hazelchaz | Crazy, I'm crazy for feeling so lonely. I'm crazy, crazy for feeling so blue. I knew you'd love me (Reply)

Animé Los Angeles photos by Christian McGuire and Alex Bellanger are now online that we discovered as part of my website recovery; they hadn't actually been online and lost, they'd been tucked away on one of our computers. I've also uploaded photos from Culture Day: Dim Sum and FIDM Star Wars Exhibit (06-Nov-2005), Arcade Infinity, IE/Birthday gathering (12-Nov-2005), and Lux Shindig Reherasals (Nov-2005). Click on the picture of

colleency on Gary's lap to see those photos.

The Star Wars costume exhibit mostly focused on the really fancy one-of-a-kind duds from episodes I-III. I would have liked to see more of the ones that they produced in multiple quantities, like the Empire costumes that showed the bridge from ep. III to ep. IV. But it was a gorgeous exhibit, and as usual the dim sum was good beforehand.

The Arcade Infinity gathering that was put together by Infinitely Excellent Forums was a pleasant afternoon/evening; it celebrated Sandahl's 21st birthday as well. I gave her the mango-flavored Finlandia vodka I picked up in Glasgow. We spent a lot of our time hanging out at the pool hall next door to the arcade, as it happened to have comfy seating and good lighting. We decided we'd have dinner at the same shopping center ("Diamond Plaza" just south of the 60 fwy at Fullerton Road), so I went around to every single restaurant and asked for their paper take-out menus and brought them back... Sandahl picked "The Boat" which happened to be the one at the very opposite end of the place. They had lots of vietnamese, chinese, and korean dishes, as near as I can tell; and part of the menu was in Armenian. We had a party of about 20, and we really should have split into tables of four or five and each small group should have picked a few dishes to share family-style. I didn't figure this out early enough to suggest it; we ordered from the menu as if each dish was a single-person entree, which it was not -- most of them would serve about four or five people. It was obvious that they weren't just generous-sized Claim Jumper-style dishes when the soups came, at the end of the meal (Chinese-style); the two people who had each ordered the same kind of soup were faced with these enormous bowls, and they gamely attempted to consume the whole thing. Throughout the dinner, when a dish someone had ordered arrived, they'd put some on their plate and then usually share the platter around the rest of the table. With the exception of one or two that got shared around before they reached the person who ordered it...

The group was a bit raucous; I was a little surprised we weren't thrown out when some of them started banging on the tables. I insisted we overtip to compensate for this, and worked out everyone's share; I threw in some extra money on top of that, mostly because of an arithmetic error; I added a certain percentage to each pre-tax item to tell people what they owed, but then used that same percentage on the post-tax total to figure out the total we needed and made up the difference. So they got an extra five or so bucks from me... An expensive dinner, but a delicious one. Full of strange and new flavors that I'd never had before. I'd like to go back there.

The next day, and the following weekend, were the last two Lux Shindig rehearsals, leading up to Loscon. The Shindig was a Firefly/Serenity-themed show, and as usual the rehearsals were at

colleency and

obishawn's house. I volunteered to bring snacks; the rehearsals were scheduled for 1:00 or 2:00 pm ("Have lunch before you show up!"), so I mostly brought my cooler full of sodas and some chips and sweet snacks. The second weekend,

library_lynn came along and we brought some bread and ham in case someone skipped lunch. The snacks were generally well appreciated. The rehearsal on the 19th was almost complete -- there were one or two bits that didn't get included, and one that hadn't been there the previous weekend was Bonnie Delight's burlesque number. She's an edsysiast, and got down to her lingerie, more or less; it was decided that the card players (John Bryson and Pat Mannion, the two stagehands, and Jim Russell, the guitar player) would stay on stage and they'd take care of picking up her clothes and taking them off stage. She ended the act facing away from the audience; this meant that she'd be facing the card players when she got down to her teeny bikini top (or pasties, in the case of the rehearsal), and "Jayne" would escort her off stage while the other two carried the clothing bits.

At the show, Shawn warned the audience that they should act now if they didn't want their kidlings exposed to the sins of the flesh. One or two people reportedly took the warning, but the rest of the audience stayed...

The show went off at Loscon just fine. More about Loscon later, though, when I upload those photos. (I held off uploading these photos because I didn't want to give away the show's gags and surprises.)