The Smithee Review: A2 ‘05
The thing that was the 14th Annual Smithee Awards. Sadly, all the pics I took seem to not be there or be there but terribly crappily so. Alas, this year you will have to settle for 1000 words.
Smithee Saturday dawned bright and early, or rather it kind of gloomed not so bright but still early for the Q house. I had an appointment at 8am with the Holiday Spice Pepsi in the freezer so I made my way down stairs, pulled out nine 2-liters and promptly decided to go back upstairs and back the hell to bed. 8am is WAY too early to be up and functional, especially if you consider that the Smithee festivities don’t usually get over with until sometime after last call.
At noonesque, I believe, we finally got up and rolling. There were a few places I needed to stop beforehand and TheMan needed to pick up stuff from the office so we headed out to run errands. DQ was going to ferry us and the Smithee crap to the show around 4pm (we budgeted a bit of time for organization and car cramming with the intent of still arriving there early as there is quite a lot of Smithee Crap) so we zoomed back at 3ish. Lo! But the DQ was already at the house! Eh, we wound up loading everything (and there is a lot of everything, the car was filled to the brim – and that did not include the Fu box, which went home with Bubbles the night before) in short order and found ourselves with about two hours to kill before we had to leave. What to do, what to do…HEY! Let’s watch a Columbo! They are about 2 hours long!
So we threw in a Columbo and watched it all the way to the bitter end, which was about 2 hours and 30+ minutes. Ayyyieeeeee! Our clock read 5:50…ten minutes before we wanted to be a half hour away. Ayieeeeeeee! We zoomed. We zoomed the zoom of zooming and arrived in good time (about 6:10. Don’t tell the cops, but I think DQ lead footed it most of the way there) to find that we were the first supply car there. I think. Maybe? Well it seemed as if we were the first supply car there because none of the doors were open to the Chem building and no one appeared to be inside. ThesHunter was lurking about and managed to weasel into the building through one of its little known but open doors (go Thes!) and then things were peachy.
We and the rest of the crew, who had arrived under my radar and had everything all down at the bottom of the room by the time I got in the building…which makes me think maybe they were in there the whole time? Or maybe I missed them all coming in and unloading three metric tons of unhealthy food and seven hundred gallons of “Drinks of Color Not Found in Nature” in the few minutes I was…errr…doing something very important. Whatever, the stuff was in and we were set!
The show started around 7:10 and ran with very few if any technical glitches (as opposed to the Year of the Infernal DVD Player of Frustration) and everyone had a marv time. Here are a few random highlights that I don’t feel like crafting into eloquent sentences and fitting them into the story:
The weather was craptastic. Just to give you a taste for how Uuuugly it was, Sunday we had 4 inches of snow dropped on us while Thursday the high was about 80 degrees. The weather had to not only drop about 40+ degrees, it had to gear up for snowing so all of Saturday was awash with nasty, oppressive, ubiquitous, chilly, evil rain. This, of course, cut down the attendance from what we expected. Sad. On the other hand, we had more new people that I figured we would. Every third group of people seemed to have one or more members who were Smithee virgins. One even brought food along (a crock pot of honey mustard meatballs. Odd choice for the venue, but surprisingly they were GONE by the end of the night. I think the vast quantities of empty caloried crap put people in the protein craving mode). Even weirder, our numbers did a strange sort of statistical non fluxing thing this year, which meant there were about equal numbers of people who came in late as there were people who left early. Not exactly equal but the difference from high category to low category was a mere 22 people (if I understand Badmovie’s notes correctly). Also interesting; if you drop the first category, the difference was only 12 people. In past years it’s been more like 40 or 50 people difference. I think that once people got here, they just didn’t want to leave, while those that did were replaced by stragglers who were late.
Food! My god we had food. Badmovie seems to think (and I might agree) that if the weather were more fantabulous we would have broken our attendance record from last year. So, he bought for about 170+ people. We topped at 141. There was a lot of food and not just the pickings that Badmovie came in with either. The A2 Smithees are becoming a food and movie thing, apparently, because we had fan food additions of sticky popcorn, Velveeta fudge, BLT cupcakes (tomato soup muffins with bacon frosting and lettuce hats), brownies, shrimp crackers, chocolate popcorn stuff, GORP, meatballs, trail mix and probably other things I didn’t notice. There was a lot of food!
My mommy brought food! Awww, she (and Mr. Paul) are Smithee regulars. *sniff* She even saved me a glass of dark side M&M trail mix that they made for the Smithee food table. Awww, my mommy is so cool! Unfortunately they had to leave around intermission because she instinctually put on her bad weather boots without thinking about her bad just de-bunioned surgeried feet. She was pretty achy in the feets after a couple of hours.
Although it only took 11 hours for the Holiday Pepsi spice to thaw a mere week before, the combination of colder weather and…errr…ice elves prevented the nine Spices to thaw as much as I would have hoped. On the plus side, you can drop a half melted Pepsi Spice two liter from about four feet up and it wont break. You can get a good bounce on it too. I’m just sayin.
Sean Whose Name is Nate won a give away. Again. 100+ people and he wins two years in a row? I think he sold his soul to the Smithee devil. The sock puppet mummies were well received as were the complimentary aliens. Sadly, when TheMan did a poll about how people found out about the Smithees, three people raised their hand for the flyer option. Three. How depressing.
The after Smithee wind down at Pizza House was mighty fun. TheMan had many long islands, as did LunarGeography (Pizza house makes a darned fine long island) and the rest of us got a smattering of food and drink and did a little unwinding. All was well in Smithee land, or as well as could be expected given the stupid weather.
Last year at the booniverse: JSFR: Watering Kissmint!
Last last year at the booniverse: I just lugged in, well OK I carried in because the whole package is about three inches square, a mini tea garden.