aruan | a day in the long, long ago life

This was supposed to be a quick browse of the f'list, but

mimesere squeed about Ted Raimi in this post, and I remembered the lovely afternoon back in August 2002 when I met him.

It was the first week after the start of school, and the siren call of the road and a weekend of fannish discussion and reaffirmation of my Smallville love after my recent intiation into popslash spurred me to take that most wretched of transports, a Greyhound bus, to Atlanta for Dragon*Con 2002.

The atmosphere was immediately worth the trip, from riding the subway with anime characters to eating breakfast with a band of musketeers. It felt like I was the only person without a costume, just walking around and goggling at everything. I grabbed a schedule of events and went through with a highlighter, ending up with at least three too many things to do every day. My romping was gleeful and thorough and mostly aimless because TWO enormous hotels, one with three convention levels and the other four, and every fandom you can imagine. Basically, I followed the pretty, and recommend the experience to anyone who really wants to just forget which world we live in for a weekend.

My own notes and pictures of the event are somewhere in the ether, but I Googled and came up with a really detailed account that mentioned both the Sunday panel, "An Hour With Ted Raimi," and my participation in it. One Warrior Princess Nerd did a full account here. I didn't know Ted Raimi any further than the some three episodes of Xena: Warrior Princess before the panel, but I'm a sucker for the hapless pseudo-hero and ended up with floor seating in the center aisle about seven rows back.

She mentioned him being very physical in his comedy and a bit sarcastic, so it's tricky to translate to flat text, but he was a delight. There were spot-on imitations of other actors and honest answers that the fans present didn't necessarily want to hear. Some excerpts:

Someone asked if he ever pulled practical jokes on the set ... He said not really, just little things now and then. He said some actors make notes on their scripts, like "Begin anger here," or "I'm mad at this character because..." So he took Lucy's script and wrote "I am so pretty. Flip my beautiful black hair here."

That was hilarious.

He then proceeded to inform us that he's learned over the years to never disagree with Xena fans. He put on a Valley guy-type voice and said, "Um, isn't Lucy Lawless like the most beautiful woman you've like ever seen?" In his own voice he said, "Well, I don't know if she's the *most*..." He cut himself off and pretended to put a gun to his head and became psychotic Valley guy "ISN'T LUCY LAWLESS THE MOST BEAUTIFUL WOMAN YOU'VE EVER SEEN!!?"

Yowza. But then, we totally know what he means, too. Embarrassingly enough, I'd probably react the same way about Rodney. Yeah, left shame in a seedy back alley way back there.

And then the dismount. Apparently, this is something he does with some regularity, choose some obviously straight-man sap from the audience. Yes, that was pretty much verbatim my final, deeply dorky question, in that many words. It was clever in the privacy of my own inner monologue. Even an editor needs an editor is a lesson we all learn along the way.

He ended his panel with a round of pretty hard teasing of [Jules], who asked "What are your guilty pleasures, or did you have to relinquish your shame card when you signed your SAG contract?" He was a bit confused by the question (as were we [g]) and the more [Jules] tried to clarify herself, the worse it got, until he finally invited her up front and we had a few laughs at her expense. She seemed to take it pretty well, and wasn't offended at all. Ted bid us adieu ...[but] I was surprised to see him appear several minutes after he'd left the room. He'd come back to apologize to [Jules] and to make sure he didn't offend her with all of the teasing. She thanked him and assured him she was cool with it. Sweet.

For my part, I remember something about peanut butter (probably as part of his answer to my original question), a pretty good amount of fairly witty banter on both ends after I got my feet back under me, a woman coming up to me afterward to thank(?) me for wearing my Television Without Pity shirt (that's a red Smallville jersey with Will you guys just kiss already? on the back, heh, went well with the Xena/Gabrielle motifs unseen behind us) and ducking outside to call

silentfire to regale her with the whole story, loudly, on the streets of Atlanta.

Also while Googling, I found pictoral evidence:

Which, wow, looks both manipped and a lot more interesting than what our conversation actually was. It's probably my "Oh, right," face.

As an aside, I also ran into the Star Wars dad from whatever MTV show at the time was putting embarrassing parents on display. He was very tolerant about my earnest nosiness, but I suppose that's pretty much in any parent's job description. There's a photo somewhere of us, too, tables of comics and 'zines (we were flipping through adjacent boxes of back-issue magazines at a dealer table), and characters from at least five different sci-fi shows all around us. What a weekend.