So, today is the first day of August, and you know what that means!
BLOG EVERYDAY IN AUGUST! Otherwise known as BEDA. I missed the BEDA in April so I decided to participate this month. August this year is going to be a pretty big month for me. A lot is happening that I'm used to, like sitting around the house doing nothing, but there are going to be a lot of firsts for me this month as well. I'll get to those as they come, but this first post of August is going to be the continuation of the last couple days of my Awesome Summer of Awesome trip. So, without further ado...
Day 3: Infinitus. We woke up that morning at about 8, left at 9 and got to the Royal Pacific at around 9:30. Amy and Caitlin immediately sat themselves down outside the Pacific Ballroom 7, which was where the A Very Potter Sequel showing was going to be held, pulled out their laptops and promptly started posting pictures. They told us that we could walk around and do whatever we wanted to, so Kelly and Jennie and I decided to head over to the Vendor room at 10.
As we killed time before 10, I discovered where to pick up our Infinitus shirts, and we also met this really cool guy whose shirt said "Neville would have done it in 4 books." I love Neville, as everyone knows, so I had to talk to this dude. He ended up being really nice and cool.
At 10, we walked around the corner into another hallway and into the Vendor room. The previous day, I had received a Tweet to my phone saying that the wrock band Ministry of Magic, as well as Skyway Flyer and ALL CAPS, would be in the Vendor room at 10 for an hour, so Kelly and I were jumping out of our skins since MoM is our favorite wrock band of all time ever. So we go in, and walk around looking at all the stands selling stuff, but nowhere did we find Jason, Luke, Aaron, Ryan, Mark or Kristina. We soon left, feeling a little disappointed, but vowed that we'd check often in case they showed up.
We headed back to the others, pulled out our laptops and proceeded to post our own pictures, but I soon gave up because my iPhoto didn't want to cooperate. Kelly and I decided to try another trip to the Vendor room to kill time before the Wizard Rock Writing panel that we wanted to go to.
So we go in the room this time and, lo and behold, Jason Munday (Ministry of Magic, Skyway Flyer) was behind a table setting up some merch. Kelly and I just about burst from excitement and hurried immediately over to his table to talk. We ended up buying his Skyway Flyer CD, which was a great find for me, since I was convinced that I wouldn't be able to buy it until school started, and a Ministry of Magic poster. He signed both for us, and then was kind enough to take a picture with us (note Kelly's freaked out happy face in the picture below). I'm such a huge Jason fangirl, so I felt like a little bit of a creeper as I asked him questions, but he seemed totally fine with it, which made me feel better =]
So we were about to leave happily, when Kelly noticed that Luke Conard (Ministry of Magic, ALL CAPS) had also arrived at the table to help with MoM merch and set up his ALL CAPS table, and Kelly and I pounced again! He signed our poster and took a picture with us, all the while Kelly almost dying from love for him, and we asked him if he knew if Kristina was going to show up later (his girlfriend and fellow ALL CAPS member). He said he didn't, but was pretty sure she was at the pool at their hotel (which I later learned, from reading her blog, was exactly the case xD). Either way, Kelly and I were very happy as we left the room.
It was just about time to line up for the Wizard Rock Writing panel when we got back to the others, so just hopped in the shorter of the two lines across the hall. It started at 11 in one of the smaller rooms, and they let us in about 5 minutes before it started (there weren't many of us). The main attraction at that time, the official photoshoot with Team Starkid, was right next door, and the line was sooooo long that I was actually kind of grateful that I hadn't bought a photo with them...
So we go into the room for the panel and sit down in the front row. The girl who was supposed to be giving it, Lena Gabrielle from the wrock band The Butterbeer Experience, has, in my opinion, one of the best voices in the genre, but I was kind of sad to find out that this summer was the last time she was going to tour because she just had surgery for vocal nodules, so I was excited to be able to see her in any capacity. So we were waiting for a good ten minutes past 11, when some of the volunteers came up to the front and said that no one was able to get in touch with her and that they were going to probably cancel the panel. They ended up doing just that, which then made me very sad, but considering what else we got to do at 12:30, I am ultimately grateful for it.
We went back to the line only to find Amy and Caitlin picking up all their things. Very confused, we asked them what was going on, and Caitlin said that some volunteers, in particular this one redhead, had come up to them and all but yelled at them for trying to form the AVPS line early. Then they actually talked about them within earshot, and Caitlin lost it. She told them off for being rude, and they told us this when we got back. I was pretty proud of her for standing up for them =]
Anyway, they moved to the other side of the doors to Ballroom 7 to start the line there, since they'd decided that they would take the line going in that direction. A line had been forming behind them for some other event, and we asked some volunteers what was about to happen in there, and they told us the Harry Potter Alliance press conference. Kelly and I instantly knew we wanted to go, so they allowed us to take Amy and Caitlin's spot, which just happened to be the very front of the line. They opened the doors at 12, and the three of us SPRINTED to the front. They had originally blocked off the first two rows for reserved seating, but they let us fill in those two rows once it was clear that no one was going to take them.
So there we were, front row for the awarding of $250k to my favorite charity. The Harry Potter Alliance had entered a contest held by Chase Bank Community Giving to win a grand prize of $250,000 to help them achieve more. The contest was entirely vote based, and I had voted for them a couple weeks before the conference. As the days of the contest drew to a close, I really started advocating for them all over Facebook and Twitter, and they pulled out ahead of everyone by a very, very small margin at the last second and won! We got the news probably three days before the conference, so it was truly perfect timing for this contest, and they were scrambling around trying to fit in a press conference at Infinitus, and they settled on 12:30 on Saturday. SO LUCKY!
Before anything actually started, Kelly and I went up to Matt Maggiacomo from the Whomping Willows band and asked for pictures, which was totally cool. He seemed really laid back, albeit excited since he's one of the Ambassadors for the Harry Potter Alliance, and was going to get to sit up on the stage with the rest of the HPA officials.
So it started off with co-founder, Andrew Slack, who gave a very enlightening speech about inspiration and Harry Potter and such. Various members of the organization spoke, as did a representative from Chase Bank, and then they were presented with a giant check!! There was such an amazing energy in the room, everyone was so inspired and happy for them. At the very end, co-founder Paul DeGeorge from the wrock band Harry and the Potters broke out his guitar and engaged the audience in a version of his song "The Weapon." The organization's slogan "The weapon we have is love" came from that song, and it was such a powerful moment to see an entire ballroom full of people singing one song that meant so much to everyone present. It was truly a wonderful moment.
So after the press conference, Kelly and I returned to the Vendor room for something to do, and we found that more members from Ministry of Magic had showed up! Mark Jennings, aka Voldemark, and Ryan Seiler, the two additions to the band in 2008, were there, and I freaked out, because Mark literally has the best voice ever, so I fangirled really hard xD
So we went up to them and asked for pictures, and they were really super nice. We ended up talking to them and Luke and Jason again, when I then looked to my left and I almost died.
Alex. Freaking. Carpenter.
That's right ladies and gents, Alex Carpenter from The Remus Lupins walked into the Vendor room. I squealed, "Oh my god, Alex!" to Kelly and ran off in pursuit of a picture. I felt kind of bad randomly bombarding him as soon as he got in the room, but then I remembered how famous he is at cons, and knew that if I had waited any longer, he would have a line out the door. So Kelly reluctantly left Luke and followed me to take my picture with him. He seemed a little dazed when I first asked him, but he was really very nice about it (he's probably had worse fangirls than me actually glomp him, so I guess I'm not so bad =P ). That's me and him:
After that, we went back to the ballroom to find Lauren from The Moaning Myrtles and the popular Youtube channel, fiveawesomegirls. Kelly and I got super excited since we watch 5AG religiously, so we asked for a picture with her too. She was so sweet. When we asked her, she was like, "As long as you don't mind that I look like this," and Kelly and I protested profusely. She looked adorable, as always.
So at this point, there was a huge signing going on in the Vendor room for Team Starkid, the group of students from UMich that created A Very Potter Musical and A Very Potter Sequel, the showing of which was later that day and, honestly, the whole reason we'd come to the con in the first place. Caitlin and I really wanted to get their autographs, so I grabbed my program book which had come with registration and had some autograph pages, left Kelly and Jennie with Amy, and we got in line. The line literally snaked all the way around the corner of the hallway, so we ended up waiting like, 50 minutes or something to get in.
As we were waiting in line, Alex Carpenter passed us, and I asked him for an autograph, since I didn't have anything for him to sign when we got a picture.
So we got into the Vendor room like, 5 minutes before the signing was over and they were all sitting there in front of us. Darren Criss, Joey Richter, Bonnie Grueson, Lauren Lopez, every member of Team Starkid right in front of my eyes, not just on my computer screen! I almost died when Caitlin and I actually had a conversation with Lauren Lopez! I got some pictures of them, and spoke to most of them, and they were all really frazzled from the sheer number of autographs they'd had to sign, but they were all incredibly nice. It was amazing.
So the two of us returned to the AVPS line, which had officially been open, and found the other three. When we got there, however, we saw that there was suddenly this whole huge number of people in front of us in line, when we had specifically been situated the entire day so that we were in the front of the line. We were all really confused, so Amy told us when we found them that they'd changed what door they were going to use, which was farther down the hallway. That made us all really pissed, because even though some of us had been going around all day, someone had always been in line to hold the place.
But someone was on our side that day. And her name was Redhaired volunteer woman.
Yeah, remember her? The one that Caitlin had told off for talking about them when they could hear them? Yeah. She felt a little guilty for that, so she ended up being our personal savior all day. She had seen that Amy and Caitlin had been in line since 9:30 that morning, so she decided to pull some strings and have us bumped up to the very front of the line!
So that was a really huge break. Or so we thought.
When the doors finally opened at 3:30pm, the way they had seating set up made absolutely no sense and instead of the people at the front having center seats, we ended up with probably the worst seats in the house. They filed everyone to the edges first, so we were on the very end, in the fourth row, with a terrible angle so that everyone looked horribly distorted (the picture below is an example). Amy got so upset at this, because the entire reason that she and Caitlin had flown down from Wisconsin to Orlando was for this showing, and they'd been waiting literally all day, and certainly not for those seats. The red-haired volunteer noticed that she was really upset and tried to move us further in and up a row, which she did succeed in doing, but the seats weren't too much better. In the end, once the show started, we kind of forgot about our terrible seats, because what we were presented with had such a high level of awesome that nothing else registered for the 4 full hours that we were in that ballroom.
I won't talk about the show, because it's on Youtube now, so you can go watch it yourselves, but let me just say: it was "Totally awesome!"*
So we got out of the hotel at 8pm, stopped at a McDonald's for dinner, and headed back to our hotel to change into our formal dresses for the Night of Frivolity Ball! We got back to the hotel at about 10ish, but Jennie had decided that she wasn't going to go because she was going to drive us all back the next day and since we were going to have such an early morning, she needed to sleep. We sadly left her at the hotel.
So the first thing we did was go in the ballroom, which had been opened up with the one next to it to form a huuuuge room. We found a place to safely leave our stuff, then went out to the dance floor for a couple minutes, when Kelly and I noticed that Amy and Caitlin weren't in there with us. We left the room to go back out into the hallway, and we found them taking pictures with the giant dragon statue. So we all got a picture, but then all of a sudden, Amy and Caitlin took off again, looking super excited, and Kelly and I followed, not understanding why.
Oh boy.
Turns out that they'd both seen the members of Team Starkid getting in the drink line, and they had both thought that it was too good an opportunity to miss. So we ended up getting pictures with all of them, and talking to all of them and they were just SO COOL! I thanked Darren Criss (Harry Potter) for everything he'd done for the Harry Potter fandom, and we all told him the show was a total success. We even got some surprise from Joey Richter (Ron Weasley) when he found out that we had been waiting for the show since 9:30. He was like, "That was you?? We had heard that someone had been waiting all day for the showing!" That really got us all excited that they'd heard of us, even if they didn't know it was us!
That pretty much made all of our nights.
And Darren Criss made mine =]
So we went back to the dance and had a ton of fun, but Kelly was still kind of sad that she hadn't met Kristina Horner (ALL CAPS, The Parselmouths, fiveawesomegirls). I wasn't as concerned since I was going to get to see her perform in two days, but Kelly wasn't going to get to come to ROFLCOPTOUR since she had to work. So we decided to try to find her before the evening was over. We actually got pretty lucky because they played an ALL CAPS song, and Kristina and Luke got up on stage where Alex and Jason were DJ-ing, so we knew she was there. We didn't exactly stalk her, but we did stumble upon her in the drink line, so Kelly decided that she'd just go for it and ask for a picture. She was with her fellow bandmate, Eia Waltzer, so we both ended up getting pictures with them, and we talked to them for a little bit.
All in all, the day was amazing, despite the momentary upsets that mostly involved lines. Getting to meet all those people and see so many wonderful things, sharing the weekend with hundreds if not thousands of Harry Potter fans. It was really so touching and I didn't want the day to end. I really hope that I can go to LeakyCon2011 next summer in Orlando, but that will all depend on whether or not I get a job at SETC for the summer. We'll see. I'd love to go to another Harry Potter con. It's just so great to know that there are people out there who share in my obsession and don't think I'm weird for it.
Tomorrow I'll write about Days 4 and 5. They will probably be shorter, and I honestly was expecting to fit in days 3 and 4 together, but I guess there was so much more to say. Infinitus was kind of a big deal. I underestimated its grandeur for a moment.
Anyway, I'm signing off now (finally, I've been working on this post for hours), but I'll see you all tomorrow!
BEDA day 1, complete =]
HPRT: I'm Harry Freaking Potter!*
Current Book: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Current Song: Lovegood by Ministry of Magic
Favorite part of this post: Alex Carpenter section. I reluctantly left Luke....SO TRUE!!!!
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