Comic Con 2008: take two, the story

July 23rd, 8:45 pm. i'm horribly late to pick up heather for our Comic Con 2008 excursion. i pop some day quill (i have a debilitating cold. i'm worried about how this will affect my pathetic tweeny activities tomorrow), shout a quick "see you tomorrow!" to my mom (nigel's in the bathroom and i choose not to repeat my goodbye to him for the third time...deafo), and i head out the door wondering if i had packed underwear. i should've washed my car, but it hasn't been six months yet, you can still tell what color it should be. i slide in and quickly check my bag for undies. of course i forgot a pair. oh well, heather and i were going to stop at the porter ranch wally world anyway. since i'm about an hour late (per usual, i'm ashamed to say) i speed down cochran at about 55 mph. heather's already waiting outside when i arrive. i feel bad, wondering how long she's been out there but i remember that i did text her 20 minutes ago saying i'd be at her house in 15. she hops in with a friendlier 'hi!' than i deserve and we're off.

once on the freeway, i tell her about my undergarment quandary, she laughs and tells me she wants to get some walkie talkie's anyway. the conversation that follows on the way to wal-mart consists of embarrassing/awesome possible situations, somewhat crude remarks on my part about Robert Pattinson, and giddy speculation on who Bella will end up with and why, to discourage hate mail and riots, it should be Edward.

wal-mart: i find some underwear, a magazine (Angelina gave birth!), travel sized tissues, toothpaste, mints, some lash blast mascara (fantastic), raisin eyeliner (my attempt to coax more green outta my hazel eyes), sharpies, and a sprite i can't taste but feels good on my throat. heather gets her walkie talkies (for the cruise and possibly for comic con), gum, and a blue mountain dew she had to hunt three checkout lines for (ever since the beach trip she's been hooked). with a parting smile at the greeter with a speakerbox thing (the same guy nigel is going to hell for making fun of him) we're off!!

turns out our hotel is in the ghetto of san diego. that's okay, we ended up staying only 4 hours. after a brief nap in which i don't remember sleeping at all, my alarm goes off signaling 4:15 in the am. i decide to just lay there till heather's alarm goes off 15 minutes later. i use my fantastic lime-coconut shampoo with the coconut bodywash heather gave me. i want to ensure i don't have any offensive body odor since i can't smell anything at all, let alone myself. more day quill is taken, the directions are quickly looked over, everything is re-packed, heather locks our keys in our room and checks us out and we head out into the misty morning light that reminds me of going to seminary which makes me feel ill.

we drive around the convention center, taking unholy one-way streets, till we find a parking lot. $20 for 10 hours, and it's right across the street, woo! i glanced at the dashboard clock, 5:47 am, ugh. walking across the train tracks we can see the line for the badges, it's at least a third of a mile long before it disappears around the side of the building. heather comments on my non-offensive aroma, i tell her i was worried about it. getting closer to the building, i see a group of middle-aged women at the front of the line crowded around a big yellow sign that reads 'Twilight Mom's' of course. those women are crazy. i suddenly wish i was toting a kid around.

luckily for heather and me, the line ends shortly after turning the corner. a woman gets in line behind us as we start chatting her up. she introduces herself as hollie. hollie asks us what we're there for. thinking she's much too cool for Twilight and instead is here for Stargate Atlantis or Doctor Who, we answer with the non-committal "lot's of things" to which i quickly add: "but mostly Twilight." i'm such a proud loser. turns out she's here for the same thing. she's actually a Twilight Mom but didn't feel comfortable cutting with all the other Twilight Moms up front. lucky for us because it turns out that after we get our badges we have to go stand in another line for Hall H, where the panels are held. hollie came with a friend named melinda, who's actually from simi, and she's been in line for Hall H since 4 this morning. i brazenly ask if we could cut in with her and melinda in the Hall H line. we can!

heather in line at 6:30 in the morning, she looks pretty good!

Badges start being handed out at 7:30. we have ours in our hot little hands by 8:30 then we're speed walking behind hollie to the opposite end of the building for the Hall H line. by the time we get there, the line is already a half mile long. melinda is only about 150-200 people deep, in view of the door. she waves us down and we're introduced to her. i hear later that if the line for Hall H was stretched out straight it'd be about two miles long.

view of the line in front of us:

view of the "line" behind us:

in line we met a lot of cool people. here are just a few of the people we met and saw:

Casey the Comic Con queen. she knew everything about everything and was happy to share her wisdom for the two hours we were in this line:

the free high fives guy! he was awesome:

and here are some people who dressed up:

at 9:45 we were admitted into another line in the lobby just outside the actual hall.

at 10:30 we were let into the actual hall. the hall holds 6,500 people. we had to speed walk to our seats, center about 25 rows back, because if you ran, you were escorted outside to the back of the line.

view from our seats:

behind us:

behind us five minutes later:

in my last post there's an article that mentions the curtains in the back falling. well, that held up the panels so the first panel started at 12:10 instead of 11:30. it was The Day the Earth Stood Still. Keanu ran onstage and introduced everyone. during a quiet moment a bunch of guys near the front shouted "KEANUUUU!!" guess you had to be there.

jennifer connonly was there too;


the Max Payne panel was next. This one consisted of Mark Wahlberg, Mila Kunis, and Ludacris.

Push next. Chris Evans, Camilla Belle (that chick from When a Stranger Calls), Dakota Fanning was supposed to be there, she showed up later.

after that a really cool surprise. Hugh Jackman appeared and showed us a clip of the upcoming X-Men Origins: Wolverine movie. very very VERY cool. took a video of that one:

a picture:

right before the main event, the Twilight panel (can you feel the excitement??), a most unfortunate man had to appear without the benefit of celebrities to gawk at. the director of Knowing (an interesting-looking upcoming nick cage movie) made a valiant effort to be entertaining, but the crowd was restless. we (affectionately known as 'Twilighters') had been in line for hours and hours and there was only this one lowly director standing between us and our objective. luckily, i wasn't embarrassed by other Twilighters booing or shouting. everyone remained respectful. finally, the moment we'd all been waiting for.

the introduction. and yes, that haggard screaming and hacking you hear is indeed me.

oh oh! hollie was jumping up and down to my right and i was trying to get a shot around those chicks with the sign, i wasn't so excited that i couldn't keep the camera straight!

i have a couple of more videos, kristen and rob answering the question 'What attracted you to this project?" and and rob giving his answer to "What was your favorite scene?" i won't post them but i'll give whoever the link to my youtube account to view them.

after the panel, my battery died (perfect timing) so i opted not to stay to see Gerard Butler and Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson since i couldn't take pictures. plus, heather heard they were giving away free life-sized Twilight posters at the Summit Entertainment booth so we headed over there. on the way there we saw more people dressed up. neither of us had working cameras so there are no pictures but there were some wicked awesome ghost busters outfits. the floor was maddening to a semi-claustrophobe as myself. we instantly recognized the Summit booth from the dense crowd of girls, we decided not to stay and we started to make our way through the crowd but it took us 10 minutes and a scary moment of separation (heather's walkie talkie's needed to charge for 24 hours so they were useless to us). after passing throughout the rude, shoving crush of girls, i set off in hunt of a cool batman action figure for my brother-in-...er, my nephew. no luck though, nothing but $400 collectible throwing bat things and bust sculptures of batman. heather and i decided we had had enough. it was now 3:50 pm and our parking ticket expired at 4. it took us 15 minutes to get to the car. then i circled the parking lot twice in search of the exit. then it took us another 10 minutes to find the entrance to the freeway.

i dropped heather off and got some gas, headed home with what little free stuff i got (klaatu t-shirt, trading cards, more trading cards, a couple of comic books, and the souvenir Comic Con event book. cool beans) and attempted to tell nigel details of every minute that day but he didn't give me the awed and interested reactions i felt my story warranted so i fell asleep.

the end.

can you tell i got bored of writing this halfway through? :)

you can see the rest of our pictures (an obscene amount) here:

http://s169.photobucket.com/albums/u208/mcronmymind/comic%20con/

BIG THANKS TO HEATHER!