Odyssey Con Goes to WorldCon

ODD CON GOES TO WORLD CON - by Jerome Van Epps

"We came, we saw, we wore a cow suit."
-Tom Havighurst

Well, for the sixth time in recorded history, World Con was in Chicago. So I decided to go with Tom, Bhim, and Tom's friend Jay. Since we were packing a lot of junk I borrowed my Dad's 1982 Lincoln Towncar (aka: "The Boat") Driving The Boat is not for whimps, the hood sticks out far enough in front for a grown man to lie down on and sleep, and forget about parallel parking, it was hard enough just to dock The Boat into a regular parking stall.

'82 Towncars may have been the last American vehicles to come with a 8-track player. (Although Tom related a rumor to me that the digital 8-track is coming out soon.) In the back my dad had a box of 8-track tapes, Montivoni and the Mills Brothers, and stuff like that, but among it was one tape of 70's funk by a group called either War or Galaxy (we don't know which is the title and which is the name of the group) which was about twenty years ahead of its time - it sounded like Fat Boy Slim. Just before we left town we picked up the newly printed T-shirts with Georgie's design at Top Promotions. The T-shirts were still warm from the press.

Boogieing to funk, we head down the tollway to Chicago. Tom did most of the driving, which was just fine with me. Our directions to get to the hotel had us after taking the Kennedy under Monroe (make your own joke here) getting off onto Wacker Drive to get to the hotel on East Wacker. Imagine our surprise when we found ourselves on South Wacker. Luckily for us, it eventual becomes North Wacker, then West Wacker and finally East Wacker. Wacker is the only road I have ever heard of which follows all four compass points.

Before the Convention, I had asked the organizers if Odyssey Con could have a promotional table set aside, and after a bunch of e-mails they said I could have a spot in the Concourse room. Well, when I got there, I could not even find the spot. I asked at the information table who was in charge and was told "John Something or Other." I went back into the room and asked somebody where "John Something or Other" was, and was told to talk to this other person, who told me he was not in charge of the room, just the tables. What exactly that means, since if you removed the tables there would not be anything there, is a mystery to me. Anyway, he lead me into the far back corner of the room, which was separated from everything by a screen to hang pictures on, and there was a spot on a table marked with a little sign that said Odyssey Con 21.

Well, Friday I set out my promotional materials and T-shirts and a couple bowls of Hersey's Kisses and Hugs. I soon discovered that carrying chocolate in a hot car trunk for four hours is not a real good idea - from the number of complaints I got about the condition of chocolate, at least from those who found me back there. It sort of reminded me of the scene from Animal House where Flounder goes to a pledge party at the popular fraternity and is lead off to a side room where they are keeping all the nerds and foreign students. After about an hour someone from WestCon came to do the table next to me, and we spent a lot of the day commiserating about how impossible it was to promote a convention stuck in the Great Outback. I did get maybe fifty to hundred people, some of whom were interested, and one guy who said that he would never go to anything located in Madison because he hated the people there, and another person, who grilled me with questions to make sure our convention had nothing to do with MadMedia and then subjected me to a tirade about everything having to do with the last MadMedia. After that day I left my promotional materials out on the table and went did other things.

At the TOR party on Friday there had been a number of heavy hitting writers and editors including Tom Doherty and David Brin, but I miss Vernor Vinge who had been there earlier. Having missed him I went to one of his panels the next day. I do think he was a little taken aback by how young I, as Con President, look. (I still get carded in bars.) He asked me if I was a student at the UW, I assured him that I am a lot older than I look. He told me that he had been born in Waunakee, which is just outside of Madison, but his parents moved away when he was very little. I invited him to our party, but unfortunately he was flying back to San Diego early Sunday night.

The hotel only allowed party posters in a few limited locations, so the primary way to publicize a party is to get it listed in the Convention newsletter, which the newsletter did, but for the wrong night, Saturday not Sunday. I did not find out about this until after the Guest of Honor speeches at 10:00 PM on Saturday Tom had already put up a sign on our door apologizing for the mistake, and we were getting ready to go out to the parties when this little woman who sounded like a Darlek from Doctor Who ("Exterminate! Exterminate!"), came up to us in the hallway. She told us that she was with the official party for the Hugo award losers, and she ordered us to put up signs by the stairwell doors and the elevator so that people who were looking for our party would not come onto the floor. It seemed that not only was she not satisfied with not letting non-guests into their party, but she did not want them on the entire floor - which was a party floor. She also added a few derogatory references to fans and how their very presence on the entire floor was offensive to Hugo nominees.

Tom told her that it was not our fault that the newsletter had made the mistake, and we had put a sign on our door, and if she wanted to put signs elsewhere, she was free to do so, to which she replied, "It's not the point whose fault it is, it's your responsibility, we don't have the tools to do it. Exterminate! Exterminate!" (Well, she may not have actually used the word exterminate.) Tom was speechless, and I had had just about all that I could take, so as I opened up the hotel room I said to her, "Okay, we'll do it. Just stop talking." (You have to wonder about a whole roomful of writers who don't have single pen and piece of paper between them.)

Having put up posters at three locations, including two locations which were against hotel rules, we went over to the parties in the other building.

The East Tower had the bigger parties, including huge bid parties for Charlotte and Toronto which ran several nights. Japan was having a bid party for 2007. Their flyer contained numerous humorous word usage's such as '... thereby ensuring that all Japanese SF fans will be working in unison toward a common goal.', and 'We believe that we now have the capability to host a Worldcon', and '... therefore more than adequate in terms of size and facilities.' The flyer very stiffly listed five factors for why the most honorable fan should select Japan for 2007, including "Modern Recreation." (Damn, and I was in mood for jousting.) Most of the problem seems to have come from the inexperience of the Japanese with American-style self promotion, they're being more comfortable calling something "satisfactory" rather than "the best" or "the greatest," but there may be something else also going on. Over at the MinniCon in '73 bid party, they had packages of Japanese candy including one which had a cartoon picture of a tiny frog handing a big bouquet of flowers to a large bearded man with a hat. (Jae thought the drawing looked like Andy Hooper.) Now why any child would want to buy a package of candy because it had on it a picture of Andy Hooper with a frog is beyond me, and then there were the corn flavored hard candies, and the curry flavored wheat puffs with a koala bear dressed up like a Mexican bandito on the box.

Bhim and I took the cow suit out for a walk on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. This time we had Tom with us to pass out flyers and take photos, and in general prevent us from bumping into walls. "Be not afraid, it is a friendly cow," he told people. Kids had either the reaction of love or fear to the cow - or both. This time to prevent from roasting to death, I didn't wear a shirt under the rear end of the costume, but even so, as I walked along, little drops of sweat went splat on the ground beneath. We even took the cow outside to get pictures of him/her in front of the Rigley Building. Nearing the end of our tour of the hotel complex we went into the ConSuite which was in a hotel bar called Mrs. O'Leary's, after the infamous woman whose cow kicking over a lantern that started the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Tom got me a beer, which I drank under the suit.

It was the middle of the afternoon by the time we got finished "doing the cow." Bhim had suggested earlier that we go to this neighborhood where they had a whole bunch of Indian restaurants, but we had to take the L to get there. I figured it would be just up the line, like Greek Town, but when we got to the station, I discovered that it was two-thirds of the way to Skokie. Once we got of the train, according to Bhim it was a short walk. It was a hot sunny day and we had been walking through what is not Chicago's most attractive neighborhood for about five minutes when I asked Bhim how many more blocks it was - fifteen. Now, at this point you have to realize that there are eight Chicago blocks to the mile! The only thing I had to eat all day was an orange, and did I mention that it was hot and sunny? HOT and sunny.

After about twenty minutes, I was ready to go into the first McDonald's and call it a day. Then there was a sign, an actual sign, that said Vinge's Pizzeria. Actually it said Vince's Pizzeria, but the C looked more like a G. Tom who had noticed it first said, "Vinge's Pizzeria, lutefisk counts as two toppings." (Tom took a picture.) Now if this was fiction we would have at this point eaten at Vinge's Pizzeria and had some sort of ironic yet life affirming experience, but instead we trudged on for another eight blocks. We finally found a good and cheap Pakistani restaurant where we had mango lassi and an assortment of curries. It was a good thing we asked to be served fast when we got there, because while we ate, two other tables of patrons left because the service was so slow. Picking up some fresh food across the street for the party that evening, we took a taxi back, just in time to set up for the party.

Sunday, the newsletter correctly listed the time and place of our party. However, interestingly enough, it also said that we were having the party again on Monday night - after the end of the convention. Among the decorations, we had taken the cow costume head and stuck it over a lamp in the place of a lamp shade, the light shined out of the eyes and mouth in an either a humorous or disturbing manner - depending on your point of view. You could spin it around on the stand like Linda Blair's head in The Exorcist, - "milk me, milk me."

The costume contest started at the same time as our party, so with our guests we watched it on the in-house television channel. Of the 38 costumes, about a dozen were from a group called the Lunatic Fringe which was using black and white spotted cow fabric in its costumes. All evening long, people coming to our party accused us of being somehow involved with that particular desecration of fandom because of our cow T-shirts. About 11:30, a crowd of the aforementioned cow-costumed people showed up and gave us a big rousing "moo!"

I had invited our other guest of honor, Jack L. Chalker, to our party. Chalker is big aficionado of ferry boats and navigation in general, and he had recently slipped and injured his leg on a ferry, and so was not getting around very well, so he said he was probably going to stick to one or two parties for the evening. I was pleasantly surprised when he showed up at about 9:00. He announced he could only stay for a few minutes, but he ended up staying three hours and seemed to have a great time. We had a big pile of his own books on the table next to his armchair. (I had to raid the PhilCon party down the hall to get a Diet Pepsi for him, since we had neglected to buy enough diet soda.)

All in all it was a good party, everyone enjoyed themselves, we sold a number of memberships and T-shirts, and generated more interest in what we were trying to do. (It helped that Vernor Vinge won the Hugo.) Several people we contacted there have signed on to help with programming.

The party was still going strong at 2:15, but Jay was dead tired, and the room was under his name, so I told everyone left to take it down the hall to the PhilCon party. Free of my host duties, I found a Chicago woman I knew from MadMedia, who took me over to the invitation only Science Fiction Writers of America party, but before I had time to even drink in the heady air, she decided to head off someplace else. (She asked me "who does me?", but unfortunately she was not talking about sex.)

Getting home Monday night, I was dead tired. The next morning, cow suit in tow, I almost missed my bus to Milwaukee and slept on the way over. About 3:30 that afternoon I was at my computer when I suddenly thought, "The cow! I don't have the cow suit!" I called up the bus station, which had the suit that I had left on the bus. I am sure they got a real chuckle out of that one.

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Last Updated 1/25/2001