GaFilk report

[mdlbear]

Thursday

Got up at 5am in the morning to snag a little breakfast before figmo arrived to take us to the airport. Required some creative packing (a household specialty) and the empty half of the back seat for the guitars. They're boarding flights by "group" these days rather than by row number; I remarked that we were OK as long as they didn't call for Group W.

figmo has already described the trip in some detail, so I won't bother. Arrived an hour and a half late in Atlanta (due, I found out a couple of days later, to the ripple effect of bad weather in NY), and were met by ladyat, who showed us to the shuttle stop and then went off to corral the next belated guest (andpuff IIRC).

Our room was on the fourth floor conveniently close to an elevator, though it turned out that the most convenient elevator for the function space was off around a corner. Had a small fridge, which we never made use of.

We had been sort of expecting a welcome dinner, but the guests were trickling in one by one, so we ended up in the hotel coffeeshop (where, indeed, we ate most of our meals) in a group with people whose names I can't bring to mind at the moment. The coffeeshop was pretty decent, and we wound up eating most of our meals there. Afterwards we went up to the suite ConOps was using, and chatted until 2:30am or so before turning in (still on West Coast time, so that was pretty early for us).

Friday

flower_cat and I crawled out of bed at 9am or so and staggered our way across the street to the Waffle House, having heard its praises sung several times by various people. OK if you don't count the coffee, and the grits had a sort of slight unburnt-hydrocarbon undertaste. I don't have enough experience with grits to know whether that's supposed to be a bug or a feature.

Registration wasn't due to start until noon, but there were people around the reg. table so I hauled down Ruby (the guitar, in case anyone's forgotten) and serenaded Maya (the person running reg), Colleen, and anyone else within earshot. Later bedlamhouse said that he may make the serenade a required program item for Interfilk guests. Did stuff I can do from memory, since I didn't have the music stand handy; "Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts", "Desolation--Oh, No!", "Jabberwocky" (as a talking blues), (followed, of course, by Michelle Dockrey's "I Am the Walrus", many others. Finally the reg. stuff showed up about 3ish so I registered, paid for Colleen's membership and banquet, and continued the serenade until dinnertime. Nobody seemed to object.

Discovered on registering that I was the con's official typo this year: of the eight possible misspellings of my name (s/z, y/i, ph/v), they managed to use three different ones in the program book (i), the website (s; later corrected) and my badge (v, s). As Teri Wachowiak noted, we both have Polish names, so it wasn't particularly surprising. The fact that I use "Steve" as short for "Stephen" only adds to the fun.

It was a lot of fun watching people show up; many LJ-ers were using their usernames as badge names, so I could finally put real names and faces to usernames (not that I'll remember all, or even many, of them, of course -- mind like a steel sieve). It was also amusing watching the reactions of people (I think the first was ohiblather) who didn't know who mdlbear was. I'm easily amused.

Dinner in the hotel coffeeshop again.

Opening Ceremonies included the introduction of the guests, and culminated (because it was a slightly-belated New Year's Eve party) in the singing of "Auld Lang Syne", all six verses of it (at least it wasn't 47!), after which the guests, who had been armed beforehand, decorated the crowd with silly string. Did I mention that I was wearing a silly (and grossly uncomfortable) plastic hat? ohiblather has a good picture, here.)

After a decent pause came my only program item other than the concert: a quiz show called "My Filk". The two teams (labled A and 2) were recruited from the crowd; the guests were the judges. Questions were tough; by the end of the secondt round the judges were nearly even with Team A (2 was way ahead). The third part started with each team pulling two words out of a hat (mine, that's why I mentioned it earlier), and writing a filksong using them. That part was worth a total of 75 points, which the judges ended up splitting so that Team 2 won, but only just.

The evening's programming ended with Dan (filker0 and Melissa (spiritdance) Glasser's concert. Hadn't heard them since Consonance a couple of years ago; they're wonderful. Dan's so-called "lullabye", "Close Your Eyes", goes perfectly with his wild-eyed looks.

There was a Chaos circle Friday night, which I enjoyed immensely. People warned me that there's a little more inter-song delay in the laid-back Southeast than I'm used to in laid-back California, but since I tend to be excessively timid in chaos circles anyway, it worked out fine.

Saturday

The first program item on Saturday was the Super Secret Guest, Tanya Huff (andpuff), who started out reading one of her short stories. (I've never read any of her stuff; that will change! Colleen promptly went out and bought one of her books.) She followed the reading with a rendition of her infamous "Pervy Hobbit Fancier" song.

My concert was next; it seemed to be pretty successful, though I stupidly forgot to mention the upcoming album at the obvious place (the intro to "Guilty Pleasures"). I came out only 30 seconds short of 45-minute slot; pretty good considering that I was making adjustments up to the last minute and hadn't gotten the setlister running on my little laptop yet (still don't, for that matter -- it can wait). "I Wanna be a Webmaster" was the designated sacrificial song. Managed to zing a large fraction of the audience with "Cicero in the 21^st Century", "Paper Pings", "Talking Dragon", and "I am the Walrus" -- always gratifying when a punch line goes over well.

Keep the Dream Alive
The Owl and the Pussycat
Cicero in the Twenty First Century
Uncle Ernie's
High Barratry
Talking Dragon
Desolation --- Oh, No!
I Am the Walrus
Paper Pings
I Play Magic Now
The Stuff that Dreams are Made Of
Guilty Pleasures
The World Inside the Crystal
Ship of Stone

Got quite a bit of good feedback afterward (always nice).

After my set came Teri and the Space Pirates -- this was Teri's Toastmaster set -- it was rather weird, coming after my TM gig at Consonance, to find that the TM's role at GaFilk seemed limited to introducing the 2x10's, which immediately followed her set. Well, it is billed as a relaxicon. ("It's a relaxacon. So relax, dammit!" -- this was one of the two mantras we heard repeatedly over the course of the weekend; the other was "Life is good".) Anyway, Teri et. al.'s set had number of good Pern songs TTTO Stan Rogers; the one to "White Squall" had both sets of lyrics earworming me the rest of the weekend and beyond. I immediately bought one of her CDs.

The 2x10's (2 songs or 10 minutes, whichever is less) came next, introduced by Teri. I missed a couple of them from getting into conversations, but got to most. All were excellent. Did I memtion the conversations? The more cons I go to, the more I enjoy just meeting and talking with people. Is it possible that I'm becoming less of a curmudgeon in my old age? Naaaahhh!

Every con has its traditions; one of the many unique traditions of GaFilk is that the banquet is a dinner/dance. I'd been warned to expect formal dress, so I came equipped with a tuxedo jacket (from Savers; the cummerbund Colleen got me many years ago no longer fits me; the bow tie does but I let it get locked in the filk room by mistake (sigh)). Didn't dance; Colleen wasn't up for it, and the last time I did any ballroom dancing was my high school Sr. Prom, which would be some 40 years ago as of sometime this Spring. Can you say "rusty"? Thought so.

The music, however, was fantastic!, combining jazz and blues standards with matching arrangements of filksongs. The lead singer was "the lovely and talented Jodi Krangle" (hey, I'm just quoting the web site), "backed by our talented GAFilk House Band. Mary Crowell on piano, Dave Rood on trumpet, George Powell on bass, and Brian Richardson on percussion." I have to remember to record Big Blue Blues and send links to Mary (quadrivium), whom I also have to thank for transcribing Keep the Dream Alive for the convention songbook.

After dinner was the main event: Kathleen Sloan's GOH concert. My favorites were "Discipline Queen", "Neighbor of the Beast" (even though I quibble over the number: 667 would normally be across the street; it is probably not entirely coincidental that I picked 668 as the combination on my luggage-strap locks), and "Road to Roswell" (by Lloyd Landa and Karen Linsley, and which never fails to move me).

Next came the Interfilk auction -- a hoot, as usual, with the GOH joining in on the wenching. (Turnabout is fair play -- I got to sit on her lap when one of my donations was up. She bought it, too. Actually, she bought three of my four dontations (don't remember who got the lemons). I think she likes my stuff. Altogether the auction raised over $2K. I scored a Windycon CD and a Martin guitar sound-hole coaster.

• Demo CD "Is This Thing On? 2005-1-5" -- $110 to Kathleen Sloan
• Our infamous lemons -- $45 for the three of them
• OSE T-shirt -- $40 (To be given to Erica -- all the bidders wanted to do that, but Kathleen got the glory. The unanimity of purpose did seem to put a damper on the bidding,, however.) Note that OSE stands for "Operating System for Embedded systems, but...
• DVD of my Toaastmaster's concert at Consonance 2004 -- 175 to Kathleen. Did I mention that she seems to like my stuff?

There were a number of old filk tapes up for auction; andpuff told me later that, as the contents were read off, she realized that she had more of my songs than she knew. (If they weren't long out of print and of very dubious quality, I might not have to issue a CD.)

Several different filks started up after that; Colleen and I ended up in the "buckyball chaos" circle, which involves passing a token in the form of a foam buckyball. Whoever has the token gets to decide where to pass it after their turn; people with followers put up their hands and hope it gets tossed in their direction. Did a lot of stuff I don't do very often, mainly because it fit: "Rocket Rider's Prayer" (vaguely religious songs), "Filksong Lullabye" (lullabyes), "Silk and Steel" (love song to a guitar) Colleen complained (after we got home) that she hadn't enjoyed the buckyball circle much, but I think it was a combination of a slightly upset stomach and the fact that I didn't get as many turns as she would have liked. I liked it, but I'm happy just to listen to new songs most of the time.

Sunday

Somehow I managed to miss the Ecumenical Filk; I was in a conversation. In any case, I don't have a whole lot of religious songs anyway, aside from "Rocket Rider's Prayer".

Closing Ceremonies mainly involved collecting all the guests and giving them the much-coveted black GaFilk hat (Teri has apparently been coveting one for several years now). The con closed with the singing of ladyat's "Strangers No More", which sort of sums up the whole weekend.

At this point, Colleen and Lynn left for the airport. They were an hour late getting to ORD, but that was OK because their connecting flight was even later; Colleen wound up getting home about 2:30am.

Meanwhile, many of those who were left trundled across the street to the Steak and Ale for an excellent dinner.

The Stray Dead Dog was wonderful. Actually, there were two; the one remaining filk room filled up fairly early, so the rest of us wound up in the wide place in the hallway where registration had been set up. Among other people, we had ladyat and bedlamhouse, khaosworks (who will be GOH at Consonance in March), the Glassers, and quite a few others. Among other things, people who had been too busy during the con got caught up on songs they'd missed. Finally, Dan closed out the dead dog and sent us off to bed with a repeat of "Close Your Eyes".

I'm leaving out a lot of great conversations, on subjects ranging from filk to guitars to computers to kids. Did I mention the conversations? I'm also leaving out a lot of LJ usernames that I'm too lazy to track down right now (my friends list will get even bigger over the next few weeks). But this thing is already long and late, and rather than make it longer and much later I'm going to shove it out the door and hope the many folks I've left out won't feel slighted.

My inadequate but heartfelt thanks to everyone who made this trip possible, and made GaFilk such a wonderful con. In particular Interfilk (of course), Kathleen Sloan for lobbying Interfilk on my behalf and for the amazing amount of money she spends in the auctions, Bill and Brenda Sutton and the rest of the GaFilk con-comm, Mary Crowell for transcribing my songbook contribution, Gerry Tyra for a great job on the sound board, and everyone I met and talked with there.