Now that there's been a second anime convention in Nashville, the city best known for Roy Acuff and the Grand Ole Opry, there's no such thing as an unlikely place for a convention - except maybe at the the bottom of a coal mine or the top of a mountain. After all, Nashville has more than the Ryman Auditorium nowadays; they have NFL and NHL teams, so why not an anime convention?

What is unusual is to hold a convention at a time of war. That never happened when these events were in their infancy, because the first conventions took place a few months after the end of the Gulf War. So conventions take place under a thin veneer of fear, heightened from the warnings of a chance for more terrorist attacks.

Middle Tennessee faced a special challenge. The first convention was held in 1999, but the 2000 event was called off a couple of weeks before it was scheduled to be held. So the organizers had to drum up interest in their convention without the year-to-year momentum that is so valuable. And they also had the potential of competition from the following week's Sugoicon, a few hours away by highway.

But one of the convention volunteers pointed out another event that seemed unlikely to draw the same crowd as an anime convention, but apparently did; a hacker's convention in Nashville. We were told that some hackers are anime fans, and some of them slipped away from the hacker conference to shop at the Middle Tennessee dealers' room.

And there also was a Bob Dylan concert in Nashville on the Middle Tennessee weekend, although Dylan may be too old school for anime fans.

It looked as if around 400 people were on hand for the two days that the author was able to attend Middle Tennessee. It felt like a cross between a convention and a weekend anime club meeting - but that's not bad, since there were no long elevator waits and no long lines for anything.

It might say something that there were several volunteers from the ranks of Anime Weekend Atlanta volunteers who helped Middle Tennessee. It's also interesting to note that the only convention flyer spotted by this author at the hotel was for the second Yaoi-Con, scheduled for half a continent away in California.

There was another distinction for the Nashville event. It's not unusual for a convention to have several English-language voice actors as guests of honor, but Middle Tennessee may have been the first event where all of the guests were actors. Tiffany Grant and Kira Solar had been seen earlier in the year, but Bill Timoney, Debi Derryberry, Sonny Strait and Jackson Hamlett were making their first appearances of the year. 

Strait, one of the Dragon Ball actors, appeared during a hot streak for the show, which in October was challenging SpongeBob SquarePants for the highest Nielsen Media Research rating among animated cartoons on cable TV. Dragon Ball was regularly appearing in the cable top 15, and the 6 p.m. episodes were the highest rated Monday-through-Friday shows on cable.

Just as the author has seen at other conventions, fans formed a long line to get autographs and pictures of the actors. And Debi Derryberry spent the weekend promoting her appearance in the Jimmy Neutron film and her country themed Honey Pig album.

A couple of years ago, the author wrote in the notes for another convention that the U.S. economy was being driven by Pokemon, pro wrestling and NASCAR racing, and that the rise in anime's popularity could be good for business. Now, with rumblings of a recession from the dot-com collapse and fears of terrorism, there could be some fresh truth to that assumption.

A few days before the Nashville convention, Bandai, the big Japanese toy company, announced that their profit was going to be higher than they expected, and said the reason was because of brisk sales of Digimon and Gundam toys in the U.S. and Europe. By comparison, Mazda Motor Corp said they were planning to run their factories only four days a week because of slower product demand in the U.S.

On the other hand, even Dragon Ball may be dwarfed by Harry Potter and Star Wars. On the week before the Nashville event, there was plenty of buzz about the Potter movie that was two weeks away, and plans to show the Star Wars ep. 2 trailer before the Monsters Inc. film had fans planning to go to the film just for the trailer.

But anime fans have their own loves. One of the most fascinating places at the convention was a contact lens display - the lenses that are fashion statements, with their bright colors and animalistic irises. Quite a few fans took the time to try out a couple of lenses and find what they would look like with red and blue eyes, or with cat irises.