This was an enjoyable, busy event. Usually there are quiet spots in the middle of the day where the author has a chance to retreat to his room and assemble parts of the page. That didn't happen this time, with interesting events on every hour of every day. So there were a lot of panels uncovered and costumers not photographed in the rush to get as much as possible on the page. Some people say the author can be in two places at the same time: that would have come in handy this time.

After a late start to the opening ceremonies, the event ran smoothly. If you want to get an idea of how many people showed up, consider this: the hotel is roughly one block long. On Saturday night, the audience line for the cosplay stretched that entire block, from the ballroom entrance to the hotel lobby, twisting and turning down several halls. The guests of honor enjoyed that kind of devotion from the fans (even the one case where we heard that a fan beat one guest in a video game, and got a rare sketch as a reward).

For the second year in a row, the weather got in the way of the convention, even though the storms were on the day before the event. The bad weather hit Chicagoland on Thursday, and those who tried to get to the convention one day early had to wait several hours until the weather cleared at O'Hare Airport.

The weather and equipment trouble made for a miserable Friday afternoon. We were told that most of the Sheraton Arlington Park's air conditioning units failed, and the remaining unit didn't have the capacity to cool the building. It was uncomfortably warm on Friday, but a cold front blew through on Friday night and kept the rest of the weekend comfortable.

The Sheraton (a Hilton that was reflagged a few months earlier) had an odd layout. The rooms were in a curved tower that looked, from the inside, a little like the old Star Trek hallway sets from 1967. There were two lower-level areas of meeting rooms, but they weren't connected. Even odder: there were two dealers' rooms, one on the main level and another in a downstairs room below the main events hall. You had to know exactly where you were going in the maze like building.

Anime Central drew a big crowd of people from the Midwest. There was a large delegation of fans from Michigan, and people from Iowa. One person came all the way from Seattle (near the home of Sakura Con from the previous month) and two traveled from Toronto.

The worn-out author was just able to bang out the final few words of this report before hunting for a phone jack and a soft spot to lay down (there was a bed in the hotel lobby, of all things). It was a fun experience, a reunion for some and a new adventure for others.

On Friday, after a busy first day of Anime Central (so busy that the author was very late posting pictures and stories), the author made an Internet connection to find what he had missed since 3 a.m.

First came the E-mail message that brought the news that Roger O'Conner, the guiding voice behind the Anime Radio online show, had been killed in a car crash. Anime Radio was not a conventional show, but it always was lively and managed to mix information with its humor. As if the news of O'Conner's death wasn't sad enough. there was the cruel irony that he was killed on the way to tape an Anime Radio show.

Then a check of the Speedvision web site showed the simple, stunning phrase: "Adam Petty, 1980-2000." The youngest member of the famed four-generation stock car racing family had been killed Friday in a practice crash at the New Hampshire International Speedway. In previous years, the author had met Petty's father Kyle and grandfather Richard. Sadder still was that Lee Petty, Adam's great-grandfather, had died five weeks earlier.

Those deaths brought more into focus the previous week's trial in Houston of the man accused of several deaths from Texas to Illinois. One of the victims of the man who had been called the "railroad drifter" was a school teacher, murdered on the day before Project: A-Kon in 1999. The teacher was an anime fan and amateur artist who loved the convention and had planned for months to attend the event.

Look at these stories and you can't overemphasize the point that anime conventions are a welcome and wonderful escape from the pain of the real world. 

(The point was made even more clear five months after Anime Central when Michael Alben, the voice acting director who made his first anime convention appearance at the Chicagoland event, died while on his way to work in New York. Alben had been set to direct the His and Hers Circumstances dub for The Right Stuf).