Last Weekend...
May. 10th, 2008 03:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cedar_grovePardon my little joke at the crew's expense... Joking aside, the volunteers who worked the convention, on the whole, do a thankless task in a very friendly and professional manner. Mind you, those guys, the volunteers I mean, were in black shirts. It was these others, (it said 'pit boss' on their ID tags strung around their necks), the Redshirts, as they got dubbed, who were the ones to watch out for... especially the the guy with the hat, whom, I have to be honest, I found a little creepy. Still...
Milton Keynes, land of the Concrete Cows, is only about an hour's drive from me down the M1 motorway, so it was really no hardship to travel there every day from Saturday to Monday. I missed Friday, because I was working, but did manage to go all the rest of the days.
I didn't get there as early as I had wanted, as traffic was pretty bad, but I got there in time to get in and find the people I wanted to see, which was pretty much only Max (Grodenchik) and Connor (Trinneer), before getting myself settled.
One of the first things I did of course was to check in with Max and hand over the thing I had for him, of which he was very appreciative. He was busy though, so we made arrangements to catch up later, which was fine by me, gave me a chance to take a look around at the vendors to see if there was anything I actually wanted. I already have a couple of pictures with Connor, taken with him at other conventions, and actually I thought he seemed to be a little stricken with Jetlag, poor guy. Don't know whether he was or not, but... anyway, I did want to get his autograph, and ask a question or two, so... I figured I'd wait until he was a little less busy. Those of you wondering what he looked like saturday, here's the shirt... oh, and the man too... :)
After a fabulous lunch of potato and asparagus soup at 'The Place to Eat' - the in-store restaurant at John Lewis, (I did mention the convention was in the middle of a shopping centre, right?), I wandered a little more before going to talk to Connor once he'd returned from his lunch break. Essentially it was a conversation that was kind of cut short, in what was, I am sure, a mental abberation causing a brief moment of rudeness from one of those wonderful volunteers, but anyway, as far as I can remember it, it went something like this...
After welcoming him to England and asking him how it [England] was treating him, to which he answered that it was pretty good, though he hadn't had the chance to see much of it, I moved on to the burning question of his recurring role as Michael on Stargate Atlantis. Were we going to see any more of the Wraith-Human hybrid anti-hero. In fairness I'm sure he can't really say much without getting into trouble with MGM, so what he said didn't really tell me anything I didn't already know - that Michael isn't dead yet, so there's a possibility. He did say that you find out a lot about what Michael is doing in Season 5 of SGA through what the other characters say of him, so they, "Don't have to have [me] back so much." But he said that he really likes the role, so maybe...
We got into a conversation then about how I felt that the writers had given themselves problems. He sat back and regarded me with a strange (but interested) expression on his face and asked, "What do you mean?" So I spoke of how I worried they had written themselves into a corner with various elements of the Season 4 Michael/Teyla story arc because it might offend some people's sensibilities - morally speaking - because Michael was right, they are "...not that different." He nodded and was in the middle of saying, "So you think the writers won't follow thr--" [through?] but the crew person sitting next to him cut right across him to stop the conversation. I won't go into the whys and wherefores of that, but... anyway, I thanked him for his time and left him in peace to his empty line, and went to find Max.
Not that this was hard, he was sitting a couple of tables down from where Connor was sitting. By this time it was getting to be fairly late in the day and things were winding down. Max had been tired, through not sleeping much the night before, (again, Jetlag I'm sure, because he said that Connor and he'd discussed it, and Connor said he always had trouble the second night, which Friday night would have been for both of them if they arrived on Thursday), so I asked if he felt better after his nap. He said he did, though since he'd also eaten, he was now ready to sleep. :) He introduced me to James, his very pleasant crew-member, and the two of us hung out with him chatting in between his signings. After several people had spoken to him about GCSE's and A-Levels, James and I took it on ourselves to educate him in the British Education System.
Paul McGillion was supposed to be arriving - straight from his shoot on SGA-Whispers I have to say - but things kept getting pushed back and back and back, so after a little while I had to leave, to go and listen to the Derby - I wasn't about to miss that, not even for Max, Paul and Connor - so Max and I said our farewells until the next day, and I drove homeward. I learned the next day that apparently Paul arrived rather late from flight delays, was rushed through the airport and brought straight to the convention. Poor man.
Saturday in summary - Traffic jams and jet lag, cut off conversations, the need for a close encounter with a bic, British education and a shout out for Crewmaster James.
Sunday I actually thought to take more pictures... and of course there were a lot more people that I was running around to see, so I was both very busy, and had a lot more time to hang out with Max. It was absolute insanity when I arrived...
Here are some candid shots...
Connor of course - with a very Michael-like expression on his face
Mark Ryan - formerly Nazir from Robin of Sherwood, most recently the voice of BumbleBee in the Transformers Movie.
Paul McGillion - Carson Becket SGA
so I wandered a little bit... figured out where everyone was, not exactly planning out the rest of my day, but I did want to make sure that I got a photograph with Paul McGillion, who is just such a warm and charming man, as well as a bit of a joker. :) The first thing I did when walking up to him for the photograph was thank him for coming straight from work, and let him know I thought he was a real trooper for doing that. He seemed very touched by the gesture and expressed his appreciation at the comment. We took the photograph...
...and thanked each other and I wandered on my way. Max was back from lunch by this point so I went to say hi. They'd moved him to the other end of the row he was on the day before, something they apparently do. Max joked that he thought it was because he kept coming round to take pictures with people, and since there was no door where he was on Sunday, he couldn't do that. He soon found a way around that... by crawling under the table. :)
The question of the day on Sunday, however, was... as someone from the UK, do you consider yourself English, or British? See... there are certain questions that don't really /have/ a definitive answer, but are those kind of questions that make you think. Max was asking this to just about everyone that came to him to get an autograph. He and everyone he asked, were having quite a blast with the question... and I was surprised, being someone who answers one way or another depending on my mood, that there were many people who were quite adamantly English or where most definitely British. There were even a few people who answered that they were European, though I'm not sure how many of them were having fun with Max. :)
After a while I had to go and fulfil a promise to my children (the ones in my class who had done good work) and get their work signed by Mark Ryan. The work was done on the subject of myths and legends, and we used Robin of Sherwood as a starting point. Mark was thrilled and very impressed with the kids' work and he and I had a quite intellectual conversation about the symbology in RofS as well as the positive impact of the role of Nazir in representing the Muslim faith in British TV (you have to remember this was a while ago now that the show first aired). After signing the kids work and having our conversation, he was kind enough to let me take a picture...
After speaking with Mark I went back to see how busy everything was down the other end of the 'show' because I thought that Paul McGillion was just way too busy and he'd be there in the morning, which I expected to be quieter. Monday, I decided, would be my Paulday, (as I was going to see two different Pauls).
The convention was organised with two rows of signing tables at either end of the 'hall' with the vendors in a rectangle between the two... down at the other end, things were much quieter, and I stood chatting with Max and his Crewperson for the day, a nice girl from Wales called Gwyn if memory serves. Throughout the day, as well as quizzing people on their nationality which turned into the question of the day, we also spent some time talking about horse racing because of what had tragically happened the day before in the Derby, and the call by certain groups in the USA to ban horse racing and also to punish both the jockey and the horse for what had happened. It was neither of their faults of course and we couldn't understand why people would want to do that, still... it sparked an interesting conversation, and of course Max, with some ties to racing of sorts, was very sympathetic.
Once it got quiet at Connor's line, I decided to see if I could go and ask him a couple of questions that kind of got left over from the day before. He was in an excellent and chatty mood, quite the sweet guy actually, he'd also shaved...
...I asked if I could ask him a couple of questions, and he grinned and sat back and said, "Sure, wha'd'ya wanna know?" (very Triplike actually), So I said, "Does Michael have anything to do with the baby before Teyla gets rescued?"
He grinned and said, "I can't tell you," sitting back and folding his arms as though he wasn't going to say anything else. Then a second later he sat forward again, and said, "No, seriously, what do you want to know?"
"Well, I know that they rescue her," I said, "they have to, but does she get rescued before she has the baby, or after? Does she have the baby while she's still with Michael...?" and he cut in and added, grinning like a fool, "And what does he-- Does he do anything to the baby in the meantime?"
I nodded and said, "Yeah..."
He answered, "Well it was... they had to rescue her..."
"Yeah, that was a given, which was what I meant yesterday about the writers..." I told him, and he nodded and said,
"Right, now I see what you mean," then he went on, "Well it's pretty much a given that they rescue her, but did he do anything in the meantime..? that's what that first show is all about. And Michael is still alive, so..." and he had this kind of playfully smug look on his face... then said, "You'll have to wait and see." He was teasing a lot.
Afterwards, I asked him the second question, which led into another shorter conversation. I asked him if he knew anything about Atlantis before Michael. He admitted that they'd had to give him a few episodes to watch before he started so that he could get a feel for the show. So I explained to him about Teyla's 'gift' being the result of genetic experiments performed by a sole Wraith operating outside of the authority of his Hive, and almost before I'd finished, he said, "That would be a little convenient, don't you think?" with a little smile on his face. So... after that, not wanting to push my luck, he signed the photo and was good enough to pose for the picture above, before I thanked him and said goodbye, after discovering he was actually leaving the day before Showmasters had advertised he was. Not that this is/was a problem, just something that came to mind and came up later in conversation with Max, when Gwyn and I were jokingly expressing our thoughts that there might be people that arrived on Monday expecting to see Connor and not doing so, might be annoyed because of course, "Don't you [actors] realise that we [fans] own you!" Max was suitably tickled and took the comment in the manner in which it was meant. Yeah we were teasing him like crazy.
Time was getting on a bit, and after a little wandering, and Max being impressed with some of the stores in the shopping centre, the show closed. Max and I hung out a little while - the poor guy was very tired after his day, and still had the party to attend. We made a phone call to another friend of ours for a while, before we each made our way 'homeward'
Sunday in summary - English or British? Charming Candians, The educational merits of Robin of Sherwood, the great stores in MK:The Center, and long conversations about Michael. A shout out to Gwyn for being such a good sport too.
Knowing it would be a quiet day on the Bank Holiday, I waited until lunch time to get there. Max had threatened that he was going to work through lunch, and I had threatened to bring him lunch if he did... and there had been other threats too which tickled him silly when they were relayed, but in the end no one ended up having to make good on their threats, because the Redshirt who came to ask Max if we (Myself and a girl called Cookie from Belgium, who also has pet rats, and anyone who has pet rats is okay in my book) were bothering him, brought him a good-looking sandwich for lunch. We left him in peace to eat it.
Back when I was all but knee-high to a grasshopper, as the saying goes, I was a big fan of Blakes 7, I still am really. They keep threatening to remake it... and knowing that Paul Darrow, who played Avon in the series was there, I just had to go and ask him what he thought of the idea. His only comment on the subject was that he'd believe it when he saw it... which, yeah... pretty much matches my own opinion. He said that they'd only commissioned two scripts. He also said he didn't mind the speculation because it meant that he was splashed all over the papers as he once was - that is, when he was younger. Still, I think he's aged well...
From one Paul to the other... actually it was quite a wait. Paul McG took a long lunch break, and well deserved I'll say. But he returned in good form, and was very grateful for the Carson-Care Package of chocolate that I gave him. I asked him then if he'd been invited to Joe Mallozzi's chocolate party. He said that the Exec Producer of SGA, Joe, didn't invite the regular cast people, but added that he did bring them a wonderful array of chocolate the following day. Paul McGillion seems quite the consummate chocoholic. Afterwards I asked him if his appearing on Whispers meant that they [the Atlantis team] had managed to cure Carson's degeneration. He answered, "Yes, thank God!" I asked him then if they had done it by themselves, or if they had stolen it from Michael. He said that he thought they had done it by themselves, and that it could be seen in The Seed, Episode 2 of Season 5. He, too, was good enough to pose for a picture, and afterwards, I thanked him again, and left him to the rest of his line.
The convention got very quiet, very quickly, in the afternoon, but when I had first arrived to say hello to Max before lunch, he'd asked me to finish this sentence, "The time is 12:30, so it's half [blank]" Of course I said "Half past twelve" and he said no, and to forget the 'past' what did that make it? "Half twelve," I said. Yes, the question of the day was, in which format does one say the time. Does one, as the English, (or British if you prefer), say "Half twelve" to mean 12:30, or does one say, "Half one" to mean 12:30 as they do in Germany and other German speaking countries? We all, I think, managed to completely confuse poor Max. We talked for a while about writing and websites... Nicole, Max's crewperson for the day, asked for details of my site to give to her friend who was really into the Mummy, which I duly gave her, and Max seemed to be making a mental note of the web address. I don't know if I should be nervous or not. :)
So... we're coming up on 4:30pm and Max says that he's going to say something at the appropriate time. Sure enough, 4:30 arrives and he cups his hands around his mouth and says, "Half four and all is well... Half four and all is well... unless you're German in which case I mean it's 4:30pm." Total goofball, but very loveable with it. Young Nicole seemed to be a little phased by it... I don't think she quite knew how to take him.
But his fan - the pink flower with whizz round petals that he used to dry the ink on his autographs - held out for all four days of the convention, which wrapped up at not long after 4:30pm, and after another quick dash around the shopping centre, Max and I made our goodbyes, until the next time - which will either be in Boston or in Vegas.
I leave you with some good shots of the wonderful Max...
Monday in summary - Paulday, B7-believe it when you see it, chocolate, writing and half four.
A somewhat long report, but then it was a fun filled, but somewhat long weekend. I wouldn't change going though. I enjoyed it, even driving to and from the convention. Brewi.i has never had quite such a workout... at least not since I went to Manchester.
Milton Keynes, land of the Concrete Cows, is only about an hour's drive from me down the M1 motorway, so it was really no hardship to travel there every day from Saturday to Monday. I missed Friday, because I was working, but did manage to go all the rest of the days.
I didn't get there as early as I had wanted, as traffic was pretty bad, but I got there in time to get in and find the people I wanted to see, which was pretty much only Max (Grodenchik) and Connor (Trinneer), before getting myself settled.
One of the first things I did of course was to check in with Max and hand over the thing I had for him, of which he was very appreciative. He was busy though, so we made arrangements to catch up later, which was fine by me, gave me a chance to take a look around at the vendors to see if there was anything I actually wanted. I already have a couple of pictures with Connor, taken with him at other conventions, and actually I thought he seemed to be a little stricken with Jetlag, poor guy. Don't know whether he was or not, but... anyway, I did want to get his autograph, and ask a question or two, so... I figured I'd wait until he was a little less busy. Those of you wondering what he looked like saturday, here's the shirt... oh, and the man too... :)
After a fabulous lunch of potato and asparagus soup at 'The Place to Eat' - the in-store restaurant at John Lewis, (I did mention the convention was in the middle of a shopping centre, right?), I wandered a little more before going to talk to Connor once he'd returned from his lunch break. Essentially it was a conversation that was kind of cut short, in what was, I am sure, a mental abberation causing a brief moment of rudeness from one of those wonderful volunteers, but anyway, as far as I can remember it, it went something like this...
After welcoming him to England and asking him how it [England] was treating him, to which he answered that it was pretty good, though he hadn't had the chance to see much of it, I moved on to the burning question of his recurring role as Michael on Stargate Atlantis. Were we going to see any more of the Wraith-Human hybrid anti-hero. In fairness I'm sure he can't really say much without getting into trouble with MGM, so what he said didn't really tell me anything I didn't already know - that Michael isn't dead yet, so there's a possibility. He did say that you find out a lot about what Michael is doing in Season 5 of SGA through what the other characters say of him, so they, "Don't have to have [me] back so much." But he said that he really likes the role, so maybe...
We got into a conversation then about how I felt that the writers had given themselves problems. He sat back and regarded me with a strange (but interested) expression on his face and asked, "What do you mean?" So I spoke of how I worried they had written themselves into a corner with various elements of the Season 4 Michael/Teyla story arc because it might offend some people's sensibilities - morally speaking - because Michael was right, they are "...not that different." He nodded and was in the middle of saying, "So you think the writers won't follow thr--" [through?] but the crew person sitting next to him cut right across him to stop the conversation. I won't go into the whys and wherefores of that, but... anyway, I thanked him for his time and left him in peace to his empty line, and went to find Max.
Not that this was hard, he was sitting a couple of tables down from where Connor was sitting. By this time it was getting to be fairly late in the day and things were winding down. Max had been tired, through not sleeping much the night before, (again, Jetlag I'm sure, because he said that Connor and he'd discussed it, and Connor said he always had trouble the second night, which Friday night would have been for both of them if they arrived on Thursday), so I asked if he felt better after his nap. He said he did, though since he'd also eaten, he was now ready to sleep. :) He introduced me to James, his very pleasant crew-member, and the two of us hung out with him chatting in between his signings. After several people had spoken to him about GCSE's and A-Levels, James and I took it on ourselves to educate him in the British Education System.
Paul McGillion was supposed to be arriving - straight from his shoot on SGA-Whispers I have to say - but things kept getting pushed back and back and back, so after a little while I had to leave, to go and listen to the Derby - I wasn't about to miss that, not even for Max, Paul and Connor - so Max and I said our farewells until the next day, and I drove homeward. I learned the next day that apparently Paul arrived rather late from flight delays, was rushed through the airport and brought straight to the convention. Poor man.
Saturday in summary - Traffic jams and jet lag, cut off conversations, the need for a close encounter with a bic, British education and a shout out for Crewmaster James.
Sunday I actually thought to take more pictures... and of course there were a lot more people that I was running around to see, so I was both very busy, and had a lot more time to hang out with Max. It was absolute insanity when I arrived...
Here are some candid shots...
Connor of course - with a very Michael-like expression on his face
Mark Ryan - formerly Nazir from Robin of Sherwood, most recently the voice of BumbleBee in the Transformers Movie.
Paul McGillion - Carson Becket SGA
so I wandered a little bit... figured out where everyone was, not exactly planning out the rest of my day, but I did want to make sure that I got a photograph with Paul McGillion, who is just such a warm and charming man, as well as a bit of a joker. :) The first thing I did when walking up to him for the photograph was thank him for coming straight from work, and let him know I thought he was a real trooper for doing that. He seemed very touched by the gesture and expressed his appreciation at the comment. We took the photograph...
...and thanked each other and I wandered on my way. Max was back from lunch by this point so I went to say hi. They'd moved him to the other end of the row he was on the day before, something they apparently do. Max joked that he thought it was because he kept coming round to take pictures with people, and since there was no door where he was on Sunday, he couldn't do that. He soon found a way around that... by crawling under the table. :)
The question of the day on Sunday, however, was... as someone from the UK, do you consider yourself English, or British? See... there are certain questions that don't really /have/ a definitive answer, but are those kind of questions that make you think. Max was asking this to just about everyone that came to him to get an autograph. He and everyone he asked, were having quite a blast with the question... and I was surprised, being someone who answers one way or another depending on my mood, that there were many people who were quite adamantly English or where most definitely British. There were even a few people who answered that they were European, though I'm not sure how many of them were having fun with Max. :)
After a while I had to go and fulfil a promise to my children (the ones in my class who had done good work) and get their work signed by Mark Ryan. The work was done on the subject of myths and legends, and we used Robin of Sherwood as a starting point. Mark was thrilled and very impressed with the kids' work and he and I had a quite intellectual conversation about the symbology in RofS as well as the positive impact of the role of Nazir in representing the Muslim faith in British TV (you have to remember this was a while ago now that the show first aired). After signing the kids work and having our conversation, he was kind enough to let me take a picture...
After speaking with Mark I went back to see how busy everything was down the other end of the 'show' because I thought that Paul McGillion was just way too busy and he'd be there in the morning, which I expected to be quieter. Monday, I decided, would be my Paulday, (as I was going to see two different Pauls).
The convention was organised with two rows of signing tables at either end of the 'hall' with the vendors in a rectangle between the two... down at the other end, things were much quieter, and I stood chatting with Max and his Crewperson for the day, a nice girl from Wales called Gwyn if memory serves. Throughout the day, as well as quizzing people on their nationality which turned into the question of the day, we also spent some time talking about horse racing because of what had tragically happened the day before in the Derby, and the call by certain groups in the USA to ban horse racing and also to punish both the jockey and the horse for what had happened. It was neither of their faults of course and we couldn't understand why people would want to do that, still... it sparked an interesting conversation, and of course Max, with some ties to racing of sorts, was very sympathetic.
Once it got quiet at Connor's line, I decided to see if I could go and ask him a couple of questions that kind of got left over from the day before. He was in an excellent and chatty mood, quite the sweet guy actually, he'd also shaved...
...I asked if I could ask him a couple of questions, and he grinned and sat back and said, "Sure, wha'd'ya wanna know?" (very Triplike actually), So I said, "Does Michael have anything to do with the baby before Teyla gets rescued?"
He grinned and said, "I can't tell you," sitting back and folding his arms as though he wasn't going to say anything else. Then a second later he sat forward again, and said, "No, seriously, what do you want to know?"
"Well, I know that they rescue her," I said, "they have to, but does she get rescued before she has the baby, or after? Does she have the baby while she's still with Michael...?" and he cut in and added, grinning like a fool, "And what does he-- Does he do anything to the baby in the meantime?"
I nodded and said, "Yeah..."
He answered, "Well it was... they had to rescue her..."
"Yeah, that was a given, which was what I meant yesterday about the writers..." I told him, and he nodded and said,
"Right, now I see what you mean," then he went on, "Well it's pretty much a given that they rescue her, but did he do anything in the meantime..? that's what that first show is all about. And Michael is still alive, so..." and he had this kind of playfully smug look on his face... then said, "You'll have to wait and see." He was teasing a lot.
Afterwards, I asked him the second question, which led into another shorter conversation. I asked him if he knew anything about Atlantis before Michael. He admitted that they'd had to give him a few episodes to watch before he started so that he could get a feel for the show. So I explained to him about Teyla's 'gift' being the result of genetic experiments performed by a sole Wraith operating outside of the authority of his Hive, and almost before I'd finished, he said, "That would be a little convenient, don't you think?" with a little smile on his face. So... after that, not wanting to push my luck, he signed the photo and was good enough to pose for the picture above, before I thanked him and said goodbye, after discovering he was actually leaving the day before Showmasters had advertised he was. Not that this is/was a problem, just something that came to mind and came up later in conversation with Max, when Gwyn and I were jokingly expressing our thoughts that there might be people that arrived on Monday expecting to see Connor and not doing so, might be annoyed because of course, "Don't you [actors] realise that we [fans] own you!" Max was suitably tickled and took the comment in the manner in which it was meant. Yeah we were teasing him like crazy.
Time was getting on a bit, and after a little wandering, and Max being impressed with some of the stores in the shopping centre, the show closed. Max and I hung out a little while - the poor guy was very tired after his day, and still had the party to attend. We made a phone call to another friend of ours for a while, before we each made our way 'homeward'
Sunday in summary - English or British? Charming Candians, The educational merits of Robin of Sherwood, the great stores in MK:The Center, and long conversations about Michael. A shout out to Gwyn for being such a good sport too.
Knowing it would be a quiet day on the Bank Holiday, I waited until lunch time to get there. Max had threatened that he was going to work through lunch, and I had threatened to bring him lunch if he did... and there had been other threats too which tickled him silly when they were relayed, but in the end no one ended up having to make good on their threats, because the Redshirt who came to ask Max if we (Myself and a girl called Cookie from Belgium, who also has pet rats, and anyone who has pet rats is okay in my book) were bothering him, brought him a good-looking sandwich for lunch. We left him in peace to eat it.
Back when I was all but knee-high to a grasshopper, as the saying goes, I was a big fan of Blakes 7, I still am really. They keep threatening to remake it... and knowing that Paul Darrow, who played Avon in the series was there, I just had to go and ask him what he thought of the idea. His only comment on the subject was that he'd believe it when he saw it... which, yeah... pretty much matches my own opinion. He said that they'd only commissioned two scripts. He also said he didn't mind the speculation because it meant that he was splashed all over the papers as he once was - that is, when he was younger. Still, I think he's aged well...
From one Paul to the other... actually it was quite a wait. Paul McG took a long lunch break, and well deserved I'll say. But he returned in good form, and was very grateful for the Carson-Care Package of chocolate that I gave him. I asked him then if he'd been invited to Joe Mallozzi's chocolate party. He said that the Exec Producer of SGA, Joe, didn't invite the regular cast people, but added that he did bring them a wonderful array of chocolate the following day. Paul McGillion seems quite the consummate chocoholic. Afterwards I asked him if his appearing on Whispers meant that they [the Atlantis team] had managed to cure Carson's degeneration. He answered, "Yes, thank God!" I asked him then if they had done it by themselves, or if they had stolen it from Michael. He said that he thought they had done it by themselves, and that it could be seen in The Seed, Episode 2 of Season 5. He, too, was good enough to pose for a picture, and afterwards, I thanked him again, and left him to the rest of his line.
The convention got very quiet, very quickly, in the afternoon, but when I had first arrived to say hello to Max before lunch, he'd asked me to finish this sentence, "The time is 12:30, so it's half [blank]" Of course I said "Half past twelve" and he said no, and to forget the 'past' what did that make it? "Half twelve," I said. Yes, the question of the day was, in which format does one say the time. Does one, as the English, (or British if you prefer), say "Half twelve" to mean 12:30, or does one say, "Half one" to mean 12:30 as they do in Germany and other German speaking countries? We all, I think, managed to completely confuse poor Max. We talked for a while about writing and websites... Nicole, Max's crewperson for the day, asked for details of my site to give to her friend who was really into the Mummy, which I duly gave her, and Max seemed to be making a mental note of the web address. I don't know if I should be nervous or not. :)
So... we're coming up on 4:30pm and Max says that he's going to say something at the appropriate time. Sure enough, 4:30 arrives and he cups his hands around his mouth and says, "Half four and all is well... Half four and all is well... unless you're German in which case I mean it's 4:30pm." Total goofball, but very loveable with it. Young Nicole seemed to be a little phased by it... I don't think she quite knew how to take him.
But his fan - the pink flower with whizz round petals that he used to dry the ink on his autographs - held out for all four days of the convention, which wrapped up at not long after 4:30pm, and after another quick dash around the shopping centre, Max and I made our goodbyes, until the next time - which will either be in Boston or in Vegas.
I leave you with some good shots of the wonderful Max...
Monday in summary - Paulday, B7-believe it when you see it, chocolate, writing and half four.
A somewhat long report, but then it was a fun filled, but somewhat long weekend. I wouldn't change going though. I enjoyed it, even driving to and from the convention. Brewi.i has never had quite such a workout... at least not since I went to Manchester.
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Date: 2008-05-11 10:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-05-14 03:51 pm (UTC)