After I acquiesced to my wife’s demand for a slow, careful descent down Lookout Mountain, our scenic Day Three continued north with a two-hour drive along the east side of the Rockies, through Boulder (very fancy and well-manicured, though not a single Mork & Mindy statue in sight) and northwest to the cozy, wooded town of Estes Park, home of Rocky Mountain National Park.
The drive can be accomplished in less than two hours if you keep your eyes focused on the road and ignore your surroundings. That’s a terrible way to experience the Rockies, though. I had a hard time deciding how often to stop, which views might stand out the most on camera, and which ones to pass by without stopping. Along that entire stretch, beautiful vistas were as common as mile markers. We thought highly of them, anyway. I don’t know if people who live near mountains take them for granted or genuinely wake up appreciating them every day, but we’re used to the topography of Indiana, where the nearest mountains are in West Virginia and all those rolling hills in the southern half of the state stopped impressing me around age 5. Then again, I can imagine Kansans driving up and down State Road 37 between Bloomington and the Ohio River, oohing and aahing at how not-flat everything is. It’s all about your geographic context and personal perspective, I suppose.
I have to admit to myself here that God’s majestic monoliths don’t really beg for puny human captions. This is me stepping back, shutting up for the space of several pics (some taken inside the park, some on the way to the park, all clickable for plus-sized goodness), and letting you enjoy the kind of views that have inspired many a landscape painter, poet, mountain climber, and cinematographer.
For those who didn’t attended GenCon 2012 in Indianapolis last weekend and are beginning to wonder: yes, the gaming convention had games, for playing as well as for buying. Participation in most gaming sessions and tournaments requires extra ticket purchases above and beyond your admission fee, so your personal budget has to be drastically inflated accordingly. Foreknowledge of the game and its rules is a plus, thus shutting me out of a good number of opportunities. Also, I always worry that my first try will devolve into an hours-long heated debate about everyone’s variant rules they use back home versus what the rulebook actually mandates. And then there would be egos involved, followed by machismo, expressed through the throwing of dice and props at me, and then my whole weekend is in shambles and I have to forfeit the game and fees out of concern for my safety and mood. Rather than risk this ludicrous scenario coming to life, I leave the gameplay to others.
My wife and I did play-test one game in the exhibit hall. Luckily for us, the folks at Smirk and Dagger Games are always accommodating to inexperienced passersby who seek something that’s different instead of alienating. It helps that they never seem to have crowded tables. The last time I attended GenCon, I bought a copy of Run for Your Life, Candyman, a spoof of Candyland that adds a violent gingerbread-man-on-gingerbread-man combat system, after they impressed me with a demo of its then-upcoming sequel, Shoots and Ladders, in which the armed cookie-killers are transplanted into a familiar, interconnected, 100-square setting. This time around we tried Sutakku, in which those frustrating small and large straights from Yahtzee are given slightly relaxed rules, then adapted into a tower-building scenario using a handful of d6’s whose standard pips are replaced with Japanese kanji. The game master handily beat us, but I’m proud that it wasn’t a shutout. $24 seemed steep for a handful of designer dice, a cardboard circle, a rulebook, a scorepad, and a deck of tiny penalty cards that worked much the same as the “Share the Wealth” cards from Life, but it was fun while it lasted.
Beyond that, the following photo parade captures an assortment of sights and statues from our GenCon 2012 thumbs-up experience:
The centerpiece of the exhibit hall was naturally Dungeons & Dragons, one of the reasons GenCon was created in the first place back in 1968. The booth entrance looms large and bids you welcome!
The Ringer waits in the wings for her time to strike.
Important things first: ABC Family has wisely chosen to order more episodes of Bunheads, with a promise to return in the winter instead of making us wait till June 2013 for our next fix. Much appreciated, ABC Family execs!
That saving grace means that this week’s episode, “A Nutcracker in Paradise”, wasn’t the series finale after all, but a “summer finale” marking the end of the season in an astronomy sense rather than the TV-standard sense. I’m unused to this approach to TV time-marking since I’ve never watched any other ABC Family shows, unless you count the old reruns of Whose Line Is It, Anyway? that they dropped long ago, or one time our family visited the set of The 700 Club in Virginia Beach even though we weren’t fans. (Long story.) I look forward to the “winter premiere” when its time arrives, but one has to wonder if the summer season and winter season will together comprise the eventual Season 1 DVD set, or if Summer 2012 was Season 1 and Winter 2012-2013 will be Season 2, or if the DVD manufacturer will avoid “season” divisions and opt instead for “volumes” like some animated shows do.
I’m taking a DVD release for granted, of course. Now that the specter of cancellation has dissipated for the moment, unbridled optimism is the order of the day. While we’re dreaming big, let’s also wish for more fun cameos for the benefit of you Gilmore Girls fans, maybe a few higher-profile guest stars, and something involving the word “Emmy”. Call me a lunatic, but it feels a lot better than living in a constant state of fear and chanting, “Six seasons and a movie! Six seasons and a movie! Six seasons and a movie!” as if the Beetlejuice summoning method will make it so.
Regardless: we can breathe more easily, knowing that the show didn’t end permanently with this week’s cliffhanger. I knew the show was headed somewhere dark as soon as I realized that the first half-hour had far too many happy moments in it. Too much happiness always means doom and gloom are bound to arrive and restore much-unwanted balance to the scales. First happy event: the previous week’s feud between Ginny, Melanie, and Boo over the date-ability of icky Charlie and dashing Carl was forcibly negotiated with a gum-wrapper treaty and no small amount of badgering from an annoyed Sasha and a tentatively promoted Michelle, clearly high on the first of many power trips yet to come.
With everyone friends again, love was truly in the air! (Well, not for Truly, hereby dubbed Lady Not-Appearing-in-This Episode.) Michelle and Godot the bartending stud moved past the googly-eye stage and shared tender public moments, to a lot of bemused head-turning from the other tables. Fanny and Michael seemed happier than ever, and in talks for some extended quality time in Montana. Boo gave the most achingly self-deprecating speech of the season, threw herself on the mercy of the Nutcracker fundraiser, and won back the heart of Our Hero Carl at last. Hurray for happy endings that will certainly stay very happy forever and sure not be ruined by any horrifying turn of events or anything!
Not even Sasha was immune to Cupid’s well-oiled scattergun. Despite her wish for lesbianism to save them all from guy trouble, Sasha met-cute against her will with a potential suitor of her own at the Oyster Bar’s fundraiser. He begins the episode as Tyler, star of a sad basketball team on a Charlie Brown losing streak, and ends the episode as Roman, newborn rebel transformed by thirty-year-old goth-rock. I’m fine with the costume department’s eclectic decision — grateful, even, that they went with something besides ’80s hair metal or up-‘n’-coming corporate-rock product placement. I’m not sure how well “Bela Lugosi is Dead” would lend itself to modern dance, but they’re certainly welcome to try. (If that doesn’t work out, might I suggest “Detonation Boulevard” by the Sisters of Mercy?)
Outside the subplots of love, Sasha once again nabbed a solo routine, this time in a satirical anti-Wall Street number accompanied by the descendants of the dancers from Madonna’s “Material Girl” video. Michelle enjoyed a rousing musical moment, a dream rendition of “Maybe This Time” from Cabaret. Boo and Carl shared a blissful makeup dance to “The Rainbow Connection”, as covered by Weezer with Hayley Williams of Paramore. Hopefully the winter season/volume/session/whatever allows opportunities to shine the spotlight on Ginny, Melanie, or even twelve-year-old Matisse, who by my reckoning is owed something for enduring Ginny’s frantic will-I-or-won’t-I rapid-fire blathering that seemed to be fueled by one too many gallons of Red Bull. (Fun trivia: this episode isn’t actress/dancer Matisse Love’s first time performing The Nutcracker.)
Alas, everything came crashing down in the episode’s fateful second half, in which Michelle wreaked untold havoc with six of the deadliest words in the English language: “I was only trying to help.” After earning so many smiles from Fanny in the first thirty minutes, she found it was all frown-hill from there.
First she attempts to play Doctor Love for Fanny and Michael, now falling out over Michael’s alleged plan to move to Montana permanently and possibly solo. When Michelle tries to talk Michael out of doing what she thinks Michael is doing, Michael apparently accelerates his plans and vanishes ahead of schedule. Handy tip: when a schmuck of a male is trying to avoid commitment, telling him his Signficant Other’s surprise commitment plans may not be the best way to change his mind. Who knew.
And then there was the big night, The Nutcracker in all its intended glory, Paradise Dance Academy’s biggest show of the year, the one that keeps them solvent and on the map. It’s like tax season for H&R Block, or the Indianapolis 500 for the town of Speedway, or the annual Marvel crossover event. This. Was. Very. Important. And all of it came crashing down in an initially funny, suddenly terrifying sequence in which an inattentive Michelle reaches for some refreshing misting water for the overheated cast and instead whips out her can of “pretty mace” on all of them, even testing it on herself like a true Stooge. Hijinks, eye damage, and “Marco! Polo!” ensue. As blinded teens body-slam each other or crawl offstage to safety, The Nutcracker transforms into Rise of the Ringer as Sasha’s usurper seizes the day, takes the stage, and delivers the performance of her career to an appreciative audience of zero.
Yes, behind all this madness and mayhem lurked…the Ringer. The first-ever super-villain ballerina was cordially invited to infiltrate the dance studio at Fanny’s behest while Sasha was still under the spell of Bring It On. Though Sasha was obviously freed this week from the Cult of Sue-Sylvesterology and ready to assume the role of Clara per Paradise annual tradition, the Ringer was nonetheless unstoppable by the adults and unflappable in the face of Sasha’s attempt to fire her. The nameless Ringer was a lean, mean, dancing machine undaunted by multitasking, untempted by human niceties such as courtesy and emotion, and completely oblivious to everyone else’s constant movie references. “I don’t have cable!” she whined in pain as she revealed her one weakness and her secret identity in that moment: she’s obviously a Nielsen viewer. Expect this supernaturally talented adversary to become Bunheads’ answer to Sideshow Bob in the seasons/volumes/sessions/whatevers ahead.
Beyond a bittersweet yet enigmatic dream reunion between the widow Michelle and her departed one-time husband, the episode ended with a wrenching walk down the hospital’s White Mile, accompanied by the echoes of Fanny’s fury and the sounds of Paradise parents demanding something between justice and litigation. The final Dead Poets Society tribute may not have been original, but it was no less heartbreaking, especially when Michelle had to remind Blockbuster’s best customers how that particular movie ended. (Seriously, is there so little to do in Paradise that all the kids spend their entire lives sitting through eighteen hours of cable movie channels every day, memorizing them wherever possible, maybe even taking notes on index cards just for small-talk prep? Remember the time when Melanie cracked wise about Martin Scorsese’s Kundun? What human does that? Watch Kundun, I mean?)
In these next few months without Bunheads, many questions will haunt us. Can the parents of Paradise ever forgive Michelle? Can our queenly quartet devise a clever way to restore Michelle’s honor and somehow blame everything on the Ringer? Can Fanny forget that free-love cad of hers and move on with her life and heart? Even if she does, can the studio afford to go on? And is there some way Ghost-Hubbell can become a regular?
Until Bunheads returns, we bid farewell for now with this closing number — that Weezer/Williams cover of “The Rainbow Connection”, one of the best Oscar-nominated songs of all time, a close personal favorite of mine since childhood. Kermit’s fragile banjo hook strikes a nerve for me every time. This version opts instead for ethereal strings that don’t achieve quite the same authenticity, but a TV season/volume/session/whatever that included both this song and They Might Be Giants holds a pretty astronomical ranking in my book.
Thanks very much to those of you who’ve been enjoying, sharing, and starring in the photos that my wife and I took at GenCon 2012 last weekend here in Indianapolis. Rest assured the city always gets a kick out of your presence, and I’m not just referring to tourist dollars. (Seriously, everyone left and took all the pizzazz with them. Bring back our pizzazz! WE NEED IT.)
Please enjoy this last hurrah of cosplay fun and outright fashion victories. Newcomers may refer back to entry #1 and episode 2 for your “Previously On: GenCon 2012 Photos” recap. All previous disclaimers regarding quality and old-people ignorance apply as before.
Local variety band il Troubadore aren’t always representing for Trek in their live performances, but you have not experienced “American Pie” until you have heard it in the original Klingon.
My wife and I present more of our Costume Contest and non-competitive costume pics from GenCon 2012 in Indianapolis, as we personally witnessed on Saturday, August 18, 2012. Same disclaimers apply as in episode one regarding photo quality. Neither of us is a professional photographer, unless someone wants to PayPal us a tip in exchange for a copy of the original file for any of these pics. Then we’ll consider ourselves professional photographers. Until that impossibility happens, we’re just two fans sharing our experiences with a lovable, enthusiastic crowd.
Drow knights, either from Tolkien, Dungeons and Dragons, or one of their descendants.
Darth Talon, from John Ostrander and Jan Duursema’s erstwhile post-ROTJ series Star Wars: Legacy.
This weekend our fair hometown of Indianapolis hosted the 45th edition of GenCon, one of America’s oldest and largest gaming conventions. When I was a kid, it was hosted up Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, which I remember because once per year TSR’s Dragon Magazine would include a free GenCon event schedule as an insert, several pages long. I was in the upper years of elementary school at the time, but as a precocious fan of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons and other TSR games, I thought that a gathering of RPG fans would be a unique experience. I fell away from RPGs after junior high after all my friends moved away, and never really returned to the hobby. For me 2003 was a little too late for GenCon to relocate here, but we outsiders can find entertaining sights and activities among the massive crowds. At the very least, my past allows me to get more jokes than the other non-gamer commoners.
Attendance in 2011 was in excess of 36,000. This is no gathering of a dozen sweaty guys in a single hotel conference room. Not only does GenCon use just about the entire convention center (including the recent expansion made possible by the demolition of the old Hoosier Dome), it also requires additional gaming space in several adjacent hotels. If your interests and gaming specialties are diverse enough, you could tally up miles’ worth of steps all over downtown Indy on your pedometer by the time your four-day weekend is over…if you could afford to take that much time off work, and also owned a pedometer.
This was my third GenCon, having missed the last two due to scheduling issues. I’m still hesitant to pay extra to participate in any real games, but I certainly wasn’t bored this year. I’ll outline some of our activity options in some other installment because I’m exhausted after conventioneering two weekends straight and I’m running out of time tonight. For now, please enjoy some samples from GenCon’s 27th annual costume contest, as well as costumes proudly worn throughout the grounds outside of competition.
About that contest: some of those photos weren’t the greatest. I deleted many, kept many more than aren’t worth keeping, and will still have to keep pruning. The ballroom was poorly lit even with every house light fired up, but was kept dim throughout the contest. Flash photography was forbidden, largely to ruin the day for most of us with inadequate cameras that blur everything when the flash is turned off. Worse still, my wife and I were roughly back in row 10, which was hardly ideal (albeit still in the front third of the ballroom, better off than several hundred other attendees fared — the smart Costume Contest audience members start lining up at least two hours early). We did what we could with the location, technology, and limitations at hand. It’s something we enjoy doing, to show our appreciation and awe for those with the flair for this particular aspect of the scene. This installment features some of our better shots and their better costumes, but we regret a fair amount of greatness that we missed nonetheless.
One more disclaimer: as an old man, my knowledge of anime and MMORPGs is woefully sketchy. If you catch me misidentifying anyone, please don’t hesitate to call me out. I like learning, I like giving credit where it’s due, and I have no problem owning up to my own ignorance, which will only worsen with age if someone doesn’t stop me here and now.
Onward, then:
While contestants are organized backstage, pre-show entertainment is usually provided each year by DDBD, a belly-dancing troupe. This, like cosplay, is another hobby that’s best left to other people besides me.
Overall winner of the shebang was this looming Tauren warrior from World of Warcraft. On the right, if my hasty notes can be trusted, is someone from Tsubasa who won the Anime category.
The first nine episodes of Falling Skies‘ second season have been a tense thrill ride, except arguably the one episode that was devoted entirely to people chatting in cars. And, granted, fans of special effects may also noticed to their chagrin that last week’s episode, “The Price of Greatness”, didn’t feature a single live Skitter. I also find it immensely distracting every time two characters ostensibly hundreds of miles apart just happen to bump into each other. Otherwise, thrills have been a-poppin’ and tension has been mounting.
The addition of special guest stars Terry O’Quinn (Lost) as the first post-apocalyptic politician and Matt Frewer (forever Max Headroom in my heart) as an unthinking military man was certainly a step in the right direction away from staleness. Based on the promo for the season finale (enclosed below), it’s safe to say we can expect great, hopefully unpredictable things are in store for us. So far, I’ve been pretty satisfied with where the show has been steered of late, thanks in large part to season 2 showrunner Remi Aubuchon, whose previous work on NBC’s Persons Unknown was a big hit in our household and apparently nowhere else. (I still think of the show every time I’ve seen Reggie Lee pop up in other things like Grimm and The Dark Knight Rises. Seeing our heroes undergo Level 2 would’ve been a real treat.)
What if things had gone differently? What if Aubuchon hadn’t been available to helm Falling Skies because he was too busy wrapping up Persons Unknown season 3 after it magically found an audience? Imagine infinite versions of the show by infinite showrunners, perhaps in worlds where the fates of many a TV creator ran along a much different career track than they have in the reality we know and love.
In some of those alt-Earths, the Falling Skies season 2 finale, titled “A More Perfect Union” in our present reality, might be reimagined by those alt-producers like so:
Joss Whedon: One of the Overlords is finally given a name and a distinct, engaging personality. Season 2’s Big Bad is revealed at last, and happens to be the CEO of an evil galactic corporation. The season concludes not with another cliffhanger, but with a satisfying firefight that looks really expensive but was done on a shockingly modest budget, while at the same time offering deep-rooted closure to the season’s ongoing themes of distrust between allies and compromised freedoms. Also, because Tom has a happy relationship with Anne and is a great father to his boys, he obviously has to die quickly and brutally at the end. Season 3 will see the show renamed Maggie the Skitter Stomper, and Hal coping with his grief by developing unhealthy addictions to black clothing and expensive hair care products.
Chris Carter: Tom and Anne’s relationship is immediately downgraded back to irritating will-they-or-won’t-they status. The finale introduces four new kinds of aliens, six new supporting characters, and eight new conspiracies, ending after much sound and fury with an alien-war cliffhanger and a “To Be Concluded” placard. It is a placard of lies.
Amy Sherman-Palladino: After nineteen straight episodes of near-flawless heroism, Tom spends some time revealing all his fatal flaws and making sure we know he’s no hero to be praised or followed. This culminates in a harsh argument with Weaver in which both characters are required to recite entire speeches’ worth of dialogue at each other, longer than the Declaration of Independence and at 400 wpm. Weaver eventually convinces Tom about his wrongness just in enough time for the two of them to nab a pair of empty front-row seats at the Charleston Elementary production of My Fair Lady, in which li’l Matt closes the show with a heartbreaking rendition of “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face”. Eliza Doolittle is played by his new harnessed girl-pal from two episodes ago, who’s seen the error of her ways and begrudgingly joined the 2nd Mass after all. Forgiveness and healing are all but certain, as are countless tossed-away joke references to hip, erudite topics such as The Fantasticks, Secrets and Lies, Tamagotchi, The Decameron, and Steve Urkel.
Shonda Rhimes: Fifteen minutes of relationship angst and forty-five minutes of sex scenes. Noah Wyle will glisten and preen like he’s never glistened and preened before. Every female character will become insufferable.
Dick Wolf: The finale is a fully self-contained episode, except half the cast die or quit the rebellion. Their replacements in season 3 will be played by desperate but totally terrific Broadway actors at half the cost.
Alfred Gough and Miles Millar: Hal suddenly realized he’s still in love with Karen, was meant to be with Karen, and will never give up waiting for Karen, even though the best viewers will waste countless hours disagreeing with him via the Internet. All other characters will moan, groan, and keep pointing him toward Maggie in vain. Pope’s chaotic-good repartee will become three times zingier, and Pa Mason will spout more aphorisms than ever. Frustrating cliffhanger ending is mandatory, and won’t see full closure until eight episodes into season 3.
Vince Gilligan: Tom goes underground to meet the dregs of what’s left of American society. He discovers a way to destroy the invaders from within once and for all, but it may require him to sacrifice the life of one of his sons. He goes forward with it anyway, as the darkness begins to form slowly in his once-pure heart. Anne is strangely on board with every bizarre decision he makes. The Noah Wyle that America once knew and loved as the benevolent Dr. John Carter gets really scary to watch.
Frank Darabont: The first fifty-eight minutes will be the characters standing around wreckage, staring into space meaningfully, pausing to reflect and mourn at length, holding conversations about compromised freedoms, and ending every other sentence with, “…but at what price?” The final two minutes are super awesome alien wartime nonstop explosion cinema extravaganza that blows the fans away, costs $60 million to film, and requires a now-penniless TNT to cancel all its other original series except Franklin & Bash, whose two stars are willing to forgo paychecks and work for vending machine snacks.
Veena Sud: One solid hour of everyone standing, staring, pausing, and generally hanging out on lots of dull grey sets. Smiles are forbidden. Dale Dye and all other officers above Weaver will admit they’re no closer now to understanding the aliens’ motives than they were when the invasion began two seasons ago. In the only real plot development of the entire episode, Tom is relieved of command when he admits he has no idea how to use a gun, and has just been getting really lucky all this time.
Thankfully none of these realities are ours, for we live in the greatest reality of ALL TIMES. Enclosed for posterity is that brief season finale promo that may or may not contain all the hints we need to predict what’ll happen this Sunday night.
My amateur predictions:
1. Charleston will burn.
2. A minor recurring character will die. The easy money’s on Tector.
3. The firefight will look spectacular.
4. Lourdes hopefully stops mourning and gets back to representing for the faithful.
5. Just as the battle is nearly lost, Ben returns with a veritable cavalry.
6. Pope quits and leaves for good, and then returns again, and then quits and leaves yet again, and so on.
7. My wildest prediction, most likely to be wrong — Dai will have at least three whole lines. You heard it here first.
Just as Dinosaur Ridge was mere minutes from the Red Rocks Amphitheatre, so was our next stop ten minutes or so from Dinosaur Ridge, down the slope of Alameda Parkway, across the interstate, and up the forested residential side of Lookout Mountain. We were elated to suffer no ill effects from the changing altitudes this time. The real estate on the way was curiously maintained, as most of the home along Lookout Mountain appeared well-to-do, as if the local upper-class had all sought refuge together in case of another worldwide flood. At the very least, I imagine their homeowners’ association prides itself on strict upkeep.
Past the mountainside suburbs and one abandoned restaurant was our next stop, the Buffalo Bill Memorial, final resting place of Old West legend William F. Cody himself. I’m not sure why visitors feel compelled to throw pennies at him. Perhaps famous people’s graves are like wishing wells if you toss them just right. Perhaps they’re meant as tributes to Charon. Perhaps they’re a down payment from those who think Buffalo Bill’s ghost is a detective who helps the helpless and gives hope to the hopeless…for a price. Perhaps they’ve somehow mistaken his grave for Benjamin Franklin’s. The world may never know.
The miniseries finale! Rather than cut back to three hours’ sleep per night, I decided early in the process to pace myself and set aside some photo sets for the conclusion, rather than trying to post hundreds in the space of a single day.
Winning in the category of Best Fan-Made Inanimate Object was, for me, Lego Order of the Stick. I have a hard time getting into webcomics, but Rich Burlew bypasses this prejudice by reprinting his stick-figure fantasy-comedy in paper editions, so he gets a pass.
We photographed several actors from a distance for value-added entertainment. Some didn’t really care, and would even offer free photos if you asked with utmost humility. In some areas photos were forbidden to keep throngs of amateur paparazzi from suffocating each other and ruining everyone’s weekend. In more than a few areas it wasn’t discouraged at first, and then later it totally was, as “No Photos in This Area” migrated from one table to another as stars came and went. For example, at one point early Saturday, The Walking Dead‘s Jon Bernthal looked like this:
My wife and I may have different goals and preferences at conventions, but one of our stronger common interests (besides a wish for better concession stand food) is a love of seeing other fans in costumes. All that inspiration, sartorial effort, and fashion derring-do enlivens and enriches even the most jaded, crowded, bizarrely laid-out of conventions.
Careful readers will note I’ve just reused the intro from Part 3. Not much has changed since then. We like costumes. Here are more. Please enjoy some.
X-Men are usually a staple, but this team has taken an uncommon direction in presenting the original X-Factor lineup from 1986, when Beast, Cyclops, and Iceman reunited after Jean Grey’s second resurrection. Angel was off-camera to the left, engaged in conversation. Leave it to billionaire playboy Warren Worthington III to find time for brokering deals.
If I could count the number of times that a small-town teen was suckered by a charlatan promising a “Sound of Music” singalong…
Despite Michelle’s hollow promises, tonight’s new Bunheads episode “No One Takes Khaleesi’s Dragons” featured no bris, no Hugh Jackman on Skype, no free puppies, and no Sound of Music singalong (sorry, “Brigitta”). Sadly, Our Heroines were denied those things, any other Game of Thrones references, and ever so much more, thanks to the triple tag-team menace of whirlwind emotions, unconscious rivalry, and a Nutcracker production that threatens to crash and burn harder than a rafter full of Spider-Man doubles.
For a change, some of this was Boo’s fault. Last week she failed to stand up against Ginny and Melanie when their words tore like harpies’ claws into the fragile ego of dashing Carl Cramer, her Astaire/Rogers tribute partner and would-be soulmate. This week her courage and determination overcame that failure and allowed them to connect them both for several happily-ever-after seconds, until Ginny’s subplot careened into hers. The resulting collision induced temporary amnesia into Boo, who reverted to a previous mental state and convinced herself she liked Melanie’s icky brother Charlie again. It was just like The Vow, except I’d suspect that no woman on Earth would choose Charlie over Channing Tatum.
Ginny wasn’t in the best of mental states herself. Now that Charlie has set aside his Boo-using habit in favor of simpleminded flirting with Ginny instead, her body is resorting to new defense mechanisms such as high-strung responses, flat rejection of all comestibles, bleacher-diving into hapless basketball fans, and making short jokes about other people her own height. Too bad for Ginny that she shares Boo’s inexplicable weakness for icky brothers. Thankfully social taboo affords Melanie total immunity from Charlie-crushing, but her stern reminders about the Bra Code are useless against this grave, seemingly incurable contagion. Perhaps a fundraiser is in order, if only enough top-40 musicians could be enlisted to participate in a “USA Against Charlie” benefit single.
Alas, Michelle was preoccupied elsewhere. Her attempts at simple coffee-drinking are stymied by the eccentric perfectionism of the barista Bash (Gilmore Girls vet Sean Gunn), who has peculiar ideas about buyer/seller power dynamics and who may or may not have won competitions against an actual guy from Seattle, if you can believe the stories. Then she learns that Boo and Carl’s important, relationship-making performance at the opening of a premier supermarket is threatened by the Association for the Preservation of Keeping it Real in Paradise, local busybodies who oppose such everyday pleasantries as child slavery, environmental destruction, and duck genocide.
Michelle decides the best course of action is throw caution and fact-checking to the wind, and become Paradise’s first staunch supporter of their upcoming generic-brand Super Wal*Mart. Thus she recruits Godot the potential-love-interest bartender to her cause and stages an ambush on her opponents in the Axis of Real-Keeping — tap-dance student Sam (Gilmore Girls vet Rose Abdoo), Joe who owns Joe’s Market (conflict of what, now?), and Jon Polito from Homicide: Life on the Street. Somehow the forbidden love between Boo and Carl is not enough motivation for the hearts of TAFT-POKI-RIP to grow three sizes too big and extend an open invitation to Evil Foods and their Evil Grey Poupon. Is the Astaire/Rogers show-stopper doomed before its debut? Were Boo and Carl simply not meant to be? Will his Stewie Griffin impression remain repressed forever?
Not even Fanny is in a position to assist, as her participation in Our Heroines’ lives is minimized while she concentrates on whipping numerous inadequate extras into shape to populate next week’s Nutcracker extravaganza, which require her to bark lines such as, “ARABESQUE, MATISSE!” with contemptuous desperation. Why wasn’t Truly’s witches’ brew of pumpkin-pie candles and fresh-cut flowers potent enough to course-correct such disappointing rehearsals? Would cupcakes help?
Not all subplot roads lead to more ruin, however. Sasha plumbs the very depths of her soul and her brain, only to realize that cheerleading may just be beneath her. Her kicks are too emphatic; her school pride is tainted by her belief that high school athletics are a leading cause of adult career dysfunction and midlife crisis; and her cheers are fatally insincere. Every time she lifts a pom-pom, a Spartan Spirit dies. She took the easy road out from under Fanny’s perceived oppression, only to realize that the easy road is a pretty boring drive. Two barriers now stand between the prodigal daughter and her return to ballet life: Fanny’s demand for an apology, and her own youthful stubbornness. Can she and Fanny reconcile in time to save Nutcracker and the entire school? Does the school’s fate even hinge on this performance? Should we expect scary bulldozers at Fanny’s door next week?
Hopefully next Monday’s season finale will answer these questions and more. The next-episode promo already spoiled how “one moment will change everything”, which means we’re guaranteed at least one genuine Moment. Until then, you’ll have time to let Bash design you at least one complete drink, read further into your trigonometry textbook, sculpt whipped-cream replicas of Simon LeBon’s face, locate at least one Starbucks that doesn’t play world music, frost your cookies with cookie dough, reflect on your own “commitment to the sulk”, and lift your spirits higher and higher by repeating Sasha’s best cheer before every meal:
o/~
Stay in school!
Learn algebra!
You have no future in sports!
Hey-hey!
o/~
…or you can load your copy of The Sound of Music and sing along to “My Favorite Things” instead.
My wife and I may have different goals and preferences at conventions, but one of our stronger common interests (besides a wish for better concession stand food) is a love of seeing other fans in costumes. All that inspiration, sartorial effort, and fashion derring-do enlivens and enriches even the most jaded, crowded, bizarrely laid-out of conventions. Of all the photos that we two snapped last weekend at Wizard World Chicago, these are my personal favorite costumes and scenes for random reasons.
Exhibit A: Pennywise is every nightmare you ever had. Bloodied nurse stands by, waiting to do her job after It is finished with you.
In our last exciting adventure, my wife and I attended Friday and Saturday of this year’s four-day Wizard World Chicago entertainment and comics convention up in Rosemont, IL. Much fun was had, many photos were taken, and extensive walking was required. These, then, are more of those photos, centering on those actors we met and approached (as opposed to actors we glimpsed from afar, which have been segregated for one of the future entries).
In the category of “Actors Whom One or Both of Us Met in Person”, my wife’s hands-down favorite of the lot was Dean Cain from Lois and Clark, who’s barely aged a day. Chalk it up to the effect of yellow-sun radiation on his Kryptonian physiology.
After spending our Friday at Wizard World Chicago in a series of lengthy lines, our goal Saturday was to finish our autograph want list once and for all, and then roam the place at a leisurely pace, revisiting Artists Alley, perusing the dealers and exhibitors, and admiring all the costumes.
Our longest line of the day was once again the general admission line, for which we arrived over two hours before opening. Even though we had no pressing needs that demanded an early presence, we just felt like showing up early. It’s part of the experience, and sometimes it’s fun to hang out with other fans equally motivated to do likewise for their own reasons. The early Saturday wait was much more enjoyable than Friday’s. For the morning’s entertainment, we were regaled with the humor stylings of a WWC volunteer who was very low on sleep and high on Red Bull. For the morning’s shopping bonuses, a volunteer with a megaphone (it’s as if someone with power actually read what I wrote yesterday) passed out lanyards, which fans could redeem at the WWC merchandise booth for…things. I don’t know what. The megaphone wielder was distant from us and kept yelling in the opposite direction away from us. Much of the crowd near him hollered and cheered; those of us well behind him were left ignorant and without bonuses. This is still an improvement over Friday’s silent screams.
After one important initial errand, my wife and I sauntered through Artists Alley before the crowds descended upon it, to see if anyone could lure us toward them with their wares or even a simple “hi” broadcast in our direction. The winners of our unannounced WWC Saturday “Take Our Money, Please” contest were the following creators:
* The one and only legendary, trendsetting, boundary-redefining artist that is Neal Adams. At five minutes after opening, he had no line yet. I couldn’t believe the luck. I cheerfully bought a hardcover reprint of the 1978 Treasury Edition Superman vs. Muhammad Ali, which may sound a little odd today but still looks amazing on the inside.
I’m currently writing this from our hotel in Rosemont, where my wife and I are attending two of Wizard World Chicago’s four days of self-described “geek chic”, comics fun, sci-fi spectacles, and all the autograph lines you could ever want to live in. After four hours’ walking around the State Fair on Thursday and eight hours’ standing and walking today, we’re somewhere beyond exhausted, but excited nonetheless. And we still have one more day to go! (Other attendees have more. We simply don’t do Sundays.)
The least enjoyable part was the wait to enter the convention. Per our personal procedures, we arrived ninety minutes before opening time to ensure a sooner entrance than other fans who would be vying for space and line positions inside. Early arrivers are kept waiting in a warehouse-sized room with a barren floor that’s not terribly conducive to sitting through all those early minutes.
Even less charming were the WWC employees who kept shouting completely inaudible things at the crowd — possibly instructions, possibly encouragement, possibly rap-concert clichés, maybe even tapioca pudding recipes. I wouldn’t know because I couldn’t understand a word they yelled. Helpful practical advice to those guys, especially the one who was like a skin irritant to us at a previous WWC: that cavernous waiting room is not the Red Rocks Amphitheatre, where sounds will reverberate like magic for one and all to take in. If your employers can’t be bothered to arm you with a microphone or even a megaphone, then you’re going to need to learn the difference between plain yelling and actually projecting your voice. They’re not the same thing, as one fan ably demonstrated when he returned the verbal volley well enough for all to hear and understand.
The Indiana State Fair is a great annual celebration of Hoosier pride, farming, food, and 4-H, with amusement park rides and big-ticket concerts by Top-40 or country artists. My son decided long ago that it wasn’t his thing anymore, but my wife and I attend each year as a date-day to seek new forms of creativity and imagination. Mostly that means culinary concoctions that shouldn’t exist but do.
First, foremost, and most unfathomable: the “Elvis” — a bacon peanut-butter banana burger.
It sounds heinous, but wasn’t all that bad when you realize bananas and Jif Creamy peanut butter aren’t exactly sharp-flavored foodstuffs. They made the sandwich richer and creamier, for what that’s worth. If you remember that banana is a tropical fruit, pretend that the salt on the burger is like sea salt, and imagine that the bacon is reminiscent of a roast pig at a luau, then you could tell people it’s a Hawaiian Paradise Burger. Rationalizing the peanut butter might be trickier.
Our itinerary for Day Three continued from the Red Rocks Amphitheatre to nearby Dinosaur Ridge, less than a mile down the road as the crow flies. We’ve seen dinosaur fossils before at the Children’s Museum in Indianapolis, as well as the Natural History Museums in Manhattan, Chicago, and Washington, DC. Truth be known, simple fossil exhibits aren’t as exotic to me now as they were in my youth. The displays at Dinosaur Ridge offer a different take on the subject — their fossils and samples are outdoors and still embedded in solid rock, exposed ever so slightly for visitors to see them in their natural habitat instead of being reassembled on a dais or sealed inside a glass cabinet.
When I first learned of the Dinosaur Ridge premise, I imagined entire walls filled with a panoply of complete, recognizable skeletons. That’s not quite the reality. The entrance and welcome center set the stage just like any standard museum, with the prerequisite dinosaur statues and shelves of dinosaur toys. For an added flourish, off to one side is a stegosaurus pride parade.
The natural exhibits comprise the wall along a curvy, uphill mile of Alameda Parkway heading west from the visitor center. No cars are allowed up the ridge except the official Dinosaur Ridge shuttles. The shuttle ride is free, as is their tour guide who elaborates on any points of interest and keeps you focused on the marvels you’d hoped to witness. If you’d prefer to chart your own destiny, pedestrians and bicyclists are permitted to traverse the ridge as they see fit. Our family policy is we prefer to set our own pace and avoid trapping ourselves in other tourists’ schedules or paces. In some situations this can be advantageous if you know what you’re doing and have all the same exhibit access that the tour groups do.
In this situation, it meant a stubborn one-mile walk uphill, which mostly looked like this. Open highway plains to the left of us, rough terrain to the right.
Every several hundred feet, we’d arrive at something of note. This collection of preserved footprints wins Best of Show, Dinosaur Ridge Exhibit category.
If your child thinks ancient plants are as cool as dinosaurs, this selection of imprints may make an interesting poster.
Most of the long walk was decorated with naught save rocks, stones, pebbles, boulders, and suffering grass. In a few spots, helpful signs invited more specific attention to traces that are scientifically noteworthy, easily overlooked, and nearly invisible to the untrained eye.
Closer inspection could reveal greater detail, or stump the more impatient onlookers.
Thinking about chiseling your own souvenirs out of the walls? Think again! Guests are strongly encouraged to tattletale on other guests. Big Paleontology is Watching You. Amateur geology is ungood. We have always been at war with Eastdakota.
If you survive your one-mile uphill calisthenics, congratulations! Your reward is a breathtaking sight of other Rocky Mountains in your area. If you’re a seasoned hiker (which describes none of us), this was a cakewalk. If you’re my wife and you’re still acclimatizing to the thinner air at this elevation, a nearby bench offers a broad landscape view and a moment to reflect on your husband’s boneheaded decision to skip the shuttle.
The return trip downhill was thankfully easier and faster. The rematerializing storm clouds that dogged our heels certainly encouraged a brisker pace and inspired us to catch our second wind. By the time we reconvened at the car, the threat of downpour subsided and it was still only 11:30 a.m. MDT. Our long day in the Rockies was far from over. As you can imagine, walking requirements were negotiated down to a bare minimum at subsequent stops.
To be continued!
[Link enclosed here to handy checklist for previous and future chapters, and for our complete road trip history to date. Thanks for reading!]
My wife and I have just a few days left until we take off for tiny, action-packed Rosemont, IL, for Wizard World Chicago 2012. Even though this will be our fourth WWC, we’re still preparing and weighing our options. I, for one, have my comics want-lists to update and mull over. Do I really feel like rooting through countless musty longboxes for single issues I’ve been missing since childhood? Do I really think this will be the year I find Steelgrip Starkey and the All-Purpose Power Tool #5 and achieve closure with Alan Weiss’ underrated working-man sci-fi miniseries at last? Or should I aim instead for the bargain boxes stuffed with $5 trade paperbacks, 90% of which are Marvel Ultimate comics?
Then there’s the matter of autograph pricing (is Scott Bakula’s autograph really worth three Amber Bensons?), autograph materials to bring along for the actors (which season of Buffy or TV’s Angel was really Juliet Landau’s best?) as well as for the comics creators (must dig out Hourman #1…or was there a more apropos issue?), and the little things such as emergency snacks and note-taking supplies. Lots to do, lots to put off till the last minute because that’s when I do all my best thinking, unless you count everything I’ll forget because of the time pressure.
In spite of the scene near the end where two of our cast members turned into heartless teenage monsters, I heartily welcomed the arrival of Casey J. Adler as Carl Cramer, the young dynamo introduced in tonight’s new episode of Bunheads. With a song in his heart and a dream of his hundredth viewing of That’s Entertainment! lifting his spirits, the new lead in the dance school’s Rogers/Astaire tribute sought to leap, waltz, and charm his way into Boo’s good graces when cast as her leading man. With his predecessor out of the picture (special guest Kent Boyd from So You Think You Can Dance, a.k.a. SYTYCD, which I think is pronounced “sit-icked”) and Sasha sidelined due to forbidden suntanning, can this odd couple share a dance number without driving each other crazy?
This struggle was, for me, the most interesting part of tonight’s episode, “Blank Up, It’s Time”. (Despite Michelle’s consternation, the title of the play-within-an-episode makes sense to me. Every morning for me, “wake” is a four-letter word.) Carl and Boo were only one of three new couples featured. First, Fannie introduced us to her heretofore unknown troubadour amour Michael (character actor Richard Gant, whom you probably saw in this one thing, and you’re absolutely sure of it, but for the life of you, you can’t remember it, can you?). Later in the episode, while attending an amateurish performance of Blank Up, It’s Time with Fannie, Michelle makes a new friend in the play’s director, Conor (Chris Eigeman, best known to me as Malcolm’s obnoxious teacher on Malcolm in the Middle). I’m generally not interested when shows delve into sex lives, but the rapid-fire chemistry between Michelle and Conor was fun to behold, especially as they’re comparing notes on how badly his play is going (Conor surveying the unresponsive audience: “I count eight asleep, three dead”).
Random thoughts from tonight:
* When noting in old film dialogue that, “It’s funnier when it’s faster,” Ginny discovers the secret that has driven the careers of Amy Sherman-Palladino and Aaron Sorkin.
* I spent the second half of the episode fairly irked. Michelle’s haranguing of the buffalo-legged lady struck a little too close to home for me, someone who’s self-conscious about how much space he takes up in auditorium seating. Granted, the lady’s stubbornness was the more annoying obstacle, but most of the snark was at the expense of her weight, not her obstinacy. If that wasn’t enough lowbrow mockery, then came the short jokes about poor, effervescent Carl. I appreciated Fannie’s sobering moment with not-small-boned Boo when she subtly hints that sometimes it’s to our benefit when people overlook those of unusual size (a fitting callback to Boo’s own hard-won acceptance into ballet school). I less appreciated her summation of Carl: “What he lacks in everything, he makes up in enthusiasm.” Then again, that’s only slightly less backhanded than most of her quote-unquote “compliments”.
* Favorite scene: Fannie’s tantrum over the Arroyo Grande beach party’s decision to forgo ballet in favor of cheerleaders this year. (Maybe in their world, yodeling and plate-spinning are sports, Fannie! Not nice to judge.)
* It was hard to be shocked at Sasha’s continuing downward spiral into “DEFCON Swan”. After the forbidden suntan, then her dramatic act of wanton, reckless rebellion…was to try out for the cheerleader squad? For a brief moment the ending felt straight out of Bizarro World. If Carl sticks around for future seasons, expect his disenchantment with his parents’ marital issues to lead him into a street gang whose members are all on the chess team.
* I do not want to see Michelle’s one commercial gig. Please do not show us Michelle’s one commercial gig. I will die of male horror if I have to watch Michelle’s one commercial gig.
* I bet Conor would’ve made a fantastic murder victim on Law & Order: Parental Neglect. Dick Wolf’s people clearly just didn’t get him.
Regardless of all of the above, tonight’s real star was — that name again — Carl Cramer, the long-lost son of Mad Men‘s Michael Ginsberg. Once more with feeling, here was my second favorite scene (posted officially by ABC Family, so no pesky C-&-D order to disrupt transmission this time), in which Carl’s stalker-ish tendencies show just a little before he reins them in and ends on a note of gentlemanly class…and then undermines it all with a coda threatening to do impressions. Maybe should’ve stopped one sentence sooner, Carl.
(If you’re dying to see Kent Boyd’s musical number, that’s online, too. I don’t watch reality shows, but he does seem talented.)
When we arose on Day Three, the sky remained cloudy and scary throughout the morning. As we headed west from our Aurora hotel through Denver, eventually we were privileged to cast our eyes at long last on the grandeur of the Rocky Mountains. Even with overcast weather, we were still in awe. Please enjoy the first of several clickable photos, uploaded in higher resolution than previous entries for extra mountainous goodness:
In spite of the scene near the end where two of our cast members turned into heartless teenage monsters, I heartily welcomed the arrival of Casey J. Adler as Carl Cramer, the young dynamo introduced in tonight’s new episode of Bunheads. With a song in his heart and a dream of his hundredth viewing of That’s Entertainment! lifting his spirits, the new lead in the dance school’s Rogers/Astaire tribute sought to leap, waltz, and charm his way into Boo’s good graces when cast as her leading man. With his predecessor out of the picture (special guest Kent Boyd from So You Think You Can Dance, a.k.a. SYTYCD, which I think is pronounced “sit-icked”) and Sasha sidelined due to forbidden suntanning, can this odd couple share a dance number without driving each other crazy?
