WisCon Day 2 May 26, 2007 – Posted in: Aberrant Normalcy

More alcohol last night. Less hungover today. Must be the first signs of alcoholism.

Let’s see, Mercurio and I walked around Madison in the morning and got to see the very beautiful capitol building here. Later, I helped Gavin set up the Small Beer Press table and went out to lunch with him and David Schwartz and a woman whose name I unfortunately forgot. We ate at a nice little Indian restaurant and talked about chat-bots, sexual predators, and why older men tend to slap women on their behinds. I did not hear a satisfactory answer. In the dealer room I met Ekaterina Sedia face to face for the first time and we moved down to the bar to have a nice conversation over beer about gender and literature.

I watched John Klima’s Electric Velocipede table for a few hours before the opening ceremonies. Any explanation I might give won’t do justice to the opening ceremony. But imagine a combination of a one act play written by the Interstitial Arts Foundation and a song called the “Rainbow Convention” sung to the tune “Rainbow Connection” that Kermit the Frog made so famous and you might have an idea.

We saw Eugene Myers read two flash pieces along with his Clarion Alumni, including the talented Cat Rambo. Ada, the birthday woman of honor, provided home-made mead. She told us she had given the mead to her son and I praised her for her parenting.

After the reading the drinking began in full force again. I wandered into the karaoke room where I got to hear Tempest sing before a dancing crowd. She was fab-tastic. While I chatted up lots of people and kept refilling my glass (are you surprised?) we waited for Stephen Segal to get his chance to sing. Two hours and still no turn, we decided to venture upstairs to the parties.

But, I got into a very interesting conversation with Rick Bowes about the old New York and we ended up chatting in the hallway for nearly an hour. I finally wandered down to the party where I saw our Altered Fluid alumnus, James Thomas, and his wife Ysabeau Wilce. He moved to Chicago a few years ago and it was good to see him happy and well.

I sat on Tempest’s lap while I tried to convince Stephen Segal of the importance of Fantasy magazine. Later I will find out if my rants were drunken or coherent, or hopefully somewhere in between. At last, at some point, I discovered the hallways had emptied, the parties, slowed. I did, reluctantly, shuffle off to bed.

Day two down. Now, panels begin. Wish us luck.