of highest-tier badges; we mid-level Copper-badgers and the G.A. attendees had to pay extra for the privilege. We were consequently outnumbered by a packed crowd in those first seven rows.

Two musicians accompanied Rapp onstage: Dan Weiss from the original Rent band, and a young lady whose name reached my aging ears as “Lee Peretti”, but I probably misheard and mangled that. Sincere apologies to whoever would like some.

The complete set list:

1. R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion”
2. “The Origin of Love” from Hedwig and the Angry Inch
3. Radiohead’s “Creep”
4. “Falling Slowly” from Once
5. “Another Day” from Rent
6. “Happiness” from You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown
7. Superchunk’s “Driveway to Driveway”
8. “Words Fail” from Dear Evan Hansen
9. R.E.M.’s “Everybody Hurts”
10. “Wait for It” from Hamilton
11. Frankie Valli’s “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” from Jersey Boys
12. Radiohead’s “Fake Plastic Trees”
13. David Bowie’s “Starman”
14. Peter Gabriel’s “Solsbury Hill”
15. “Visits to You”, a Rapp original
16. “Without You” from Rent
17. “What You Own” from Rent
18. “Seasons of Love” from Rent

Some footnotes:

• 1. The song he sang at his Rent audition.
• 3, 12. He just really likes Radiohead!
• 6. One of numerous other shows he’s done besides Rent.
• 8. He wishes he could’ve played Evan but is well aware he’s too old now.
• 9. I would’ve died then and there if he’d sung “Strange Currencies” or “Exhuming McCarthy”.
• 11. A rare exception of a jukebox musical he likes — normally they’re (loosely paraphrasing him here) dumb stories with a lot of great songs.
• 15. From his 2000 album Look Around. Co-written by Joe Pisapia, formerly of Guster.
• 16. The song he sang at his mother’s memorial service.

Admittedly it was weird hearing his rock-pageant pipes sanding the rough edges off some of the original singers’ versions that made them distinctive in their own ways. On the other hand, this was Broadway-quality singing of a song list curated from an extremely personal perspective, not merely playing random Top-40 hits like a wedding DJ. Each track was a part of his story and/or something that deeply resonated with him, and in turn with us.

Rapp wrapped up at 9:30 p.m. Karaoke was scheduled to follow at 10:00, but we’d been up since 5 am EDT (4 am CDT) and were beyond the verge of collapse. But we only had a ten-minute drive ahead of us; Rapp would soon have to catch a flight because he was scheduled to be in Austin the very next day for a very special Dazed and Confused 30th-anniversary reunion (postponed from last year due to the SAG-AFTRA strike). He assured us he’d return Sunday and we’d see him again soon.

And so we would. To be continued!

Other chapters in this very special miniseries:

Part 1: The Stars in Our Galaxy
Part 2: Cosplay!
Part 4: Saturday!
Part 5: Sunday!
Part 6: And the Rest!

[Updated 10/3/2024, 8:00 pm EDT. Special thanks to Ali Nagib for a helpful correction.]