Musings
an Online Journal of Sorts

By Alyce Wilson

The Mario Brothers and their many mad props

It just occurred to me that I left out something that happened on Sunday at Otakon. Close to the end of the day, The Gryphon asked me to help look after some lost children. They had been brought to Con Ops by a staffer when the Dealers' Room closed. Apparently, they were cousins and the father of the girl had told them to meet him in the Dealers' Room at the close of the day. He must not have realized the Dealers' Room closed earlier than the rest of the BCC.

A couple of staff members were already helping out. I was really impressed with one of them; she was really good with kids and was keeping them comfortable and entertained. I'll nickname her Brigid, after the ancient goddess known for a host of seemingly conflicting characteristics, including healing, fertility, the arts and the eternal flame inside every woman. Another source says she is fertility, the hearth, all feminine arts and crafts, and the martial arts, which just seems to suit this person perfectly.

She was teaching them, for example, about astrology and what their different signs meant about how they probably got along with each other. The Gryphon got from them information to aid the search, such as details about the father, including what style badge he was wearing. To help determine that, I got samples of all the different badges and then gave each of the kids a full set as a souvenir.

Since there was already both a male and female staffer watching the children, I took a bathroom break. As I was coming back, I saw a little girl squatting down, her head in her arms on the information desk, crying. Nobody was currently at the information desk, so I asked her what was wrong.

She looked up, with a tearstained face, and told me that her friend was missing and had been gone for hours. Figuring it was yet another missing child case, I told her to follow me and took her into the same room where the missing children were sitting, to let The Gryphon know we had another one.

But the little girl, crying just moments before, gave an exclamation of surprise, ran across the room and embraced the little girl in the kimono whose father we were trying to find. She burst out with a jumble of excited words, about how she knew where the father was and they had to go meet up with him right away.

We had them wait until we could let some people know what was going on. The Gryphon informed Spec Ops, who had been searching for her, that the child's guardian was apparently located. We got a group together to accompany them, just to make sure they did, indeed, get reunited.

He was slumped against a wall in the Sharp Street Lobby, apparently tired out but not looking terribly concerned. He looked a bit like a young Roy Orbison. I was walking with the boy and was the first to reach him, along with The Gryphon. Brigid was following behind with the two girls. The father, taking a look at Brigid, who like the goddess I've nicknamed her for, was blonde and shapely, and said, "Who's the blonde?"

We told him she was a staff member and had been helping us to take care of the children. The girl with the kimono, meanwhile, ran up to her father and embraced him. But just to make absolutely certain, The Gryphon spoke to him to confirm his identity before leaving the children with him. All was well; we had reunited the family.

The funny part is that until I found the crying girl at the Info Desk, I was certain my presence was extraneous, since Brigid was doing such a good job of minding the children.

The head of programming came by and said hi to us, striking a thoughtful pose for my camera because I made the mistake of getting his attention instead of just taking a candid pose.

Afterwards, we were waiting for our friend, The Pirate. I'm nicknaming him this because I can see him being equally comfortable boarding a ship with a cutlass or rescuing a stranger from the sea. We were going to give him a ride to his car, which was parked in the Baltimore suburbs. That's when the Flood Deluge happened.

What apparently happened was that a pipe for one of the toilets pulled out of the wall and water gushed out of the women's room into the hallway, soaking the carpets and threatening to flood the lobby.

The hotel employees didn't seem to know what to do. One of them ran in with a sponge mop, as if that would help deal with all that water. The Pirate and Brigid rushed up to find out the cause of the problem and what they could do. When they determined what had happened, The Pirate commandeered some hotel staff and told them they had to go down to the basement and turn off the water main right then.

This was apparently a difficult task, because no one, including the hotel manager, knew where it was. But The Pirate found it and crawled up into a source, hitting his head on a pipe as he did so but managing to shut it off. He returned with a small cut to his head, which Brigid checked out and then, seeing it was very minor, told him to hold a clean tissue to it until the bleeding slowed.

The rest of us, of course, stood by and took pictures.

The crisis averted, we got The Pirate in the car and drove him to his car. He led us back toward the exit we'd take, making hand gestures out the window to indicate the turn until he saw us taking the exit. Then he gave us a cheery good-bye wave.

After the convention, The Gryphon, it seemed, finally let the emotions of the weekend catch up. I think he'd been in crisis mode for so long, worrying about everybody else, so that he didn't realize he, too, had been stressed. He, too, had gone through an emotional roller coaster and needed to decompress.

In his case, I'd tried to provide him with emotional support and continued to do so. I assured him that he'd done a great job and should be proud of how he had helped the staffers under his supervision. It didn't take long for other compliments to find their way to him, and that's when his talk started to turn from frustrations to ideas for how to fix things for next year.

Even though I had a relatively easy time of it emotionally, I discovered there were subconscious emotions that hadn't caught up until after the con. This was revealed through a particularly vivid dream I had late last week. I dreamt that I had been elected to a position of power in a legislative body on which I had served in the past but had taken a break. I was actually looking forward to making some real changes, such as pushing for environmental legislation. But after serving a short time on the body, I became disheartened, seeing nothing but politics. I began to complain about it, first privately, and then in an emotional, accusatory speech on the floor of the House, where I complained that most legislators didn't try to make real changes but only put a pretty bowl on the same pile of crap. At this point, I burst out crying, and I awake crying, as well. The Gryphon comforted me as I told him about the strange dream.

What does this have to do with Otakon? Well, many of the members of this legislative body were staff members who are in a position of power. I wonder if the dream reveals unconscious anxieties about the fact that I recently volunteered to reassume my role of program book editor, a position I vacated for two years, filling an assistant editor role, because it had proved too stressful for me after doing it in 2002 and 2003.

It seems as if the Otakon emotional roller coaster has come to an end, and we're beginning to embark on the yearlong process of preparing once more to board that wild ride.

More from Otakon 2005:

August 23, 2005 - All Aboard

August 24, 2005 - Going Up

August 25, 2005 - Descent

August 26, 2005 - Riding It Out

Musings on Otakon 2006:

August 8, 2006 - Bunny Ears of Command

Musings on Otakon 2004:

August 10 , 2004 - Overture to Otakon

Musings on Otakon 2003:

Day One: Down the Rabbit-Hole

Copyright 2005 by Alyce Wilson

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