Consonance2001

Web Mistress' Note: This con report is from Seanan McGuire's regularly e-mailed humor column called "A Phouka Walks Into a Bar". We highly recommend it; it's keenly observant and howlingly funny. To get on her regular mailing list, contact Seanan via her web site.

A Phouka Walks Into A Bar:
Conventional Thinking.
* * *
(Just so you know, this week's column is effectively a convention review. If you don't care, please accept my apologies, and I'll see you next week. I now return you to your regularly scheduled program.)

I am a filker. And dammit, I'm proud.

Every March flocks of strange people wielding guitars, banjos, harps and assorted wind instruments descend on the California Bay Area like seagulls dive-bombing the beach as they go for a dead whale*. Why do they do this thing? What drives them on?

Why, Consonance, of course. The Bay Area's very own filk music convention. A weekend of our own; a brief moment where our tendency to sit up until four o'clock in the morning singing about dead puppies and Argo's zoning laws isn't just socially acceptable -- it's expected. There are a lot of filking conventions, but this is the only local one. We're very fond of it.

(*Look, it's this year's most disgusting metaphor! Yay!)

I've been logistics staff at Consonance for the last two years. This means that if something catches fire, I make sure that everyone has
marshmallows and sharp sticks to roast them on. I'm not the only one: Chris and John O'Halloran also willingly spend the convention
babysitting the concept of peace and harmony. It's one of the more relaxed conventions I know -- except for misplaced songbooks, broken guitar strings and a chronic shortage of water, not much goes wrong.

Maybe that's why I felt relaxed enough to invite a few of my friends -- who aren't filkers -- to come to the convention this year and see what all the fuss was about. I was originally supposed to do a concert with Our Meg: however, my recent bout with pneumonia (the pneumonia won) had left me with very little voice to speak of. Fine. The concert was cancelled, but the people I had invited to come hear it decided to come anyway.

Fools.

And this is why I entered Consonance this year with Chris (the lovely and talented Taxi Whore), Jeanne (cute, frazzled, and half-awake at the best of times), Amanda (Graduate student in need of a break) and Rebecca (who took the train from San Diego) in tow. None of them had ever been to a filk convention before -- they had no idea what to expect.

Pardon me a moment while I laugh hysterically. BWAHAHAHAHA...okay, we're done. Thank you.

The first hurdle was the registration desk. It seems simple: you give money to the people behind the desk, they give you a badge, you write your name (Rebecca, with remarkable aforethought, labeled herself 'Seanan's Friend'), and you go. The trouble is, they litter the desk with stickers that you can put on your badge. It takes the average person about thirty minutes to finish fixing their badge. This is a clever ploy to make you stay and talk to the registration staff, who are probably remarkably bored.

Eventually everyone's badge had been properly adorned with a variety of musical notes, butterflies, bats, flowers, bugs and penguins -- guess who most of the penguins were stuck to -- and we were ready to move off into the convention.

Now, most conventions rely on a complex and tightly-timed series of program events and panels. If you can't find something to do every minute of the day, they reason, the programming staff hasn't done its job. Filk fandom doesn't work quite the same way. Most of the action at a filking con takes place at night, sitting in wide circles in crowded rooms, playing their guitars and banging on various percussion instruments. Programming for filkers is largely a matter of giving them chairs, water, and a room with good acoustics. This means that we spend an awful lot of time milling around and being glad to see each other, at least before we settle down to the serious business of singing.

All the familiar faces were there, along with a few folks that managed to surprise me -- it's good to have such an extended family. After news had been exchanged and plans for the rest of the weekend had been sketched into place, it was time for the Friday night concerts.

Concerts are about the only really 'solid' programming item that you're likely to encounter at a filk convention. Oh, we have a few panels and workshops, but mostly it's circles and concerts. This batch ranged from the semi-traditional (Tuppence, out of Phoenix) to the downright modern (Carla Ulbrich, a new face who nearly made me swallow my tongue laughing). After the last performer had finished (and the recording for World Dream* -- I'm sorry, Steve, I refuse to spell it 'WorlDream' was finished) it was time for the open filking.

(*More on this later. Much, much more on this later.)

Friday night filking is usually pretty slow at Consonance. Which was a good thing, because my throat was already shredded. We wound up spending a couple of hours in Con Suite, keeping Momma Colleen company, then fled for the safety of bed -- and the only good night's sleep we'd be getting during the convention.

I am an early riser. It has long been one of the more annoying things about my personality. Even after only getting five hours of sleep, I proved to be unable to stay unconscious much past nine. Since everyone else in sight was sacked out, I decided to get up, go down, and have some breakfast -- a free buffet came with the hotel room, and that was a truly wonderful thing.

Kathy Mar was also on her way to breakfast; we sat together, and spent a leisurely hour talking about carbohydrates (they're bad for you), bacon (also bad, but tasty), orange juice and where I should go when I visit England next year. Jeanne and Chris showed up just as we were finishing, so I joined them to chat while they ate.

Jeanne was starting to look a little shell-shocked: she was used to conventions, sure, but not quite this _sort_ of conventions. Chris, on
the other hand, was still relatively fresh -- probably because he had gone to bed so early the night before. Cheater.

Saturday passed pretty quickly, in a flurry of short concerts, long conversations and general silliness. At long last the evening concerts -- the most anticipated event of the convention -- rolled around. It was time for the Guests of Honor, the Toastmaster and our specially imported Interfilk* Guest to get up and shake their bad stuff.

(*More on this later.)

The only problem was, well, the concerts got started a trifle late. There were a lot of reasons for this -- it was no one's fault -- but it meant that a reasonably early evening of music and hilarity had been pushed back to 'you don't really expect us to be _awake_, do you?'. assuming no further delays, the last group -- Urban Tapestry -- wasn't going to be finished until after midnight. (They actually finished just before two.)

Ah, well. Time and filk wait for no man. The concerts began, pushing later and later into the evening.

By this point Jeanne, who wasn't used to Filker's Standard Time yet, was turning into a small puddle of unconscious brunette. We shook her awake and sent her up to the room, promising to wake her up when Urban Tapestry was going to go on. She went limping off into the night, just in time to miss the Interfilk auction.

Interfilk, for those who don't know, is the big filker's charity. Basically, we donate strange, unusual and interesting items, which are then auctioned off during the 'intermission' periods of the concert program at the various filk conventions. When I say 'strange and unusual', I mean it. We've had everything from pre-release copies of assorted CDs to The Interesting Lemon*.

(*The Interesting Lemon was donated because of its...unique shape and properties. Let's just say that while I won't go into detail, it could have been put to good use by the makers of many fine adult films. The sort that you have to show proof of ID before you can rent.)

Interfilk auctions range from the vaguely amusing to the downright hysterical, depending on the items to be auctioned and the people that are doing the auctioning. Most of the offerings this time were pretty mild -- unlike the auction at OVFF, where the truffle-eating auctioneers not only raised the prices, but the ambient temperature of the room. There was, however, a lot of assorted chocolate items.

The things that people will do to chocolate never fail to amaze me. This basket contained normal chocolates, sure -- but it also contained chocolate soap and chocolate wine. Things that were never, ever meant to be made out of chocolate. The bidding started fairly low. Then Chris got a good look at the contents, and woke up.

"Sixty," he said. This was a nice increase -- not too high, but enough that the auctioneers were pleased. For a moment, it looked like he was going to secure the Holy Grail of Unusual Chocolate Products.

There was just one problem: Debbie Ohi. Debbie is the cute, perky flautist of Urban Tapestry. She's friendly, clever, talented -- and utterly addicted to chocolate. To the point of occasional obsession. Trying to take chocolate away from Debbie is like trying to take the new Harry Potter book away from your nine year-old nephew: it's just not happening. Give it up.

"Eighty," said Debbie.

"One hundred."

Everyone else had dropped out of the auction by that point, and were watching in awe as Chris and Debbie pushed the cost of a bag of chocolate up into the stratosphere. Chris was winning, for a few brief, shining moments.

And then the Debbie Ohi Chocolate Conspiracy kicked in. Because Debbie's chocolate addiction is so well known throughout the filk world, other filkers will sometimes work to _get the chocolate for her_. This is partially because she's cute, and partially because it's funny. All around the room voices started to chime in, offering to contribute more and more money to give Debbie the chocolate.

Chris eventually gave up, allowing Debbie the dubious pleasure of paying approximately twenty dollars an ounce for her chocolates. You gotta love charity auctions. Several items later the auction was done, and it was time to set up for Urban Tapestry.

The ambient temperature in the room had been dropping steadily for the last several hours; at this point, it felt a lot like my unheated living room on a Tuesday morning. Callie -- one half of Echo's Children, and a very sweet lady in her own right -- was turning slowly blue. I passed her on my way out of the room, and asked if she needed me to bring her a sweater. Her response was a rather emphatic 'yes', and once I had checked to be sure that all my limbs were still attached, I took off for my hotel room.

I can make pretty good speed when I want to. Having woken Jeanne, convinced her to put on a pair of pants and grabbed the requested sweater, I came running back into the concert room just in time to catch the end of Urban Tapestry's first song. This amazing piece of lyrical poetry ran:

"And it's one two three
The kids love the monkey;
Four five six
The monkey's got a hockey stick.
Seven eight nine
We're having a good time, yeah."

How can you go wrong at a convention where this can greet you as you enter a room? It has kids! It has monkeys! It has a hockey stick! Everything is going to be just fine. The monkey will protect you.

At the end of the song, Jodi informed us that this had become 'the good-bye song' -- when leaving friends, they tended to sing about the monkey, because it was such a happy note to end on. This seemed pretty sensible to me. It's hard to be sad about leaving when the people that you're trying to leave are happily telling you about a monkey with a hockey stick. Go, monkey.

The rest of the concert was divine; they played old songs and new songs, things I'd heard and things I hadn't. And when it was over we cleared the room, broke down the sound equipment, and set up our circle, ready to sing and play the night away.

It was a beautiful night for a filksing. We sat up until five in the morning, singing and playing. The Bonhoffs sang things both silly and
sublime; all of the convention Guests put in an appearance at some point; Kathy contributed her 'Chick Joke', and Carla Ulbrich showed up to sing several sharp and pointed songs. Even Paul Kwinn showed up, startling us all.

Now, Paul and his lovely wife, the esteemed Beckett Gladney, have recently made More People. These More People -- who have taken the form of twin boys, currently approximately three weeks old -- also put in an appearance at the convention, towed by their parents. Now, children this small are very cute, mostly because they have two settings: on (probably screaming), and off. Beckett had somehow managed to set her children to 'off' for the duration of the convention, allowing everyone to coo about how adorable and angelic they were. Beckett just smiled. It's probably a good thing none of us are mind readers, since I doubt any mother of twins is thinking kind thoughts when told that she 'should have two more just like them'.

Beckett and the children had vanished shortly after Paul's afternoon concert; most people assumed that they had left the premises. However, that night, there's Paul in the filk circle, just as pleased as punch. They had taken a hotel room so that Beckett could stay at the convention, and so that one or both of them could attend the Urban Tapestry concert: proof that Paul is a) smarter than the average bear, and b) pretty damn dedicated to this crazy thing that we call filk. Go, Paul.

Now, as noted before, I didn't really have much of a voice this convention. As a consequence, I really hadn't been singing -- thus
proving that I do, occasionally, show signs of common sense. Even when the theme of the circle swung briefly to ose (also known as 'songs that make you want to slash your wrists' -- my favorite kind), I had managed to keep my mouth shut.

Then we started singing about sex. And somewhere right in the middle of all this, Paul played three bars of a song, looked up long enough to catch my eye, and said "Well?".

I am now officially a melody slut. I don't think I've ever crossed a room that fast.

One song about modern relationships, sex toys and blow-up girlfriends later, I was pretty much ready to call it a night. The circle was
starting to shrink as dawn threatened; Jeanne had wilted still further; and while I've been known to greet the morning following a long
night's filking, it isn't necessarily my favorite thing to do. Off to bed I went, with a substantial group trailing after me.

Of course, I still couldn't sleep. There's a law. After about three hours, it was time to get up and get active, heading down to breakfast and early morning kibitzing with all those other fools that were awake before noon at a filk convention.

Sunday pretty much passed in a blur. Songs, laughter, friends; water services, dealer's room madness, and watching Jeanne blow a hundred and fifty dollars on CDs; checking out of the hotel room, searching for everyone's missing things, making sure Rebecca had everything she needed to get to the train station, and one frantic trip to McDonalds for lunch before the miniconcerts and one-shots.

But the day ended. The day always ends. People were running out into the stormy outside world -- seventy mile-per-hour winds had grounded a lot of planes, and made the roads a little difficult to navigate -- and waving as they went, taking off again for whatever life they lived on the outside. We were done. For another year, we were done.

And just so you know -- Jeanne bought too many CDs. Rebecca learned too many choruses. Amanda sang in open circle...and Chris is already talking about OVFF. We win.

Time to go. With the rain coming down on all sides, I hoisted my songbook under the relatively waterproof hem of my lab coat and walked out of the hotel, leaving my filking friends behind until the next convention. There will always be tapes, recordings and house filks -- but an awful lot of people will be awfully far away.

And there's always next year.

Because it's one two three, the kids love the monkey...

What does this button do?

Seanan McGuire. 3/5/01.
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