When I was a lad I was a little bit shy, something came along and caught my eye. When I heard

ConQuesT 36 pictures from Saturday are online now.

By the way, ConQuesT had 500+ members. Additional note to my previous post: Linda Donahue and Julia Mandala were in dressed in "Daisy Mae"-inspired outfits.

Saturday morning, I went downstairs for a little breakfast. Their breakfast buffet is open until 11:00 am, so that gave me a deadline to be washed, dressed, and downstairs. Because of my Hilton Hhonors status, they gave me breakfast tickets when I checked in, so breakfast was covered. Which meant I could easily leave a $3 tip for my breakfast server. When I got back to the L.A.con IV table, I noticed that Crispin Burnham and David Sooby were setting up a signpost. They had it all prefabbed and ready to assemble, they just had to screw together the base and all of the pre-printed signs. Apart from stefnal signs pointing the way to places like Barsoom, they had arrows to point the way to Art Show, Dealers, and so forth. A nifty idea; I think they could have sped up installation if they'd pre-installed the signs for one side of the pole, and they probably should have set it up on Friday. But it's an idea I want to steal for animelosangeles.

Leo Knisely, chair of Konniption last April in Columbia, Misouri was working Program Ops for this convention. For a while, he was sitting at the bid table. You see, they have this corridor junction near the elevators, where the corridor leading to the function space crosses the hallway from the back entrance to the front desk. A natural place for a Registration desk -- and, in fact, the hotel has a place for meeting registration right there, I found out at the end of the convention. And, further, last time I was here convention reg. was right in this nook. This time, they had two tables set up in an L shape, one with the Kansas City in 2009 and Chicago in 2008 bids, and the other with L.A.con IV. (Many thanks to Carol Doms, hotel liaison, for getting me the laconiv fan table -- I'd asked for one ahead of time, but the message wasn't passed on, and Carol made it happen anyway.) The bid table wasn't always staffed by the bid people -- but Leo and company found it a handy place to work on their panelist table signs.

Of course, people still walked up asking if they could register. Doug Wilson and Leo had badges that said "Darryl" and "And Darryl", and on Friday they were sitting at the bid table. Their response to people walking up asking about registration was "Sorry, this convention is full, we already have three people. You should try ConQuesT, down the hall" in a silly Swedish accent.

Sitting with Leo, I learned about some of the problems with running a convention in Columbia. The most significant is they have no leverage with the hotels. Apparently the hotels aren't hurting for business, and they can't get a sliding scale reduction on their function space charges. There is a new hotel or two going up, and maybe that'll help the fans in the future. For now, they hustle all year doing fund-raising to cover the cost of the convention, in addition to the membership moneys collected. Golly!

I'd brought Dark Chocolate Peanut M&M's with me, as fan bait. I should have snagged a bunch of bags of the plain Dark Chocolate M&M's -- not only are they impossible to find in most of the towns the people I met are from, but after I got back they'd vanished from the shelves too. I can find more Dark Chocolate Peanut, but not the plain. I just hope that they decide to bring them back in the winter, the same way they bring the red & green Mint M&M's out for Xmas.

One of the fans I recognized from last time was Amanda Clay. I gave her the "Vanilla Pride" ribbons to hand out. I'd brought a small assortment of ribbons to play with; by the end of the convention I'd given away 179 of them... I mentioned Linda Donahue, a Yard Dog Press author. She had a reading on Saturday, but it was apparently some kind of multiple-author Yard Dog Press session -- she only got about five or ten minutes into her story before she had to yield the floor to another guy. A shame, I wished I could have heard more of it. I got distracted, and never used the 50-cents-off coupon she'd given me for her book...

Sherri Dean had an interesting accessory on Saturday: a roll of duct tape chained to her belt. I guess she uses enough of it that it's important to have it handy.

Saturday afternon Margene Bahm presented her "Worldcon 101" class on how the Worldcon site selection process works. Vincent Docherty happened to be in the neighborhood, and he and I audited the session. Two other fans were there, soaking up the information. I'm glad that they got it. I'm surprised other fans didn't go -- or perhaps they learned it all during the run up to the vote in 2003?

Saturday night was the Masquerade. The Masquerade was held in their largest ballroom, using available light. No spot light, no lighting tech at all, just somebody (Les Roth, I think) on the sidelines doing the music cues on a sound system. They also had hidden a note under one of the seats before the event, and if you found it, it meant that you were the surprise Extra Masquerade Judge.

There were about eight or nine entries. Four of them were young ladies with anime or video game inspired costumes (Chobits, Final Fantasy, and another I didn't catch). Does it count as "recreation" if the costume didn't exist in live 3-D form? Three more competitive entries were Star Wars-inspired, with one exception: there was a pair of stormtroopers, there was James Hallaman in a Matrix/Darth Vader crossover, and Sherri Dean was "Darth Barbie" (with pink helmet and everything). Someone was dressed as "Bubba Ninja" with deadly throwing moonpies. And Holly Messinger wore a silver dinner gown circa 1880 that was just lovely. And a non-competitive entry that I've forgotten; and another non-competitive group entry, to promote the "Run away to the circus" theme for Contraception in Independence MO.

There were also a couple of Harry Potter-inspired costumed fans that arrived too late to be in the Masquerade, they'd already collected all the paperwork and worked out the running order. Zoe had a Slytherin tie, if I remember correctly, and a man named Harold Potter (yes) was dressed as Hagrid, complete with umbrella.

The circus entry included Jim Murray dressed as the Bearded Lady. It was the most sedate outfit I've even seen Jim wear -- it was positively monochromatic. When I saw him party-hopping later that evening, he'd added a colorful hat to the ensemble. More about the parties later...

Les & Jeannette Roth were FGoHs, and they brought the TICC (West Lock) crew from Des Moines. At the Masquerade halftime, they presented a show called "Phannish Treasure" (a parody of the recent movie "National Treasure"). "Halftime" is a misnomer, though. They have an elegant solution to the problem of waiting around for the winners to be announced: they don't announce them that night. Instead, the winners are announced at the Closing Ceremonies. So the costumers don't have to stick around an extra hour or whatever to find out who got what, but the winners don't get to go to bed knowing they've won. An interesting trade-off. Not all of the winners were at Closing Ceremonies; does that mean the system is broken?