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Ohayocon Author's Notes 2005 Once there was an off-season in the anime convention schedule. Now, with around 70 events expected in 2005, this site had barely four weeks between the old year's last convention and the start of the new year's celebrations. The 2005 Ohayocon weekend was a relentlessly busy experience for the author of this web site - but it was the kind of work that leaves you satisfied, though drained, and waiting for the next convention. From the Friday morning moment when the author dragged too much equipment through the entrance of the Columbus Convention Center, to the Sunday afternoon time when only a handful of fans were left in the artists' alley,  it was a weekend of nonstop work. The author bought a couple of artists' alley tables, one for the equipment and sample pictures another to make space for picture posing.  Even before the new light stands were set up each day, there was a constant flow of fans looking at pictures or buying prints. The response was so strong that there was little time to relax all weekend, but that was a great situation. For those who stopped at the table when the author was missing: he sneaked away for a promised Friday afternoon panel on the online fan world, and for the Conte Brothers concert and costume contest on Saturday. And there were a couple of token breaks to run for pasta salad and turkey sandwiches in the hotel next door: forgive the author for eating and trying to conduct business at the same time. This writer lost a couple of hours of sleep time on Friday night for another good reason, the wedding of Bob Baranek and T.J. The convention fans' grapevine let the author know the event was going to be after midnight Friday, which created an unexpected rush; strike the artists' alley portable photo setup, rush it back to the room at the Red Roof Inn across the street, then dash back to the Hyatt hotel for the wedding. It was more than worth the effort and the lost sleep to witness the ceremony, held in front of a small group of longtime fans and people from the industry (including one couple who had a more conventional wedding less than a year earlier). It was unusual to have a marriage in a party setting with purple lights on the walls and balloons on the floor. This writer remembers the Robert and Emily DeJesus wedding performed at Anime Central a few years earlier. The overimaginative author, knowing that Baranek is a successful cosplayer, wonders what it would have been like to hold the ceremony at halftime of the Ohayocon costume contest, with all of the cosplayers carrying swords to make a ceremonial arch, military style, for the wedded couple to pass through...no, it would never work. The fifth Ohayocon marked the first time the Ohio convention had been held in the same place for two years in a row. After two years in a southern suburb of Cleveland and two years in the state capitol of Columbus, Ohayocon seems to have found a permanent home in the convention center on the north end of downtown. In 2004, the convention's largest events were in an upper-level ballroom and the dealers' room was in a street-level area. In 2005, the dealers' room moved to that larger ballroom and the artists' alley was liberated to the lobby outside the ballroom. This site had its photo area in that artists' alley. We showed up with a reworked lighting setup that worked great but was nearly too large to haul around. The extra space, along with Ohayocon's attendance and revenue growth, have made big-time concerts possible since the move to the convention center. Blood, the Osaka visual kei band, starred in 2004. In 2005, it was the turn for Steve Conte, known by anime fans for his collaborations with Yoko Kanno. Conte hadn't performed in Columbus since a show at the Newport Music Hall, and he had rarely given a show aimed at anime fans with anime theme songs. Thanks to the band and Ohayocon organizers for letting the author take pictures from any angle he wanted, including backstage. That convention center has 1.7 million square feet of space, and Ohayocon wasn't big enough in 2005 to fill  it all. So the anime convention shared the center with a wedding dress and tuxedo sale, a real estate show and the "Blaze: Ignite Your Passion for God" tour of Dare 2 Share Ministries, an Arvada, Colorado-based church group that tries to reach teenagers and youth. Dare 2 Share, which has been around since 1991, roughly the same time that anime conventions started, has links to Promise Keepers and Focus on the Family. The audiences of the church meeting and the anime convention were almost the same age. Ohayocon's web site gave no hint of the other two groups (you had to check the online convention center schedule to learn about the other bookings), so the presence of the church group came as a surprise to anime fans. Both groups rubbed shoulders in the convention center and the adjacent food court on Friday evening and Saturday. The church group had their meetings in a convention hall that was right next to the ballroom that was used as the anime convention's dealers' room. That religious convention produced one of the most remarkable stories ever, passed along to this writer by Ohayocon chairman Adam Beaton. It involves actor and musician Vic Mignogna, who has mentioned that he had attended similar church functions in his younger years. On the anime convention's Saturday, we noted Mignogna talking to people at the Dare 2 Share registration desk, and Beaton said the actor was trying to intercede on behalf of a scruffy guy seen in the convention center, carrying a cross and a "Repent" sign with a quotation from the gospel of Mark. Talk that that the scruffy guy was getting a hard time from the kids at the religious gathering but was having no trouble with the anime convention fans. When Vic went to check on that situation, he was told that the scruffy guy actually was one of the Dare 2 Share organizers in disguise, dressing down and acting unusual to test his attendees and see how they would react.  (That explained a snippet of overheard hallway conversation from a Dare 2 Share representative who said something that sounded like "Our people have to be less judgmental.") During his conversation with the church group, Mignogna agreed to speak to the Dare 2 Share group as a representative of Ohayocon and even offered to show them an episode of Fullmetal Alchemist. That bit of reverse conversion - taking anime to young people at a church convention - might seem unusual, but the premise of Fullmetal Alchemist is one that teens can understand. Mignogna has spoken poignantly about how Edward Elric, his role in the series, is a teenager forced to grow up early, who has lost his father and mother and paid a horrible price for a failed attempt to revive his mother. Edward talks tough but still is a vulnerable child inside, Mignogna has said, and that's a situation that too many teens face, no matter how long they've been "churched." If there ever was a situation where the Christian world could learn from the anime world, it was that Ohayocon situation - and Mignogna was the right person for the task. Ohayocon came within 48 hours of having a perfect weather weekend - at least by the standards of the volatile Midwest. On Wednesday and Thursday of the convention week, Columbus had 64-degree high temperatures. Then a cold front blasted into town, driving away the false notions of spring and reminding anime fans that winter in Ohio is still something to be taken seriously. Friday, the warmest day of the convention weekend, saw a 32-degree temperature drop from Thursday. By the time convention fans headed for home on Sunday night, low temperatures were in the single digits, as cold as this writer can remember for any convention. And the extreme cold couldn't even stop the snow on Saturday and Sunday, although there was no repeat of 2004's heavy snow. The convention center area was spared the high water and flooding problems that drenched some places near the Scioto and Olentangy Rivers (which meet about a mile west of the convention center). And the cold eliminated the fog that had led to the astonishing 200-vehicle crash on I-96 between Lansing and Detroit on Wednesday of the convention weekend. Ohayocon Main Page