Mama is a bit nicer when her dopey family isn’t around.
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:
My wife Anne and I enjoy attending entertainment and comic conventions together, whether in our hometown of Indianapolis or in our neighboring states (and sometimes even farther). We’re the Goldens. It’s who we are and what we do. This weekend we once again drove two hours southeast of Indianapolis to attend the sixteenth annual Cincinnati Comic Expo, their own version of our usual Midwest cons. After a two-year relocation to the Sharonville Convention Center, this year CCE returned at last to downtown Cincy’s newly renovated, erstwhile Duke Energy Convention Center — now rechristened the First Financial Center. This was our sixth time at CCE, which we’ve been visiting on and off since 2016. We bought weekend passes for this occasion a while back, but by showtime they only had two guests list we considered absolute musts whom we hadn’t met before. So we deleted a Friday hotel stay from the itinerary and drove in Saturday morning for just the one day. We made the most of our limited time…
…which included the special guest in our lead photo: Vicki Lawrence! Boomers know her as one of the stars of The Carol Burnett Show, while some Gen-X-ers fondly recall her as Thelma Harper from its ’80s sitcom spinoff Mama’s Family, which ran on NBC first before jumping to syndication with a rearranged supporting cast. Anne has seen way more episodes than I have, but there were more than a few keepers among its six seasons — the one where Burnett’s recurring character Eunice sings at a wedding in a drunken rage, the one where Thelma goes on Jeopardy!, the one where they all go on Family Feud, the Rashomon homage, et al. Once CCE announced Lawrence would be attending and doing photo-ops in costume, we pretty much locked them into our schedule.
