The Mandelbear's Musings

It occurs to me that I haven't written about Saturday at Baycon yet; guess I'd better do that before I forget even more of the details.

Actually, not much went on most of the day, except for the Cynthia McQuillin memorial. That wasn't as well attended as the one at Consonance, of course, but well enough. It could easily have run longer; we only had one 90-minute timeslot, and we had to circle the chairs ourselves, then uncircle them at the end. Not really enough time. One of the high points for me was Don Simpson singing "Ship of Stone"; I sang "Green Passions" (the flower_cat's favorite) and joined in on anything else I knew.

Dinner in Spencer's (the hotel's expensive-but-good) restaurant with cflute, and Alisa and Luis of Puzzlebox. The trick to eating cheaply in Spencer's is to order a variety of appetizers and side dishes, and share them around the table Chinese restaurant style. It came to just about $20/person including drinks, which isn't bad for a place where entrees range from $25 on up into the $40's.

The concerts I went to (Tony Fabris and Michelle Dockrey -- tfabris and vixyish -- in the first slot, and the Bohnhoffs in the second slot) were excellent, as usual, as was the open filking. I skipped the Avalon Rising concert (I like them, but they're loud), confirmed that the party floor was almost totally dead, got my guitar, and joined the circle. Cornered cflute to work up a duet version of House Carpenter. Over the course of the con we eventually did all of our concert songs in open filking.

I'm having a wonderful Baycon, in spite of only being able to get to a fraction of the programming I wanted to (including several concerts -- bah!) and an on-again/off-again dry throat that threatened several times to cut off my singing but never quite did.

Yesterday was my busy day for programming: two panels and a "filk sing-along" in kids' programming. None of the kids sang along, but several of the parents did. I was ably assisted by cflute; my infinitely fuzzy ursine brain will probably not be able to recall all of the setlist.

The first panel, on "found filk", was noteworthy for the fact that the schedule on our badges disagreed with the programming grid; after a certain amount of conflicting advice from green room staff, we eventually went with the poocket program, and had a pretty good turnout. The second panel, on music publishing and recording, was scheduled opposite a concert (fortunately not Puzzlebox, which was the hour before) and immediately after a panel on polyamory, which was in full swing when we got there. We looked in, decided we were outnumbered, and set up in the hall at what had been the autograph table. It worked, and was a good panel.

Lots of good conversations at this con. Lots of old friends coming out of the woodwork. More later -- it's time to do some packing and have some breakfast.