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Anime USA Author's Notes 2004 Notes written back home in a diner where the employees were wearing Halloween costumes: The previous time the author of this site spent time at Anime USA, in 2002, might have been the worst place and time ever for a convention. there was nothing wrong with the hotel, but the convention was held around the time of the sniper shootings in Virginia. One of the shootings happened on the morning of the convention's opening day, and another shooting happened shortly after the convention and a few miles down the road. By comparison, the biggest obstacle Anime USA faced in 2004 was slow traffic around the elevators, something this writer avoided through selfish good fortune. When the author got to the Sheraton on the convention's Friday morning, he was fortunate enough to get a room right away - and the room was on the hotel's main floor. Rather than wait for an elevator, the author needed only to leave his room and walk down a hall, and he was in the middle of the show. The people who were in the upstairs luxury rooms were the ones with the long waits. A week earlier, the J-rock band Camino had been part of the show at the inaugural Oni-Con convention near Houston, Texas. The band traveled northeast for Anime USA, equipment in tow, and put on another ground-pounding performance at the Virginia convention. Camino puts on a great show, and you can tell it from the squeals from the delighted audience. This writer still finds it interesting that the Camino audience seemed to be more or less equally male and female, yet the females seemed to cheer louder for Camino than the males. The rock show presented the Anime USA staff with a big setup challenge. The concert was Saturday's first event in the half of the hotel's main ballroom that was not taken up by the dealers' room. When Camino was finished, the crew had to break down the concert gear, reset the lights and sound system, and set up hundreds of chairs for the costume contest that was scheduled for the same room. It didn't get done as quickly as possible, but it did get done. This author was fast enough to get Caminoconcert pictures online before the concert was finished, aided by a halfway decent Wi-Fi signal in the hotel lobby.  Of course, the author made up for that accomplishment by neglecting to get 40 pictures from the costume contest online until the morning after the event, discovering his error just before he jumped in a cab for the ride to Dulles airport andthe trip home. Fans who look at those contest pictures and the list of contest winners are going to wonder how a quartet of elementary school kids got the best in show award. Simple: they deserved it, and overcame two two biggest disadvantages of costume contests, being young and being one of the first acts on stage. The kids, with a poise beyond their years, sang a "convention blues" song that they made up, the lyrics to which had the judges howling with delight. This writer took his contest pictures from a well of sorts between the judges' table and the stage, and we can testify that this group fo judges, especially actor Greg Ayres and Danny T, enjoyed the contest more than most of the audience. (Unfortunately, we missed Ayres' debut in sumo suit wrestling.) Those victorious cosplay kids certainly handled themselves better than the teenager who we spotted just as the convention staff was ordering him out of the event. Combine the two incidents and you reach the conclusions that anime conventions are safe for children, and that even if parents aren't on hand, some one will be watching the kids asclosely as the parents willwatch them. That should be a good message for people such as the one who wrote this site, asking if their middle school child would be safe at Nekocon, the Virginia convention scheduled on the weekend following Anime USA. Anime USA Main Page