Zombie Stores

Halloween is my favorite holiday, it always has been.

Part of the lead up to Halloween of course involves not only costume shopping, but generally trolling (hah) among halloween stores to see what beauties they’ve come up with this year. I choose to pretend the travesty of inflatable decorations do not exist, but otherwise, most Halloween decorations can’t be to cheesily spooky for my taste. Motion activated hand in a bowl, fake flaming cauldrons, strobe lights, it’s ALL good.

You can usually get a good dose of Halloween gloom at craft stores and fabric stores. Novelty stores like Hot Topic, Spencers, and their smaller counterparts are always good for some unique creepy items. Of course the big box stores like Walmart and Target usually dedicate a decent sized section to “seasonal” items.

For the most pleasantly overwhelming experience though, the best source is a dedicated Halloween store. The quality of these stores varies, but you’re pretty much assured to be surrounded by grey, black and orange props, often extensively enough to spend hours giggling over fake corpses and daggers.

Even in the “higher end” versions of these stores you’ll be hard pressed to find anything not made of plastic, they tend not to have anything particularly fine, but that’s really not the point. While a store full of Christmas decorations can probably cause a tinsel seisure, oversaturation of Halloween decorations just produces little kid giddiness.

I’m always curious about these stores though. In recent years they’re HUGE, the size of a Best Buy or a Target, because often they’re in a building that used to BE a Best Buy or a Target. Often the very same shelves that previously held decorative pumpkin scented candles, now hold… decorative pumpkin scented candles.

You don’t find this sort of retail recycling for any other holiday or event. Halloween stores are almost universally in previously empty buildings whose previous residents went out of business anywhere from 6 months to 6 years ago. Then on November 1st they’re gone without a trace like Mr. Elvis’s Magic Shop, leaving the boarded up shell in their wake.

As much as I love these stores, I find this a little disconcerting. It seems like these stores rely on a failing economy for their existence. I’m not trying to make some political statement, revealing Halloween stores as soulless opportunists, it just seems weird. It is, appropriately, creepy.

Where are the stores when there is not an abundance of empty buildings? Living in the Steel Belt, it’s hard to imagine this being a problem. I can’t see Halloween stores having a hard time finding a spot any time soon. But what happens on the highly hypothetical day that Cleveland’s economy explodes? Do these stores just disappear?

I don’t think so. I think they find a place where there was no space before. On a previously empty wall, a door glowing at the edges with evil smelling fake fog. A construction site completed overnight, then bulldozed again next month. Maybe a derelict house on the corner turns on a neon sign and starts selling ghosts. You follow a black cat and realize you’re lost in a part of town you’ve never seen before, and that you’ll never find again.

How else COULD it be? It’s Halloween.

Fast Drawings

For this week’s Illustration Friday, “Fast” I thought I’d do a set of quick sketches.

Click on any image to see a larger version. Everyone knows cheetahs are the fastest land animals:

According to wisegeek, cheetahs run up to 70 mph. I run about 0.70 miles per hour on a good day.

The fastest water animal, I had to look up.

This is a sailfish, which I had heard of but had never really thought about much. They’re actually pretty cool looking, like a dinosaur mixed with a swordfish. Like the cheetah, sailfish travel 70 mph, so in a triathlon I suppose they’d be about evenly matched. Until they got to the biking portion, because everyone knows fish can’t ride bikes.

Finally, the fastest animal of the air is the aptly named Sir Not Appearing in this Film. Wait. I mean the aptly named swift.

Swifts fly through the air at 106 mph, making them the fastest animal in the world (probably not great in the triathlon though).

I’m pretty happy with how the sailfish and the swifts turned out. I got the cutout effect by reverse selecting the subjects, and darkening the paper grain to add in a more noticable texture. The cheetah is ok, but I always have a tough time with cats for some reason. This one looks a bit like a monkey or a hyena, but as my cats go, it’s acceptable.

Frozen

On September 29th, a U.S. District Judge dismissed Janice Langbehn’s lawsuit against Jackson Memorial Hospital.

(click for larger version)

In February of 2007, Janice and her life-partner Lisa Pond were beginning a vacation with three of their four children when Lisa collapsed on the deck of a cruise ship. Lisa was rushed to Jackson Memorial Hospital (Florida) and Janice followed with their children as quickly as she could.

Half an hour after arriving at the hospital, a social worker went to Janice and told her, ““you are in an anti-gay city and state. And without a health care proxy you will not see Lisa nor know of her condition.”

Janice, a former health care worker, responded quickly, having her legal Durable Powers of Attorney faxed to the hospital. In spite of this, Janice and their children were left in the waiting room with no information for several hours. Eventually a surgeon told her that Lisa had suffered an aneurysm and would have no recovery.

A priest came to give Lisa last rites, and Janice attended with him, seeing her life partner for the first time in five hours. After the rites, Janice was ushered back into the waiting room.

Lisa was in the trauma room for 8 hours, but Janice was denyed the comfort of being with her during her final hours, minutes. Their children, legal children of both Janice and Lisa, were not allowed in to say goodbye before their mother died. Jance continued to wait in a non-informational bubble until Lisa’s sister came to the hospital. At that time, Lisa’s sister was told that Lisa had been moved more than an hour ago. They had not bothered to tell Janice or their children, waiting in useless space. The blogpost explaining the case can be found here.

In some ways, this story has nothing to do with Same Sex Marriage. Power of Attorney is exactly the legal protection someone is told to get if they want to make sure they’ll be allowed to be present in the event of a loved one’s deathbed. This is the power that allows you to make medical decisions for someone, to stay informed on their condition, to be allowed to visit their bed if it is medically possible. If a gay woman with Power of Attorney was denied those rights, there is no reason to believe she would have been given information and access even if she had a legal marriage. There was NO legal basis to keep Janice away from Lisa as she lay dying. As for keeping out the children, there is no human explanation. It’s nothing short of hateful.

The dismissal of the case is an endorsement for Legal discrimination based on sexual orientation.

This is not being overly dramatic. If there is no other legal basis for the decision, it can only be legal discrimination. My concern, beyond the obvious unfairness, is that if it is “ok” to discriminate based on sexual orientation for ignoring Power of Attorney, perhaps it is also ok to discriniate for treatment. This may seem like a stretch, but the precedent has just been set. I only hope they appeal.

In other ways of course, this is entirely about gay marriage. I have never understood why people who feel it is “wrong” for gay people to marry, think their belief entitles them to make the marriage illegal. Laws are meant to protect us, not to cage us, at least in this supposedly free country. Having same sex marriage in no way harms those who feel it is immoral. Keeping it illegal on the other hand, harms many.

I do not however think that legalizing gay marriage is the solution. Rather, I think all “legal” marriage should be abolished. Too many people of this country have proven that they are incapable of understanding the difference between legal marriage and religious marriage. Here is the point: the rights given by a legal marriage CANNOT be determined by religious standards. It doesn’t matter if we call it a marriage or a bunny rabbit; the only thing the STATE can grant two people, any two people, is a civil union. Currently, most states call this civil union a marriage. A few states call civil unions a marriage when it is between a man and a woman, but a civil union when it’s between two men, or two women.

It’s idiotic. Let’s just call them all civil unions and be done with it. If marriage is so loaded a word that we automatically attach religious meaning to it, the state has no business granting it, any more than it should start baptizing babies, or mandating fasting periods.

It is as problematic to have the state grant marriages as it would be to have the state tell churches who can marry. If the idea of having two men marry seems wrong to you, imagine having the government tell your church that they must allow men to marry each other.

Leave marriage where it belongs: In church. It should be up to churches to decide who can and cannot marry. If your church says it’s a sin for a woman to love another woman, that is their right, no one can force them to allow it. That’s what a separation between church and state MEANS. Meanwhile, if those crazy Unitarian Universalists start marrying Jane and Jane, WHY SHOULD YOU CARE? Please. I am begging. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Let them live their lives freely.

Make a Wedding

Today is Matt’s and my 1st anniversary.
Once we got home from the honeymoon last year I did a series of posts on the wedding, and one of the posts I wanted to do was on the crafty aspects. I never got around to it because it would make a long post and I was intimidated at the thought of all the how-to. I’m not going to make this a complete guide, but I thought it was worth at least highlighting all the things we and our friends made for the wedding, and share some of the cool photos I haven’t had a chance to share yet.

1. Flowers

I don’t like flowers. Wait. Let me reword that. I love flowers growing in the ground, or in pots, and I love plants of all kinds, but I’m no gardener, and I don’t really get the point of cutting flowers off their plants to die. I realize some flowers actually grow better if they’re cut, but the whole idea, especially for a wedding, sort of annoys me.

Initially I didn’t want flowers at all, but after thinking about it, I wondered if we could do some kind of steamerpunk-esque flowers, maybe with hinges, or clockwork moving parts, or… I got a little crazy in my imaginings. In fact I sort of let the whole idea go until I mentioned the idea to one of my Kims (we had two Kims and Maid of Honor Amy in the wedding) who said: “Ooh that will be so much fun, let’s do it.” Actually I’m not sure that’s how it happened, but she doesn’t read blogs so I figure I’m safe blaming her.

We took a trip to Pat Catan’s (like a cheaper version of Michaels) and just picked up a bunch of… parts. Cool metal looking buttons and beads, 3 colors of substantial foil, weird clock things, modeling clay, star sequins and all sorts of bits. We had a couple parties (by we, I mean Kim, who hosted everything) with Amy, both Kims, Jack and my brother Brian. After a bit of experimentation we gave up on the clay and mostly on the hinges. We did manage to get LED lights through the center of seven flowers on the bouquet, plus Matt’s button flower thing (whatever those are called, I refuse to try and spell it).

Making the flowers was not that bad, relatively speaking. I say this, because to be totally honest, Kim did most of the work. We rigged the bouquet up with a switch so I could turn the lights off, but the wiring got messed up somewhere and it didn’t work. We managed to “fix” it so that it was permanently on instead. I’m not sure when they eventually burned out, but when we got back from the honeymoon they were still burning bright.

There were three kinds of flowers: the lilies made from gold foil, the- I dunno- flower-flowers in copper foil, and the baby’s breath.

The baby’s breath was the easiest, though most tedious, and this is the only flower I ended up working on. All we did was take some of the thin jewelry wire, twist a couple silver or gold star confetti/sequins on the end, and twist it off. Eventually Kim discovered that it made more sense to do this seven or eight times per strand which saved a lot of time. This was somewhat unsatisfying, since the yield per time was pretty low, but they looked extremely cool. I think real baby’s breath is pretty useless stuff, but this shiny delicate spray was something else altogether. Kim made a more continuous strand of this as well, which she twisted in my hair.

The copper flowers were also pretty simple, and invented by the other Kim.

They cut copper foil into roughly flower shaped bits, folded away the sharp edges, and crinkled, then used the jewelry wire to thread on a textured silver button and twisted the whole thing onto cooking skewers.

The lilies were a bit more complicated as we wanted them to light up. Kim (the first Kim) used the gold and silver foil to cut out shapes the same way you would for paper flowers, but slightly more angular to keep with the metal look. As a plus, they kept their shape much easier than paper.

We wired up some long strands to the LED bulbs, gave them twisty stems from the thicker gauge wire, stuck them in the center of each flower, and sort of… sewed the whole thing together with the jewelry wire.

This was all far more complicated then it sounds, but it turned out amazingly beautiful. The guys got silver foil cala lily button flower things, with confetti/sequin deely-bob centers. These were much easier. Matt got another normal lily with copper foil, a light in the center, and the sole hinge, because we discovered that was just too much of a pain in the neck to do it for all the lilies. The bouquet took a CR2032 watch battery messily taped up in the center (we covered it with leather ribbon to make it pretty, and Matt’s took a very small watch battery (he doesn’t remember the serial number and I never knew it).

I was sort of shocked at how beautiful the flowers ended up; after buying three giant bags of STUFF I suddenly became positive that they were going to look like crappy cheesy foil things made of a bunch of… well, stuff. Instead they looked amazing. The end result of the flowers was AWESOME, in the literal sense, awe inspiring (I can say this since Kim made most of them).

We used the rest of the random craft bits to make charm bracelets for Amy, Kim, Kim and my sister-in-law Jen (just to clarify, she was not my sister-in-law at the time, being Matt’s sister) who was also in the wedding.

Which brings us to

2. Centerpieces

We wanted a non-traditional wedding. We got a priestess to marry us, I had henna (and am clearly not Indian, nor any other ethnicity that can claim it as heritage) Indian food, an Irish-punkrock band, had the ceremony AND reception in a zoo, and metal flowers we made ourselves. Also, I wore a blue dress, not white, and everyone else wore pretty much whatever they wanted.

So we clearly wanted to do things a little differently, and for that matter, not spend hours of our lives struggling with the decorations (we failed there, but oh well).

The wedding favors were just boxes of animal crackers in the old school Barnum boxes, which was possibly the easiest part of whole thing even with hand written labels (it ended up being easier than printing them believe it or not). The centerpieces presented a dilemma though.

There are ton of low cost, simple centerpieces that would have looked great, but I was unsure how much light there would be in the building, and thought local lights might be a good idea. We considered using those stupid dancing animals and creatures that hook up to ipods, hoping they’d light up and dance to the Irish music, but we weren’t sure we could make them work, and honestly they’d be small enough that they probably would have ended up looking kinda dumb in the middle of the table. The simplest (and probably least expensive) solution would have been a bunch of candles. I’ve seen a few arrangements online that are cheap and beautiful, but the zoo was kinda iffy about open flame, even in candles, and we didn’t feel like messing with it.

Soooo… I suggested light up trees. Because THAT’S easy.

Ikea had some cool LED lamps that inspired my idea, only they’re something like $60 which seemed like more than we wanted to pay, and are actually a bit larger then made any sense. So we collected various online guides to LED creations (couldn’t find any of the initial links we used, but guides are pretty easy to find) and got started. The construction was, in theory, simple. Wire frames (gauge about the same as a coat hanger, maybe a bit thicker) twisted together at the trunk, then branching out for the… branches. Long single strands of insulated wire with LEDs soldiered to the end, taped once around the connections, wound around the wire branches then taped again to hold them on the end.

Matt ordered some C battery holders, we got more switches (and these actually worked) we stuck in the batteries, taped the exposed wire with electrical tape, taped the whole battery mess with clear packing tape (to protect any unnoticed exposed parts) then stuck the whole thing in a glass cylinder and filled the whole thing with silver tinsel (which is why we needed to be so careful with the tape… the tinsel is actually made of metal and could cause some problems).

(BTW… worst definition EVER of cylinder: “Geometry. a surface or solid bounded by two parallel planes and generated by a straight line moving parallel to the given planes and tracing a curve bounded by the planes and lying in a plane perpendicular or oblique to the given planes.” from dictionary.com. I knew what a cylinder was before reading it, now I have no idea.)

I will say right off, that they looked fantastic on the tables at the zoo. There turned out to be plenty of light in the room, but they gave great mood lighting and may be the only centerpieces in the history of weddings that disappeared without the desperate couple urging guests, “please, take them!”

Matt and I managed to snag two (the one from our table was a bit different so I wanted one of the normal ones as well) but it took some effort to make sure we got them. I will also say that Jack and Kim once again came through like champs, letting us bury their home under wiring components for what might have been weeks.

The major thing I must say though, is that by the time we were almost finished with the second tree, we all wanted to scream, and if we hadn’t already paid money for all the electrical components (more than planned) and if we hadn’t been weeks away from the wedding, with no time really to come up with something better, we would have abandoned the whole thing to the depths of craft hell.

Oh yeah. Also. Our friends are amazing.

Anyway, Matt and I couldn’t really give up, and our friends were as mentioned, amazing, and stuck with us (possibly because it was the only way to get all the wiring crap out of their house, but still) so we sort of assembly lined it and eventually got all 10 trees finished (doesn’t sound like much, does it? You have NO idea).

I didn’t end up doing any of the wiring on this one either, instead I did all the tree structures (gloves and goggles both very necessary). With all the loose wires, batteries, and tape, the house looked like a bomb factory.

Each tree had 15 bulbs. We soldered all the positive wire ends together in one clump and the negative ends in another, then soldered them in place with the battery holders. As they were being put together, I started to worry that they all looked freakish, then decided I didn’t care, and eventually, realized they looked quite nice even if they didn’t quite look like my initial designs. I suppose the frustration was worth it, but if we’d known, we definitely would have chosen something easier.

Even so, I suppose as wedding work and wedding frustration and wedding decoration and wedding flowers goes, Matt and I got off pretty easy. I say weeks, but actually we got the trees done in just a few LONG sessions. Most of the wedding party chipped in to help with at least a bit, and Kim did most of the bouquet herself (she claims she enjoyed it, so I try not to feel too guilty). If we’d had ten friends (and maybe 5 soldiering irons) helping with the trees, we probably could have done it in a couple hours. As it was, the centerpieces ended up being the biggest headache of the whole wedding, so really, I guess I shouldn’t complain.

3. Other Bits

The flowers and trees were really the only wedding things we made ourselves (well that and our vows) but there were all sorts of other things provided by others.

When we mentioned we needed a broom (to jump over) for the ceremony, Kim (the other Kim) volunteered to make one, using broom grass and other plants from her garden. She tied everything together with cooper wire which sort of connected it with the flowers and centerpieces and all. My brother dug up a staff I’d picked up on a camping trip, left at his house and forgotten all about. The result was lovely, not quite dried, and is now hanging on our bedroom door (dry!) until we figure out where else we can put it. It looks very welcoming there, and we’d love to leave it where it is, but it gets a bit battered with all the opening and closing, so we should really put it somewhere safer soon.

I think I covered most of the other makers in posts last year, but just to re-mention… here goes:

There was the intricate henna for all the girls done by Lisa (also the person who married us) and then the gilding for me on the wedding day. Jeff, a talented local jeweler, custom made our rings from our ideas and his own, giving us something completely unique, and perfect for the two of us. Amy put together a surprisingly fun bridal shower (bridal showers are not my idea of fun) in spite of my inability to give her addresses until the very last minute. Kim (first Kim) helped me turn my dress from something shapeless to a surprisingly pretty roman looking thing (I’ve always said my dream wedding dress was one of the dresses Lucilla wears in Gladiator). The band we found (a month before the wedding!), the Mickey’s, kicked ass Irish rock style. The lady (owner I think) from Create-A-Cake listened patiently to my out there cake ideas, looked politely at unlikely sketches, turned them into something actually possible, and even seemed excited about it, which is always a plus. India Garden catered with super yummy Indian food and ended up taking over ALL the food and service details that Matt and I hadn’t really considered (table cloths, utensils, plates, servers, food warmers… they even provided plates for the cake) AND they gave me roses which was just amazingly sweet. Our family provided support and funding, which gave us the opportunity to have a dream wedding and honeymoon both. Finally, our friends John and Holly TOOK OVER the day-of planning, acting as guides for the guests and participants alike. Their generous intervention is probably all that saved our wedding from our lack of planning, which, I’ll be honest, was vast. They also found us our photographer, their daughter Willow, who did an amazing job.

I think that’s the real reason I wanted to post this today (and to be clear, I absolutely did NOT write it today, I’m busy celebrating with my husband). There are so many amazing people in our lives. I think of people I know with “frenemies” and I can’t imagine why. I read about people who cringe at their in-laws and am extremely grateful that I actually love mine. I guess everyone’s wedding is special to them, but I think ours will stay special to us, because it was about so many more people than just Matt and I. We have wonderful people to love and to love us, and we are both so thankful. Happy Anniversary.
*photos by Willow, Jack, Amy, etc.

Last year’s Wedding Posts:
Wild Wedding – Part 1 (posed photos)
Wild Wedding – Prepare (henna)
Wild Wedding – The Ceremony
Wild Wedding – Party Time
Celebrate (a VERY short honeymoon journal)

Slinking Suburbs

I heard a story on NPR the other day (ok, maybe the other week) about a weird trend in recent post bubble real estate, where realtors pay ACTORS to pretend to be neighbors in suburbs, with staged barbecues and invitations to nonexistent little league games, so that an empty neighborhood would seem to have people living there on Open House day. The feeling I got from the story, and that I get hearing people talk about suburbs in general, is that does not just represent the dishonesty of some realtors, it is an example of an atmosphere of duplicity that is increasingly associated with the suburbs in general.

Why does everyone hate the suburbs? Why have the suburbs come to represent all that is evil, all that is fake, soccer moms and security moms and helicopter parents and materialism? This annoys me, because as Matt and I start looking for a house I find myself having to defend our choice to look in pure suburbia.

Really I know the whys. One of the first culprits is Tim Burton. More specifically, Edward Scissorhands. I’m sure this movie wasn’t the first vision of suburban sameness, but the uniformly green grassed sameness has come to be part of popular consciousness, whether people realize it or not. The creepy echoes in Buron’s invented neighborhood are a fairly accurate reflection of many developments in post 1960s America, but they just as well describe the world of Camazots from Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. Not exactly positive associations, as was clearly intended.

And that’s fine. The artificiality being satired in Edward Scissorhands absolutely exists, and it can often be found in the suburbs. The problem I have is with the modern assumption that the suburbs are the cause. I grew up in Eugene, Oregon, a small enough city that it might as well be a suburb of itself. In my memory I lived in two different houses that were both cookie-cutter floorplans resulting from Eugene’s relatively rapid expansion. In spite of this supposed “sameness,” there was NEVER during my childhood, any sense of conformity in the homes around me. I’ve seen developments where the only difference from one house to the next is the paint color or a window shape, or a brick pattern. In the neighborhoods where I grew up, there was no need to fight for differentiation, because in spite of the repeated architecture, there was no standard look that the residents needed to fight against or conform to.

The sameness we find, I think comes from desire rather than actual similarities. The reason is not the location (suburbs), it’s that keeping-up-with-the-Joneses race that probably helped get us into the whole real estate mess in the first place. I need a bigger, more perfect house, because the neighbors have one. He needs a BMW because his cousin just bought one. It’s stupid, and it has nothing to do with a place, it has everything to do with people.

Matt and I eventually want to live in a house with a bit of land around it, in a safe neighborhood, with decent schools (since we’ll eventually be having kids) and less than an hour commute to the city. These are really not ridiculous wants, and the obvious answer, the only answer, is the suburbs. We hope to keep a garden that grows as much of our food as possible, maybe put up some solar panels or even small windmills, to keep energy costs down. I grew up with a backyard and I want my kids to have one too. We’d like some sort of woodland nearby. Basically, we want a compromise between urban and rural living.

If the human race is to survive into the 23th century, or the 30th century, I imagine someday we’ll all end up living in cities. This is (or could be) the most sustainable way to live, and at some point we won’t have a choice. In suburbs, people use hours worth of gas daily getting to and from work, burn up heat in poorly insulated homes, and spend gallons of water on uselessly green lawns. Maybe that’s why living in the suburbs is so detestable: the seizing of privacy, of space, of control and resources may well be selfish. I am occasionally drawn to the idea of living in an urban environment, with rooftop gardens and shops downstairs. There is appeal, until I remember that I can’t breathe after a few hours in New York, that I get itchy when I hear my neighbors through paper-thin walls, that the only thing I would own of the outside is a door. Someday I hope, large buildings will be planned with more public space, more green space, more space in general to keep us sane. Right now urban living is fun for some, but not a life I can imagine.

Ultimately, the life I’m seeking may not be sustainable. Suburbs, and most rural life, may fade away as energy sources dwindle and people are forced to huddle together for conservation. My response to that is to try and make a life with as small a footprint as possible, mainly to assuage the guilt that we’re contributing to the problem. I do think it’s possible to enjoy living in a dense population, I just don’t think it’s possible for me, today. I can only hope that by the time we have no choice, urban designers have come up with ways to make living wall to wall more tolerable.

*First photo by Wildernice, all others by me.

Flying

I haven’t even gotten around to drawing last week’s Illustration Friday theme, “germs” (I really wanted to do that one but I probably won’t) but I’ve got something old-ish for this week’s theme, “flying.”

Probably a better title would be falling but…I drew this image after reading Rogue Planet (a Star Wars book) by Greg Bear. Anakin is about 12 or so, getting sort of bored with the Jedi life, and seeking adventure. In one of the opening scenes he finds out about an underground race that takes place I think in the sewers of Coruscant, using these sort of winged jet-pack things. It sounded like super-enhanced hanggliding. It really just needed to be drawn.

I went for a sort of Icarus feel for the composition, and I was happy with the result, particularly the perspective. Unfortunately I rushed the background and kind of ruined it. It does have a nice raw feeling, and there is a sense of motion, but it’s just too messy to be very effective. Maybe some day I’ll cut out the surviving sections and start over.

Fan Girl (me)

On Sunday, Matt and I went to see Neil Gaiman reading at Cleveland Public Library. Amazingly, this event was free. I mean, I would have paid to see Neil read, but free is fantastic. Our libraries rock.

Anyway, Matt is wonderfully supportive of my fan-girl-ness. It probably helps that he is also a big fan of Neil Gaiman’s writing and comic books.

I wasn’t sure what to expect in terms of crowd. I figured either, yeah, it’s Neil Gaiman, so they’ll be lining up around the block (this is what actually happened) or this is Cleveland, so no one will find out about it, and there will be fourteen people in a huge auditorium yelling, “we love you Neil!”

There ended being over a thousand people, all radiating happiness and hero worship. Neil’s fans are an odd assortment of hippie-craftsters, goths, metal-biker types and general misfits, most of which are much friendlier than they look. The book worm connection probably helped. Matt, who is usually by far the social one in our pairing, accused me of being a social butterfly for once.

It’s just easier to talk to people who are a bit batty over fantasy and such. Cult audiences are so much fun. Also, yes. A real bat got into the building, which seemed fitting.

Neil is super friendly, which didn’t surprise me, but he is also rather adorable, which did. The grim visage he carries around doesn’t really translate in person.

We got to hear the first ever reading (I think) of Odd and the Frost Giants, a short novel he wrote for World Book Day, which I’d never even heard of until yesterday (the day, not the book, but actually, I’d never heard of either).

Apparently authors and publishers put out 100 page books for free, children are given book tokens and get to choose from (I think) 9 books. I’d never heard of it because it’s the world OUTSIDE of the US. Shame, it sounds like a good idea.
Neil and his undead army. Actually they’re Oberlin students, and I had a brighter picture, but I liked the zombie look.

There were enough people that not everyone fit in the main room, which I think held about 700 people.

Another few hundred peopel were shuffled into an overflow room across the hall, where I suppose they watched on TV screens. Still more were turned away entirely. Matt and I got there just before noon, and managed to get great seats in the middle. During the question and answer section, Neil made sure to gett a couple questions from the overflow room, which was cool of him. He also took a few questions from kids, (there were quite a few in the audience) including “do you remember signing a girl’s foot in Portland?” which was pretty entertaining.

He got a standing ovation, which is predictable these days, but I’d say he actually deserved it, which is less common. He’s a fantastic speaker, and of course most of his fans already know he’s a wonderful reader. I’ve listened to his audio books before, but I was still sort of amazed at his vocal range with characters, particularly reading Odd and the Frost Giants. I really did feel as though I were a little kid again, listening to the bear voices in a faerie tale. Afterwards he signed books and possibly feet.

Actually he’s a saint. He signed for everyone that wanted something. I’m not sure what time he left, but Matt and I finally made it out with our signed books at about 6 pm, and I know Neil was supposed to leave to catch a plane at 4:30. So yeah. Saint.

In high fan-girl fashion, I drew Neil a picture, hoping I’d have a chance to give it to him. I’d planned to draw something from one of his short stories, but I couldn’t settle on anything so I ended up doing a caricature of Neil. As he put it: “Oh it’s me! Beekeeping! With a 3 headed Cabal!” So I think he liked it, even though my friend Jack told me I was being creepy.

I made his head too big, and the dog’s body is a little confusing (but I suppose it would be) and actually the front dog head looks like a Corgi, which Cabal certainly is not. And don’t even ask about the futuristic bee hive.

I wanted him to be grabbing something out of the air, and I eventually settled on star anise. I tried to think of what an idea might look like, and this seemed like a good representation: half seed, half star.

His cloak of course is a nod at the Sandman’s getup, and I was trying to make his hat look a bit like Odin’s cap, but honestly that’s pretty much what beekeeper’s hats look like anyway, so I’m not sure I succeeded.

It was an amazing day and I got to give Neil my drawing, and we got some books signed, and hear part of a new story, and get a teaser about what he’s working on now, and generally hear him talk about what he does and what it’s like. It was an unbelievable way to spend a day, especially sharing it with Matt. Even if I didn’t get to eat more than a cookie and a half between waking up and 7 pm dinner. I’m still a bit giddy, and emotianlly drained from being giddy all day yesterday. Totally worth it.