Meetings with remarkable women

[randy_byers]

It's not actually true that I spent more time at LACon IV hanging out with women than with men, nor is it particularly true that the women I hung out with were more remarkable than the men I hung out with. However, certain women played key roles in my experience of the convention, and I have to choose some angle on the convention to get started. So I'll use the topic of the women of the convention as a filter to narrow the story to a manageable size, but from a different angle than the Worldcon swag post.



Perhaps first amongst equals was gerisullivan, who did at least a couple of things to counteract my mopey tendency to feel insignificant at this massive gathering of the tribes. First thing upon my arrival on Wednesday, she pulled me over to her room at the Marriott to have an editorial consultation on Science-Fiction Five-Yearly 12, which I'm helping her edit. (I finally got to meet Jack Targonsky, too, and enjoyed his wry humor.) I'm getting a strong sense of accomplishment and respect from being asked to help out with SFFY, although of course it also means a lot of work! The other way that Geri made me feel that I was part of the tribe was by contributing the copy of Chunga 12's cover and the picture of me and Ted White (from the Toronto Corflu) to the Great Wall of History -- a massive chronological display of magazine, fanzine, and book covers, photographs of various personnages, and other historical markers and amusing comments, all pasted on whiteboard panels with open spaces that people could sign under the year they first entered fandom. (1979, for me.) The cover & picture were placed under 2006, at the very end of the timeline, so I felt like quite the summation! Geri was working on a contract job (or was it two? or even three?) all weekend, so I only saw her sporadically, but every time there was some bit of news or gossip to pass on. She definitely provided me with a sense of connection, although she wasn't the only one.

Another person I ran into pretty quickly on Wednesday was athenais. For various reasons, I don't communicate with her regularly these days, even via LJ, but in person it was the old fannish story of continuing the conversation from the last con as though it were only yesterday. Lucy was someone I looked up to in something like awe when I was younger, but now she seems like a sister or perhaps a cool cousin who is always a blast to talk to. I ran into her at the art show on Thursday, I think it was, and she led me on a search for the ideal piece of awful fannish art, as she imagined it: a portrait of Captain Kirk with a winged unicorn. I suggested that the winged unicorn needed to have big tits too. The next day (or was it later the same day?) after the "What Makes Good Fanzines" panel, I told mm_fijagh about this whimsical quest, and he immediately suggested that if we really wanted to make Chunga friendlier, we needed to run this image as a cover. Perfect! I also really enjoyed hanging out with Lucy at the TAFF party on Saturday as she got sloshed and somewhat reckless. That party rocked the house, thanks to the efforts of hawkida and her band of handsome fellows. I mean, Elvis was in the house, and he was a damned good bartender. Oh, and Lucy was in the house, oh yes she was, and she appeared to want to be loopy. It's a happy thing to get loopy with your friends at a Worldcon amidst people wearing plastic Viking helmets with blinking horns.

Another pillar of the convention for me was akirlu, who braved the Hugo ceremonies in a splendid and attention-grabbing bright pinkish (but there's gotta be a better word) salwar kameez while I hid out with Marty Cantor trying my damnedest not to care about winning or losing and mostly sort of succeeding. (It didn't help that Richard Lynch stopped on his way to the ceremonies to say he thought we might just win as a West Coast zine at a West Coast convention. But he also commiserated with my nerves and said the main thing was to keep putting out an excellent zine, which I really appreciated.) Ulrika hauled me to the post-Hugos party afterwards -- where I was happily able to congratulate Dave Hartwell on his long-delayed win for Best Editor -- and then had the good sense to find it too schmoozy and to abandon it again with me in tow to return to the splendors of the TAFF party. She had called Andy to give him the news, and he had asked her to take care of me. So we got drunk with Lucy. Or was that just me? No, I remember seeing voidampersand (in sophisticated purple socks), spikeiowa, calimac, Alan Stewart, Julie McGalliard, Paul Charpentier (who said I looked like the kind of guy who would beat him up in high school -- what, like a gay biker?), Hope Leibowitz, and many, many more, many of them nameless to me.

Ulrika looked very cute in her swanky new haircut, and she provided me with another in a convention-long series of mind-expanding moments when mrhedgehog, n6tqs, and I arrived at the Tor party on Friday -- thanks to directions from marykaykare, another spirit guide in the endless labyrinth of the hallways. When we walked up to Ulrika, Lennart immediately started talking to her in Swedish. I knew Ulrika's heritage and that she lived as a little girl in Sweden, but I didn't know she could still speak Swedish. I'd never heard her speak it before, so it was almost surreal to hear her reply in Swedish without even pausing. Then Sunday evening, when we had drunk the fanzine lounge dry, I first talked Ulrika into buying me a drink at the bar and then talked Lennart into buying me and Ulrika a drink at the bar ("talking into" consisting of asking), and on the way to the bar we ran into jamesb, who asked if we needed any booze. Soon we were all on one of the three lanais (don't ask me which one) with the leftover beer and spirits from the TAFF party, and I gossiped with Lennart and with John-Henri Holmberg while Ulrika debriefed a couple members of the concom. Might have been the vodka that made her give me one of the best compliments of the convention when she said I was her favorite editor on the fanzine front. Egoboo, I love you!

And that's just one riff on the vast, complex -- or at least multitudinous -- proceedings. I should make a list of everyone I talked to. Holy moses. As I told Lennart, not as many as at my TAFF Eastercon where it was my duty, but then again there were eight times as many people to talk to, or something like that. West Coast posse, Swedish posse, Australian posse, British posse, Irish posse, Japanese posse, Canadian posse, kid posse, Ctein or Not Ctein, and on and on and on. But I'm gonna stop again now. Thanks to my three muses -- and to everyone else, of course, and your little dogs too.

Comments

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Oh, dear, have I really never previously told you that you're my favorite editor? My bad. I know I've told other people. How did I miss you? Well, so now you know. It wasn't just the vodka talking except insofar as vino contains veritas, and aids truth-telling generally.

That color, btw, is called "fuchsia" -- usually pronounced FEW-shuh, but easier to spell if pronounced FUCKS-ya -- or possibly magenta, depending on whether you're talking girl colors (fashion) or guy colors (web design). In the case of that salwar I would amend with such adjectives as "eye-searing" or "deafening", but by golly it'll get a girl noticed.

Happy to have served, as Muse or otherwise. All my editorial assignments should be so pleasant.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Ah, FEW-shuh. Might have had a mental block against recognizing that one, but duh yeah. Good color for the Hugos too. And earlier in the convention I told John Douglas that he was wearing periwinkle, which he'd never heard of before.

[mrhedgehog.livejournal.com]

Actually, it was Ulrika who started to talk to me in Swedish.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Ah, even that would explain why it seemed so surreal!

[numbat.livejournal.com]

I'd of thought surreal would be Ulrika talking like the Swedish Chef?