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| Nan
Desu Kan came at the end of summer and featured an indoor version of an outdoor
tradition, construction zones. The Holiday Inn where the convention was held
was being renovated with new drywall and wallpaper, and the management decided
to finish the work on the convention weekend. So, crowds of fans had to squeeze
past platforms and workers who were gluing paper onto walls. One of the
guys was using a propane torch to set the wallpaper as crowds of cosplayers
edged by. Somehow the fans put up with the mess, although this writer
wonders what the hotel owners were thinking about. There was chatter about
"issues" between the convention and the hotel, and talk of moving the show
to downtown Denver in 2004. One place where the convention got lucky was the weather. To the east, Hurricane Isabel hit the mid-Atlantic coast, right in the heart of the East Coast fandom region. Animazement. Anime Mid-Atlantic, Katsucon, Anime USA, Otakon, the Big Apple Anime Fest, AnimeNEXT and Shoujocon all are held in the area where the storm struck. Had any of those conventions been scheduled for the weekend when the storm made landfall, there's a good chance that the events might have been called off. Steve Bennett of IC Entertainment lives in the path of the storm, and he had to call off his trip because flights from Virginia airports were cancelled. It would have been especially bad for Otakon, held in the Inner Harbor of Baltimore. The extra rain and the storm surge flooded the area around the Baltimore Convention Center. The Baltimore Sun's web site offered an astonishing gallery of pictures that documented the high water. A few weeks earlier, many Otakon fans had strolled across Light Street, the boulevard that borders the convention center's eastern edge. Had you tried that on the Isabel weekend, you would have drowned; one of the newspaper's pictures showed that a snowplow had a hard time fording the river that Light Street became after the storm. By contrast, Aurora was mild and dry during the convention weekend. The only moisture came from the automatic lawn sprinklers in the area; they worked so often that one wondered about the stories of a water shortage in the Denver area. Certainly the clear view of the distant mountain range didn't show any snow at the peaks. According to natives, the weather was responsible for the weekend's annoying collection of flies. Apparently there had been a hard freeze in the days before the convention, so the flies went indoors for warmth and stayed there. Actor Scott McNeil was once licked by a Colorado fan, and didn't appear at Nan Desu Kan in 2003. Heartbroken fans who really, really wanted to get McNeil back reacted in the best way the knew: they started a petition. In a back hallway they posted the petition form, and it got plenty of attention. The author saw a fan removing petition forms from the wall and asked if that meant the survey was over. "No, we're putting up more forms," was the answer. "We've already got about 300 signatures." The biggest voice actor reaction seen by this writer was when Tiffany Grant looked up at the end of a panel and saw a tiny, five-year-old, plug-suited Asuka from Evangelion. Grant, who voiced Asuka in the Eva dub, was overwhelmed with the cute sight and immediately rushed to the girl. That Asuka was far from the youngest cosplayer at the convention; two small children, dressed in Salt and Pepper season fairy costumes from Snow Fairy Sugar, won prizes in the Saturday night costume contest. If the pictures from that contest look different, it's because the author was allowed to stay backstage, and got pictures of the contestants before they went onstage. Combined with an Internet access cell phone, that let the author get those pictures online before the contest was over. The author should have checked if the young woman who won first place in 2003 also made the catbus costume in 2002. This was a big Tokyo Mew Mew and Inu-Yasha cosplay year in Colorado. The pink-on-pink Mew Mew outfits were popular, even among cosplayers known for more somber outfits. One hall cosplay highlight was a gathering of Kagomes yelling "Sit!" to a gathering of Inu-Yashas, something that is becoming a small tradition at conventions. The cosplay books? The author sold...one all weekend. That's the author's fault; he spends so little time in one place that it's hard to find him. So, at the next convention, Anime Weekend Atlanta, he'll try staying in one place for most of the event. He'll also start selling pictures to cosplayers again...more to come at the book link on this site. The author's convention weekend ended with the typical Sunday morning departure, which was badly timed for attending the event's last day, but just in time for watching the start of the weekend's NASCAR race on TV. The outbound Frontier Airlines flight had onboard DirecTV, and it left just in time to let the author watch the start of the race. Ryan Newman won the Dover race; he's from South Bend, Ind., which happens to be the place where the author planned to be, two weeks later, for C-Kon. In what was once a quiet, early-autumn part of the convention schedule, there are seven weekends in a row with U.S. events. No surprise that's happening in a year with 50 U.S. conventions. |
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