Veteran of the Fannish Wars

[Tjack]

   All right kiddies, since you’re all tucked in and have said your prayers, Uncle Tjack will tell you some stories of his time working behind the scenes of a large regional Science Fiction Convention.  Like Dragnet before me all the stories are true. (or else they wouldn’t be so funny) But I will change the names to protect the innocent and guilty alike

  We might as well start of with a bang so I’ll tell you about  “The International Incident”or “Riverpuke”
Once upon a time in an almost mythical land near the sea there stood a hotel we’ll call the Lark Llaza. And to their great regret they booked two things to happen on the same weekend. The first was a SF convention we’ll call Risa.  This is where our hero toiled as a volunteer. Because he had in a previous life been an E.M.T. he was part of the Security Dept.  And his seniority put him in charge of the overnight shift.

  This might have been enough trouble for any hotel but they also took the reservations for a touring road company of a Broadway show featuring Irish Step Dancing. (Yeah, that one.) The troup consisted mainly of young men and women in their late teens-early twenties and their chaperones. Friday came and went with no trouble. By the time the dancers came back from the show the relatively low key meet the guests cocktail party was winding down and the two groups never noticed one another....Saturday night was a different story.

   That was the night of the costume contest followed by an all night dance.  When those poor waifs got back that night the lobby and mezzanine were packed with somewhat buzzed Klingons, superheroes and scantily clad warrior princesses of every type. And the main ballroom was blasting dance music and shone with strobe lights.  So if you’re a teenager in another country for the first time and you see all this, do you... A) Go upstairs and go to bed the way your stern Irish mother would want. Or...B) wait until the handlers are asleep then sneak down and join the fun. 
   Option B was taken by around 25-30 of the wayward youths with about half finding their ways to the many open door parties where upon finding out who the crashes were the party hosts began calling room service for bottles of Irish Whiskey, eventually emptying the entire hotel of every bottle. 
   Somewhat after this point our Hero who was working away with his stalwart band of officers started receiving calls from everywhere at once about drunks roaming the halls from party to party.  And a frantic radio call telling him to haul ass to the ballroom because “You gotta see this!” 
   It turns out that when the DJ found out who the 20 or so crashers were he pulled out the CD of the soundtrack for the show and put it in. When our Hero hit the door he saw a full on, live version of the show from about a distance of 15 feet.  The guy who radioed in told him what was happening and wisely passed the buck up the chain of command.  Our brave Hero responded with a mighty....Uhhhhh. 
   He himself was saved when the Convention Chair who we’ll call Mak-Kor-Mak was watching the whole thing with delight as the Hotel’s Night Manager was threatening to call the cops since that since the dancers weren’t part of the convention they could be arrested for trespassing or just booted out into the street.  The mighty Mak wasted no time, grabbed the DJ’s mike and proclaimed that all the members of the troup were honorary Guests of Honor for their work in international relations.  This shut the Hotel lady up and as she went back into her office she was heard muttering something about “God damned drunken hippie freaks.”

   The story doesn’t end there however.  After the more sane/less hammered members went off to their rooms we in the department were still left with the more hardcore male members who were seeking meaningful companionship.  Or in the words of one of them,  “I hear ‘murrican girls like to fook!” 
    Chasing them down lasted until around 4:30 am.  I stumbled back to our hole in the wall office, rolled one poor soul off our only couch and laid down with my arm over my eyes and tried to figure out exactly when my life went so wrong.  After about five minutes somebody knocked timidly on the open door way.  I yelled “WHAT!” in a far too unkind voice. The quiet reply was “one of the Irish kids is puking all over the carpet over there.  Without moving I said “Is he going to die?” The voice at the door looked over his shoulder and after a couple of seconds said “I don’t think so.”  I gave that some thought and replied “Then it’s not Medical, so I don’t care.”

    The next day it was decided that the neither the theater company, the Hotel, nor the State Department who had issued the visas and should have technically tossed them out of the country wanted an incident so it was agreed that the whole thing never happened.  The Convention was happy with the deal since it meant that it wasn’t legally responsible for either the damages or for getting the little sods tanked in the first place.  
  And they all lived happily ever after....although I still go into a giggling fit every time I hear that music. 
 

     If there’s any interest for another story someday I’ll either tell the tale of “Big Dumb Dude” or “How my buddies girlfriend became a Superhero.”

[wcw43921]

I would enjoy hearing another tale or two.  Perhaps you could collect all the tales and put them in a book.  There's bound to be an audience for it, I think.

[Tjack]

7 hours ago, wcw43921 said:

I would enjoy hearing another tale or two.  Perhaps you could collect all the tales and put them in a book.  There's bound to be an audience for it, I think.

     I’ve got lots more to tell, if others want to hear them.  But for a book I’d have to have permission from the people in them.  And we don’t all come out looking so well.  They’re safer as “No S#1t, I was there” stories.

[death tribble]

Thanks for this. That was funny. Understandable as well.