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May 2006 - Author's Notes - 2006 Every year since 2001, this site has traveled to two conventions on the same weekend - once on the same day. On the Memorial Day weekend, with four conventions in North America, it was time to return to that pattern. The plan wasn't as ambitious as in previous years, but it worked. It took three consecutive days of rising at 2:30 a.m. to get to airports at 4:30 a.m. for 6 a.m. flights, but it worked. This writer had missed the Indianapolis 500 for a couple of years while traveling to conventions, and we wanted to get back to the race. That determined our travel plans, ruling out trips to Fanime Con and Anime North because of the extra distance. So we booked a trip to Anime Boston on Friday, Animazement on Saturday and a return to Indianapolis for the 500-mile race on Sunday. The enthusiasm was the same at Anime Boston and Animazement, but the surroundings were different. The Hynes convention center is in the middle of busy Boston, built on a bridge that spans the Massachusetts Turnpike. Hynes is Boston's older and smaller convention center, but it had plenty of space for the convention; Anime Boston's dealers' room was four or five times larger than the same room at Animazement. The North Carolina convention has spent several years at the same Sheraton hotel west of the airport, fitting comfortably into those surroundings. Boston is the larger city and market and had the larger convention, but both events had a similar turnout of Japanese guests of honor. Rica Masumoto was a major catch for the North Carolina event, since the Pokemon voice had to spend a minimum amount of time away from work on that series' latest summer movie. One of the pleasant events of the weekend was Matsumoto's all-too-brief concert before the Saturday night costume contest. One surprise came in Boston, where after the last interview session of the day, we met up with Claude Pelletier and Miyako Matsuda from Protoculture Addicts magazine. We assumed that these Montreal-based writers would have traveled to Anime North in Toronto to see guests of honor such as Senno Knife and Go Nagai, but they crossed the border for the Boston show instead. Pelletier said the Boston convention would be more fun, and it turned out that Boston is closer to Montreal than Toronto, but we were still surprised. Traveling between the conventions meant we got to hear one event's guests talk about the guests at the other convention. At Animazement on Saturday, actor Kyle Hebert played up the accomplishments of actor and director Mary Elizabeth McGlynn, whom we had heard at Anime Boston on Friday. Our health problems are pretty much gone - we wouldn't have been able to make a two-convention, five-airport, three-day trip if we still had problems - but we were still humbled by the number of people who were concerned for our condition. One of those people was Yasuo Yamaguchi, the Japanese anime producer and director who wanted to see us and make sure we were ambulatory and in one piece. This site has attended each Animazement since the event began in March of 1998, and we're left with the impression that there's been a complete turnover in the fan base since the convention started. We saw few people whom we remembered from the start of the convention, but some of them were in the Lindze-and-Jenny costume group from Darkstalkers who got the best in show award at the Saturday night costume contest. On the other hand, a couple of people who had gone to Anime Boston in previous years went to Animazement instead. Our approach to these conventions went back to the site's original concept of mixing stories on guests and artists with pictures of costumers. We had the option of setting up photo sales booths at the events and brought some of that equipment with us, but it was more relevant this time to go back to writing stories. The only frustration was that we weren't able to document the comments of all of the convention's major guests because of our split weekend strategy. Sports ironies of the weekend: we were tempted to sneak away to the Red Sox home game on the convention's Friday night, but driving rain during the afternoon and early evening changed our mind. Of course, the game was eventually played in spite of the rain. The NHL Bruins used to spend May in the Stanley Cup playoffs, but they had a bad year. Instead, hockey-loving North Carolina had the Hurricanes, the transplanted New England Whalers, in the cup's conference finals - better than the teams from the other weekend convention sites, the San Jose Sharks and the Toronto Maple Leafs, who were spending the spring on the sidelines. For reasons we can't figure out, the Memorial Day weekend has been a bad luck weekend for equipment. This was the third year in a row that we had camera trouble on the weekend; this time, the mirror on our recently-repaired Canon Digital Rebel malfunctioned in the middle of Animazement's costume contest, stopping the autofocus and making us use manual focus for the rest of the weekend. May 2006 Main Page