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Anime Central - Author's Notes - 2005 All of this was written after heading home on Sunday morning to rejoin the world of work: Amazing what you can see at an anime convention if you happen to be in the right place at the right time. On Saturday afternoon of the Anime Central weekend, this writer was wandering through the Hyatt hotel during a break between interview sessions. Next to a tall abstract statue that serves as a lobby meeting place, a tall young man in a One Piece costume pulled a small white box from his pocket, his hands trembling as he opened the package to reveal a ring. Dropping to his knees in front of a young costumed woman, he asked the woman to marry him. The woman paused for a moment, clearly caught by surprise, before she accepted the proposal. The couple embraced and kissed as the lobby crowd cheered them. Now, this wasn't a Miroku "will you bear my child" joke from InuYasha (although a Miroku costumer got a costume contest award for using that line). This was the real thing, a proposal that came out of the blue, with no warning and out in the open, in one of the convention's busiest locations. If you'd been 20 feet in the wrong direction, you would have missed the moment. Long-time convention fans and visitors to this site will remember that marriage proposals are nothing new to these events (one Otakon costume contest had two of them). But it say a lot about the appeal of conventions that someone would use one of these events to ask someone to marry him. There were a lot of someones at Anime Central in 2005. We were told by a convention official that the event welcomed its 9,000th fan on Saturday afternoon. We'll guess that there were as many people in costume at the 2005 convention as showed up for a single day of the inaugural Anime Central in 1998 (which drew around 1,200 fans). That estimate might sound ridiculous, but you had to be there. At one point on Saturday afternoon, actors Caitlin Glass and Vic Mignogna gathered with dozens of costumed Fullmetal Alchemist fans (Mignogna personally escorted an Alphonse Elric suit of armor across a street) while dozens more held their own Naruto celebration a few yards away. The number of fans on hand led to some long registration lines in the convention center across the street from the hotel. On Saturday night after the costume contest, the hotel lobby crowd nearly immovable at one point. We heard that a fire marshal who was keeping track of the crowd suggested that Anime Central might want to change things next year, but the convention organizers already were ahead of him. The attendance growth has led to convention events gradually being moved to the Stephens convention center across the street from the Hyatt; the artists' alley joined the dealers room in the convention center in 2005. It's safe to guess that more Anime Central events will be placed in that center in 2006, where there's plenty of room. The Wizard World convention, which is larger than the anime convention, already uses the convention center. For those who remember the old joke about the women who show up at a formal ball in the same style of gown: two of the most elaborate anime character dresses are of Empress Sofia from Last Exile and Hinoto from X. There were two of each costume on Saturday, which is like going to a shopping mall and finding two Ferrari 250 GT's and two Duesenberg SJ's next to each other in the parking lot. Or like going to a convention and finding Spike Spiegel and Jet Black in the same place, which really did happen for dub fans. Steve "Spike" Blum and Beau "Jet" Billingslea seemed to have a great time at Anime Central, which as far as we know was only the second time they've been at the same anime convention. There were a couple of  "things that look bad turn out good" stories from the weekend. Very early Friday morning, the driver got into the construction zone on the Tri-State Tollway and managed to get through the narrow express lane in one piece, despite the impatient driver who insisted on making a 70-mph pass in a 12-foot lane surrounded by Jersey barriers. Later, this writer had just gotten the word that people with press passes would be allowed to take pictures of The Pillows' Saturday concert, and had wandered back to the sound board to get images when a man tapped him on the shoulder and said "No pictures." When we explained the situation and displayed our credential, the man said "Oh. Do you want to go backstage?" We had not planned to get close to the stage because of the hundreds of fans already there, but we were quickly ushered behind the curtain and allowed to take pictures from downstage right. Guess we looked as if we could be taken seriously, maybe because we were juggling two cameras and three lenses. Up close, you could see how hard The Pillows work at their music, taking breaks only for the lead vocalist to carefully retune his guitar (with "I Think I Can" painted on the body) between songs. That hard-driving stage act was a big contrast to the quiet demeanor the band (which is older than you might think) showed off stage. The Japanese guest who turned out to be lively, talkative and eloquent about her drawing was You Higuri, who finally got to a U.S. convention after missing Ushicon in February. It was interesting to learn her observation about the drama of storytelling and the effort of researching those stories, and fun to learn that she may be a cosplayer at heart (she took advantage of the Takarazuka theater troupe's photo costume sessions). After running a picture and book booth at Anime Central in 2004, we decided to wander the convention in 2005. Plenty of people - including the convention staff - expected us to request another booth location, but we decided to stay mobile this time. With a single-person operation, running the photo operation means missing some of the show, and we wanted to get back to attending interview sessions and putting the stories on this site. We'll have other photo operations this year at conventions, and may repeat that setup at Anime Central next year. If you were looking for pictures of the ever-popular Sailor Bubba and found none, we never got any. The only time we saw Bubba (who is one of the hardest-working convention volunteers) was when he was escorting a young man who had had too much of something or other to a convention office. Anime Central Main Page