Con Report -- Capricon

[tollermom]

I've slept... I've caught up on LJ and email... so finally, here's my Capricon report! Yay me...

I think that the only thing "wrong" with my Capricon experience this weekend was the fact that I couldn't start it on Thursday so I missed a whole extra day of goodness! There was just no way, though... my truck was in dodgy shape, at best, so I was trip-sharing with Jen, and we couldn't afford Yet Another Vacation Day plus the extra hotel day. Other than that, though, it was a most excellent adventure.

The logistics of going on the road as Wild Mercy are always entertaining. Which instruments are going this time? Will there be PA? How will it fit in the vehicles (and which, and how many vehicles are we taking)? This time we settled on Jen and I in her van with our instruments and Barry and Sally in Barry's new and very blue Focus wagon with their instruments. I think there's a spatial anomaly in Focii, and I'd love to know how Ford does it, 'cause watching Sally unpack the volume of drumstuff that she gets into those little cars is something like watching a herd of clown pile out of a Shriner car. A few last-minute phone calls on Friday morning confirmed that Barry and Sally had, in fact, successfully stowed all their gear in the wagon, so we hit the road from Indy. The trip up was uneventful, punctuated by a stop at a handmade chocolate shop where Jen & I picked up truffles for Barry & Sally which then spent the entire weekend on the desk in the room and finally got passed off to Barry at work this morning (*rolls eyes*).

We arrived early afternoonish at the Sheraton, where the friendly and efficient desk guy checked us in and (thanks to the attendance of Chase the Dog) gave us a second-floor room near the stairs. This turned out to be perfect. It was huge, and convenient for running up and down stairs when the elevators were busy, and we could have staged a soccer match in the available floor space, even after we unloading all the instruments and setting up the dog crate (which should have stayed in the van, as it never got used in the hotel). The most-excellent bellman managed to get all of our gear onto one cart and delivered it safely. This was a happy thing, being as we were rather gear-heavy.

I started seeing people I knew almost immediately upon entering the lobby. This is just so cool to me, being fairly new to the con scene (this was only my sixth con, unless I've miscounted... InConJunction, Marcon, WindyCon, Duckon, OVFF and Capricon... yep, I think that's all of 'em), 'cause it's starting to feel like coming home instead of going somewhere strange and slightly scary. First sightings were janmagic (who always gives excellent hugs) and Art, while waiting in line for the registration desk. I think the Ropers were next, as a trip to the dealers' room was high on the list of Things To Do once we had everything settled in the room.

Magnetic clippy dealies for con badges. Best... idea... ever.

LiveJournal ribbons with room for us to write our LJ names so we could start putting names and faces together. Also best... idea... ever. (Yes, there can be more than one. I said so. So there.)

Made it to the dealers' room after registration, and was promptly accosted by a purple dragon crowned with screaming-blue marabou from Bast's Garden. He followed me out of the room. So much for not spending money on "stuff" this weekend (oops). He's adorable, though, and currently adorning my monitor at work, having joined his sibling, Rasta, who followed me home from either WindyCon or Duckon. Met the very personable Peter Beagle (of "The Last Unicorn" fame) outside the dealers' room and chatted for awhile (Wild Mercy descended on his table en masse and thoroughly enjoyed our time chatting with him and his manager).

Ate late lunch in the Faculty Lounge. Salad. What a concept! (Seriously... there are always sammiches and chips and stuff, but salad and veggies were exactly what I needed, and there they were. Many thanks to the lovely ladies who kept that room stocked all weekend!). Managed to get distracted by dinner with min0taur, Sally and Jen, and missed MoonWulf's set in the Internet Cafe. Would have been distraught about that, but knew he had a concert slot on Sunday, so I still had a chance to hear him. Did catch Space Time Theatre's highly entertaining performance at 8, followed by the Fight Song Finalists, then Peter Beagle and Kat Eggleston's concert at 10 (where Sally and I each bought CDs from Kat). Thoroughly enjoyed that concert... the music was good and so was the story-telling, which was a nice combination. From there I headed off to Open Filk, with my notebook but without any instruments. I had a blast just listening... can't even remember who all was there, though... billroper, min0taur, tigertoy, Art, a very sleep filker0, quadrivium (who I didn't get to hear at OVFF and whose piano playing was just stunning), almeda, catalana (whose CD I bought from billroper later in the weekend and am quite enjoying) and more whose names/songs are eluding me at the moment. I stayed awake and reasonably coherent until about 3:30 a.m. and then stumbled off to bed.

I love the beds in Starwood properties. I wasn't in it much this weekend, but what time I spent in bed was spent sleeping well and comfortably. I can't say that about many hotels. Cons in Sheratons or other Starwood properties will always be high on my list of good places to go. Being able to get a good night's sleep is A Very Good Thing.

Stumbled into the shower at what seemed like an obscenely early hour on Saturday but which was actually only 8:30ish, then went down and had breakfast buffet with min0taur and Sally. Omelette. Yum. Bacon. More yum. Protein is our friend. Stuck my head into the robot room to say hi to Joe, who was also there from Indy. The obstacle course looked like fun, but I had to dash after only watching a couple of 'bots run it, 'cause it was time for the percussion workshop with Sally. We had a good-but-small group and since everybody was beyond the "count to four" stage, we spent most of the time working on independent coordination exercises and everybody was doing a creditable job of mixed-time stuff (where one hand's playing in three and the other in four, for instance) by the end of the class. Cool.

Wandered around for awhile, visiting with people and just generally relaxing and hanging out, then went to the "Evolution of Dragons" workshop at 3 (which, unfortunately, caused me to miss both catalana's Internet Cafe set and min0taur's cheap guitar tricks workshop (guitar being so much easier to haul around than keyboard, I really should get back to the point that I can at least strum along with myself in the filk room). It was packed, and highly entertaining, and the interaction between the younger (teaching) and older (observing) Passovoys was almost as much fun as the actual content. When that was over, it was time for Michael Longcor's concert, which was enjoyable as always. He did a number of new-to-me things from his new pirate songs CD, but my favorite was (as always) Windward Passage, which I just love. I bought a new CD, bringing my disc count to two, and I'd barely been there 24 hours. This CD has now disappeared. I had it when setting up the Wild Mercy concert, 'cause I put it down in the window with my cell phone. I had it after the concert, 'cause somebody noticed it and brought it (and said cell phone) to me. So the giant question is "What did I do with it?" I seem to have a propensity for losing Michael's CDs, having recently realized that I had the case and liner notes for "Drunken Angel" but not the disk (he graciously allowed me to rip a new copy, which probably means that the disk will turn up any day now). I'm sure the new one is somewhere obvious... I rather expect it's in one of my gear bags. But I digress...

After Wulf's concert, it was time for schlepping of stuff and WM concert prep (many thanks to singlemaltsilk and her lovely brother... we'd've never gotten set up so quickly without y'all's help!). We're getting good at adapting to various spaces, and were set up and ready to go almost on time (yay us!). Sally had printed out the programs and left them on the chairs, so we didn't do much in the way of introducing songs since we knew the set would be tight. Unfortunately, the lack of talking between songs led me to almost completely forget to plug the CDs. Oops. Must do better at that in the future! I think I actually plugged vixyish's CD before I plugged ours, since the first point at which I stopped to talk much was after we did "The Girl That's Never Been," which I fell in love with at OVFF and which we were performing for the first time. Overall, I was very happy with the concert... there were some odd spots (mostly mine... if anybody has tips for learning lyrics so that they'll actually stick in my brain, I'm definitely open for suggestions!) but we had fun and that comes across. It was cool to look out and see people singing along... I love that about doing shows at cons... the audience is engaged and interested and it's so much more fun than doing smoky bar gigs.

We ran long, but filkertom graciously let us bleed over into the beginning of his timeslot, so we got to do our whole planned set. Afterwards, we flung our gear out in the hall with the help of quite a few extra sets of hands, so that Tom could take the stage, then we came back and hung out for Tom's concert, which made me laugh 'til I couldn't breathe. Scheduling conflicts had kept me from being able to sit through a whole concert of his at previous cons, so it was truly a joy to watch the master at work. He's a funny funny man and a lovely person, and I picked up a copy of his live disk from Marcon to bring my CD acquisition spree to three.

After Tom's concert, everybody headed down the hall to the small filk room for Open Filk, but the room was promptly over-full and there were still people coming in. Sally (and probably several others) pointed out that we were several kinds of dumb for having moved from the big room to the little room, so we packed up and headed back where we'd been. The disruption of moving could have been a killer, but min0taur got things going again with a singalong while folks were getting set back up, and soon we were rocking along again. Much good music was heard, including some wonderful jamming involving billroper, quadrivium, min0taur, Wulf and others, and I finally stumbled out of the room about 3:30, having requested filker0's "Close Your Eyes" as the last thing I heard before heading up to the room. There was at least one person still in the room who hadn't heard it, but his reaction wasn't nearly as much fun as watching born_to_me hear it for the first time during the Master Class recital on Sunday. I tiptoed into the room, hoping not to wake Jen (who hadn't been seen since shortly after filkertom's concert), so you can imagine my surprise when she wasn't even there. Turned out she'd gone up to the Browncoat party (I never made it to the party floor... was having too much fun in the filkroom), from whence she returned at about 5 a.m. (I was still awake, having been sorting back through my recordings of the Friday and Saturday night filkroom performances).

Sunday morning brought another buffet breakfast (waffles... yum) w/ my bandmates (I love Wild Mercy. I've been in and around dysfunctional bands, so I'm well aware that the kind of friendship that the four of us share is rare among working bands. We've been playing and performing together for over three years now, and we don't even come close to getting tired of spending time together. Very cool.) and then I was off to listen to the performances by the folks who took the Performance Master Class on Saturday. There were some really nice performances, and since everybody was getting punchy from lack of sleep, a quick bit by tigertoy during his introduction, ending with "or would you rather get some sleep?" was giggleworthy and almost as entertaining as the "real" performances. (Since one of my personal demons is working on stage presence, I have a lot of respect for folks who can be charming and witty while their mind is no doubt running ahead to "What key is this in?" or "Oh god what's my first line?") Completely spaced the fact that I should have gone to closing ceremonies after that, as I had managed to talk filker0's guitar back out of its case and we were busy chatting and singing. I mentioned that I'd been disappointed that Wulf didn't do "Monster in My Head" in his concert, which led to discovering that Daniel also does that song. Naturally, that left me with monsters in my head and demons under the bed as earworms for the rest of the day... there's an entertaining combination, eh?

After that, I was off to the dealers' room, where I upped my CD acquisition binge from three to six (adding Frank Hayes, catalana, and Heather Alexander to the mix) and also bought seven books. I should be set for reading material for at least the next week or so now. And I won't even try to figure out why I'm still buying books when I know I'm moving and will have to pack them all in a couple of months.

Wandered about saying goodbye to some folks who were leaving, then got all my stuff packed up and headed down to the Dead Dog. Jen was already there, and we had fun hanging out w/ the other diehards 'til we had to hit the road.

And that was it... we hit the road and drove back through increasingly cold weather to Indy. Why did it get colder as we went south? Isn't that backwards?

Oh... mustn't forget... thanks to khadagan and her kids for the yummy pan of brownies. They fueled Barry and Jen and I through Tom's concert on Saturday night, and gave me energy for the drive home on Sunday. Somehow, Sally missed out on the brownies. Not sure how that happened. They were good, though!

In and around all the music, there were many great opportunities to just hang out and chat with people, including a conversation with new friend born_to_me that started with music and wound up in meaning-of-life territory. Hopefully we can continue that in email or at a future con.


The concom put on a great event. singlemaltsilk deserves special thanks for a great music weekend and also for really humane scheduling... it was nice to have time for setup, and to have helpers for setup and teardown, and the extra extended checkout time on Sunday was the icing on a wonderful cake (not to mention not having any "have to be there" programming first thing in the morning... it's much easier to stay in the filk room all night if I know the only thing really time-sensitive first thing in the morning is breakfast. :-) ).

If I had to sum up what I learned this weekend in one sentence, it would be that Chicago-area cons rock. Three of my six cons in the last two years have been in the Chicago area, and they were all good events with a great bunch of people. I hope to see y'all more often in the future!