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November Convention Weekend - Author's Notes This was the kind of weekend that makes you feel spoiled and keeps you going to conventions. From a busy two days spent at a photo sales booth in Kentucky, and from discovering a low air fare that let us get to Virginia, it was a good weekend for this writer. We're a little crazy about early setups when we run the photo sales, but we had to wait for the SugoiCon artists' alley room to be opened. That was the weekend's first blessing in disguise, since it gave us the time for breakfast at the Chaucer's restaurant at the Drawbridge Inn, which had the best pancakes with strawberries and whipped cream we've had since our racing trips to the Central Motel at Inverness, Florida. Another blessing in disguise: after we got things set up in the artists' alley room we were asked to move. That got us in a better location in the "noise room," a place that SugoiCon used to overcome one of the new location's drawbacks. The Drawbridge had narrow corridors and no lobby to provide the hangout space that fans expect, so the convention used a large hall with a stage as the hangout space to take some of the traffic out of the corridors. So we had two pleasantly busy days at the booth, with a steady stream of visitors and customers. We briefly broke away for the Steve Conte and "Voices for" concerts, along with a couple other events. At the "Voices for" event, we got called out from the stage just for showing up. Actor Greg Ayres, in his leopard-spotted hair adorned by Emily DeJesus, was the culprit. We missed SugoiCon's first-ever skit contest because of a an unexpected - and very attractive - wave of two groups of young women in gowns who wanted their pictures taken at the same time as the concert. No way we were going to turn that down. The feeling of being spoiled continued when we found a low online airfare from the Cincinnati-Northern Kentucky airport to Reagan National Airport for Sunday, and kept going when we discovered that shuttle buses at the Kentucky airport follow you to your parking space. That feeling rolled forward when we got through the security check in short order, and the optimism grew when a strong tailwind got us to Reagan National ten minutes early. But we really got spoiled at Anime USA. By chance, we found the one person at the convention who ushered us to the photo session with J-rockers Back-On. Later we bumped into singer Kristine Sa, (who is a big Conte fan) who we hadn't seen in a while, and that chance encounter led to a trip to a convention after party attended by Back-On.  We heard that the band had a young female crowd squealing in delight at their convention concert. And the most pleasant surprise of the weekend was checking into out Hyatt Regency Crystal City room and finding the hotel had replaced its tube TV sets with Samsung large-screen LCD receivers. No HD service yet in those rooms, though - but the Hyatt room was a big step upward from the cheap motel we booked for the SugoiCon stop. You have to wonder about a motel that has pink bedsheets and is down the road from a sign warning that the road floods in heavy rain. We bumped into a couple of long-time costumers and convention attendees who mentioned it was their last anime convention, but we're not following that path. We expect to get to all three days of the upcoming anime festival in New York, want to attend as much of Ohayocon as possible in 2008, and have conventions asking about out availability as far away as 2009. All of this helps explain why we've kept going to conventions now for ten years. We started this site in November of 1997 at Anime Weekend Atlanta, discovered the delights of these events, and have decided over the years that the positive parts are better than the shortcomings. We still wish the events were better organized to the point that events always started on time, for example. But things like having people offer to pack up the photo booth's equipment are a sign of respect that can't be taken for granted. In northern Kentucky on the convention weekend, the flags hung at half-mast. That wasn't for a statesman or politician, but for an old-fashioned good guy. Joe Nuxhall, the Cincinnati Reds announcer who had been a part of the team for six decades, died on Saturday morning. Another old-fashioned good guy also died in the previous week. Steve Pearl, who was among the pioneers of anime conventions and organized anime fandom, passed away from diabetes and complications. He had spent much of the last two years in hospitals and had a leg amputated, and things went downhill for him in the last month. Before many of the youngest generation of anime fans were born, Pearl was a supporter of the genre as a leader of the American Anime Alliance, and was one of the first to bring conventions and the fledgling anime import industry together. Many will mourn Pearl's passing, but too much sadness would be improper. Instead, celebrate Pearl's life and accomplishments, things done not behind a computer keyboard but in the real world. The growing number of anime conventions on the East Coast serves as bright testimony to his efforts and the success of his dreams. November Weekend Main Page