Chicago TARDIS (Image heavy!!!)

[eve11]

After Thanksgiving, auntiemeesh and I geared up for a weekend of geekery at the Chicago TARDIS convention in Illinois. It was a lot of fun and I got to meet a whole host of LJ-ers (even some I didn't know were LJ-ers at the time!).


Thursday and Friday:

A bit of background: auntiemeesh and I usually go to DragonCon for our yearly nerd-trek, and we are huge costumers. I like "costumer" more so than "cosplayer" because we're not so much into the role-playing aspects but we do like the craft of building costumes. We like to focus on one-off characters, monsters or villains, or interpretations, and we sew or otherwise hand-make most everything. Lately Meeshie has had some great ideas for Doctor Who costumes, so we had some in reserve for the Chicago trip. We brought our Steampunk Femme Doctors (made in 2011), our Calvierri Vampire Girls (made in 2010) and new quickly-put-together outfits of Kate Stewart and a UNIT shock trooper bodyguard from the Power of Three (I also made Cubes).

Thursday I started out about 80 miles east of Pittsburgh, had a lovely Thanksgiving, and set off a little after 5pm to pick up auntiemeesh. We set off from Pittsburgh at about 6:30 (?), stopped at my house northwest of the city to feed the cats, went about 1/2 mile before I realized I'd forgotten my wallet (SO glad we didn't get farther) and ended up leaving my house around 8pm. We drove for 4 hours and talked about fannish things, and fic, and I got calls from my family wishing me a happy Thanksgiving (also it was my younger sister's birthday so I talked to her too). We made it half-way through Ohio and crashed at a Holiday Inn.

I am a morning person, especially when it comes to travel days. So on Friday we left by 7:30am and the only snag was that I was running low on fuel when we were driving up on the last leg to Lombard. And my car is a diesel so it was a little bit nerve-wracking. But fuel was found and we got to the hotel at about 10:30am local time. We checked in and promptly had the usual con roomsplosion.






A box of props!

An added perk was leftover turkey with stuffing, cranberry sauce and bread for sandwiches, as well as pumpkin pie, and a neat little portable kitchen for snacking.



We had lunch, picked up our badges and schedules, briefly scoped out the con areas, and then engaged in our time-honored tradition of hanging out in our hotel room and doing massive amounts of ironing.


OMG how long does this skirt go on!!!

We decided to wear our Steampunk Femme Doctors for the afternoon, check out the dealer's room, look for other fun costumers, and go to the "Cosplaying the Classic Series" panel at 4pm. The panel was fun; though I was surprised that most of the panelists hadn't started costuming until after 2007 (I am... getting old? *sighs*).

There was the inevitable discussion about femme doctors and why it's different than crossplay or why femme versions of male characters is more popular than male versions of femme characters. I piped up with my opinion which is that it's more than just femme-to-male vs. male-to-femme; it's that the Doctor is firstly, the MAIN character of the show, so more folks like to identify with him whether female or male, and that the Doctor is by nature a more malleable character. He changes faces all the time, and costumes. His costumes are recognizable and fun to "tweak" and still be recognizable. Some of the most successful femme-to-male costumes I've seen were two guys who did different male versions of Sarah Jane's Andy-Pandy outfit from The Hand of Fear. It has similar properties of being extremely recognizable and thus malleable in the way that, eg, Jo Grant's outfits wouldn't be.

Incidentally I also asked why Jo Grant didn't get more love, and the answer was generally that unless people really know the show, and costumers really put in a lot of effort to be screen accurate, her outfits don't get that recognition that others do. This is why I like ensembles.

Anyway the panel was fun, and we introduced ourselves around and had fun getting pictures taken. Our costumes were a big hit! We ordered greek take-out for dinner and hung out in the lobby for a bit and got pics with fun costumers around. We asked about the policy on fake weapons, and thought about entering the masquerade. We caught the very end of the opening ceremonies. Later on, I realized that the person with the crazy porcupine Chicago Blackhawks Hat was in fact Phillip Olivier. Because he and Sylvester McCoy and some others were walking back down the hall from the autograph signing and he was very loudly (possibly drunkenly) proclaiming "JC Penneys! I got it at JC Penneys!"

Some pics from Friday:

Steampunk Femme Doctors with a cute-as-a-button Idris


A life-sized remote control K-9, complete with walkie-talkie voice modulator. This little girl and another (dressed as Eleven) were so enamored with him. "Come on K-9!" the little Eleven girl said, "We're playing Doctors!". K-9 also came up to me because I was dressed as the Doctor albeit a Femme one, and I asked him if he was being a good dog and he said, "Affirmative".


Us with a nice guy dressed as One, who along with his compatriot (girlfriend?) had driven up from Florida. We ran into them a few times during the con. Like us, they had multiple outfits. It makes it more fun.


This crafty young lady was at the costuming panel with a lovely crochet-ed Six coat that she designed herself!


The Westin Lombard is a pet-friendly hotel, and there were several dogs in outfits there. This K-9 was very sweet.


Femme outfits: not just for Doctors! A first-time con-goer dressed as "Sexy Churchill", who (we will see on Saturday) entered the Masquerade on a dare from her friend here, dressed as a Femme Ainley Master.


Group shot with a boisterous Jack Harkness, an Ace, and a Martha Jones.

We stuck around for the Trivia contest; it was fun but the questions were SO HARD OMG. I think they needed to play-test the game with more mainstream fans. After years of writing exams and doing party games, I have learned that if you think your question is easy, it will be tricky for others, and if you think it's tricky, it will be impossible. The biggest change they should do for the next time is not to punish people for wrong answers. That made people too scared to buzz in. Even wrong guesses are at least more participation than abject silence!

Anyhow, that was Friday. We were an hour off, had been up since 6:30am East coast time, and the trivia ended late, like 9:30pm. We went to bed! I might have done one of those "fall asleep with open laptop in mid-post" deals that auntiemeesh finds so incomprehensible.




Saturday:

Saturday morning was the Chicks Unravel Time panel, that I was eager to attend after hearing about it from various LJ flist-ers. It was also "Cube Day", so in the morning auntiemeesh and I decided it would be a good day for our Power of Three outfits. I didn't actually get a good picture of us but I found one online here. My outfit is a compilation of some tactical stuff and sports equipment; auntiemeesh's is from some great thrift store finds. It was a fun panel and I was pretty sure I recognized lizbee when she came in but then was like, "She lives in Australia... is she really all the way over here?" But she was! Also there were calufrax modd-er extraordinaire nonelvis, and calapine. Both lizbee and calapine had written chapters of the new book, and had lovely things to say about Patrick Troughton and Romana, of course! There was also general sadness that the article "David Tennant's Bum" got panned by critics for being shallow or less than the other articles. Having read it now, I quite liked it. Fanboys can get over themselves, basically. There is nothing wrong with chicks (and there was a discussion about the re-appropriation of that term as well) digging David Tennant's bum. There is also nothing wrong with a fannish experience of liking Doctor Who because of the reboot, and the subtext of Ten/Rose, and all of that. There really is no wrong way to be a fan, which is a great message that the panel got across.

They had to duck out after the panel in order to go to the signing, but I did get a chance to go introduce myself (and not come off as completely socially awkward, hopefully). I didn't pick up the books until later on in the day.

One of my favorite comments on the panel was toward the end, from the artist who did the cover art, Katy Shuttleworth. (paraphrasing) "I came in at the RTD era. I didn't know that guys liked this show. I came to my first con and was like, 'What's with all the dudes? Did they get dragged here by their girlfriends?'" LOL.


The panel, left to right: rarelylynne who was an editor of the first book "Chicks Dig Time Lords", co-editor and awesome fic-writer calapine, the moderator and other co-editor Deborah Stanish, lizbee who writes creative histories of Amelia-Pond-as-author, and who wins the prize from calapine for longest travel to get to a con, and cover artist Katy Shuttleworth.

After the panel, we hung out for a while and looked at costumes in the hallways (this is a motif for us), and I think we attended the "Cosplay Support Group" panel. I had managed to convince auntiemeesh that we should enter our Steampunk Doctors in the Masquerade. She was dubious because as I'd mentioned, we are not really "cosplay"-ers, more so crafters, you know?

We had never really entered a big Masquerade show before, not together. I had done one Pittsburgh Comicon entry with Aku a few years back, garnering third place. Meeshie and I had tried to do a skit kind of thing with our Sisters of Plenitude also at the Pittsburgh Comicon in 2008 but we didn't place; the outfits weren't really Masquerade type outfits and it seemed that they really wanted some kind of line or skit or something on the stage and ours was not so great b/c I basically thought it up like 10 minutes before going on and strong-armed/traumatized auntiemeesh to doing it with me. We didn't place. So this time around we were a little gun-shy despite being very proud of our workmanship. But then the Masquerade here also had a "workmanship" category, and the showrunner was like, "No, you don't need a skit!" So I said, "Let's do it!"

Then we went to the 12pm cosplay panel and it was all "Make sure you stay in character in the masquerade! Make sure people can hear you and that your music for your skit is sent to the right sound person... " And we were like O_O I Was Not Expecting This! So we were back to being dubious and I think Meeshie was ready to bolt from the entire con. So I asked again, "Can't' we just go onstage, twirl, and go off?"

[Aside: Back in the 11th grade, I was devastated to not make even a lowly chorus part in the school musical. I was distraught and in tears. And the next day I was like, "Ef it, I will try out to be a dancer then". And I'm so not a dancer. So at the practice dance for the tryouts, the instructor explained the moves and put on music and said, "Now is when you all flutter on stage".... and my response, spoken aloud before I could help myself, was, "Oh God, you mean we have to flutter?" I did not make the dancer cut. I ended up doing the makeup crew. Which was busy because our very lily white school was doing "South Pacific" and felt the need to bronze up the appropriate actors. *Headdesk*]

Right, so they said, "Oh sure, no problem, just remember to smile." And I think they realized we were rather timid about it. But our costumes were a big hit yesterday! I said. So it's like a "here's our outfits in case you missed them!" show, that's all. Where you have to smile and remember to at least stop on the stage before hurrying off.

So we decided to give it a go, entered as novices because of our short history of Masquerades despite our rather long history of costuming. The Masquerade meeting was at 3pm. We decided also that it was going to be difficult to do our Calvierri Girl outfits on Sunday because we had an early checkout. So if Sunday was going to be a plain-clothes day, we decided to forego the Power of Three outfits for the afternoon and go with the Calvierri Girls instead. That involved (you guessed it!) more ironing! Also sewing. I'd wanted to fix the veils which were the most contentious part of the vampire girl outfits in DC*10 but hadn't had time before we left. So yeah, early afternoon Saturday found us steeling our resolve for the Masquerade, and doing last minute ironing and editing of outfits...that we weren't going to wear at the Masquerade. I lugged my sewing machine all the way to Chicago in order to edge my veil. I messed it up but I don't think anyone noticed.

But we got dressed up, and this time around it was auntiemeesh who had a time and a half with the veils but we got ready and went down to the Masquerade pre-meeting. There we saw a frankly amazing Silurian whom we met up with later on at the actual Masquerade show. We stopped by the dealer room and I bought both Chicks books. We took pics of hallway costumers. We got our pics snapped a few times in the Calvierri girl outfits but I don't have any on record; we were only in them for a short time. We met up with a really cool Clockwork droid in the dealer room; wiliqueen on lj. I met her later on dressed as River from the beginning of The Pandorica Opens. Which is how I knew she was the droid b/c she was in full character and quite creepy at the time!


Old School Cyberman and Ironsides Dalek!


Lovely River Song Ice Skater


A candid of a fantastic KandyMan outfit, later I have learned this is lovely lj-er smallearthcat

We... we went to a panel! Yes, we did. We went to the Big Finish panel with Sylvester McCoy, Sophie Aldred, Philip Olivier and Nick Briggs and possibly someone else who is playing a companion I've not met yet. I asked a question! Which was fun because Sylvester McCoy was doing his usual "hold the mic for question askers", and there is a pic of me, dressed as a Calvierri girl (albeit with glasses), asking a question of the panel with Sylvester McCoy right next to me.

I basically asked if the parallels between Hex and Ace's storyline, and Rory and Amy's, were deliberate. Both nurses, both enamored with a girl whose life is inextricably intertwined with adventure, the Doctor and the TARDIS (even if not overtly romantic): If Hex and Rory met in a bar, how much would they commiserate? Weeeell, the phrasing of a bar was probably not the best because it hijacked the convo a bit. I think it was Nick Briggs who was like, "Oh, Philip in a bar... not a good idea." And Philip defended himself admirably: "I've never seen the inside of a bar, that I remember..."

BUT it turns out Sophie Aldred has children. Children who watch the new series of Doctor Who. So she actually has seen series five and actually answered my question (she is so awesome): "I'd not thought of it that way before," she said, "But you can certainly read a similar dynamic going on between Ace and Hex and Amy and Rory, in the early part of series five." Nick Briggs neither confirmed nor denied any deliberate attempts at parallels :)

So that was cool. I was stupid nervous asking the question. I don't want to be "that fan" that rambles on for 5 minutes and then doesn't really ask anything. But I gave it a go.

We had to leave the panel early to go prep for the Masquerade.

MORE IRONING! Also, you may notice a distinct lack of food in this day. I think I survived on trail mix, leftovers from both thanksgiving and from the greek take-out, diet soda, peanut M&M's and Reese's peanut butter cups.

We arrived at the Masquerade prep-room and pre-judging area all ready to go. We hung out with the Silurian (her real name is Michelle) and her co-creator who I knew from dw_cosplay as qob. They had lots of pictures of the making of her outfit. This is her:


Madame Vastra is about to get Paleolithic on your ass...

Ha I asked her if she'd started out in costuming gradually... "Well, my first outfit was the Borg Queen." Awesome.

There was also a group of Victorian Lady Doctors complete with a TARDIS. They had entered as Journeymen and had a whole neat dance that they did for the Masquerade. There was a Five and a Six and TARDIS. They had some other group members as well, and a Facebook page also with a great set of Pictures. They were very nice. Here is a pic of two lovely lady Fives:


She has a cricket bat!

The emcee of the Masquerade was the nicest person. He was dressed as the Master, and he made sure to come around to all the participants and make sure he had their names right and to calm nerves and tell us all that we were fabulous. auntiemeesh and I were really early in the list of entrants, like sixth or seventh. All the better to get it over with early! The judges were two Midwest Costumer's guild ladies dressed in Time Lord Robes, and also Ian McNeice (Winston Churchill from Victory of the Daleks) and Simon Fisher-Becker (Dorium Moldovar from various series 6 episodes).

Everybody lined up. We were right behind Madame Vastra and qob who was dressed as Jack the Ripper. They did the scene where Vastra kills him. He even had a red handkerchief of "blood" for him to pull out of his chest pocket as he died. We went on and off with no difficulties, and then we got to watch the rest of the Masquerade. You can see pictures here on Chicago TARDIS' facebook stream.

It was a really fun, well-run Masquerade. They had moved long skits to an Open Mic night the previous day, so the Masquerade itself was quick and ran smoothly. Highlights included Scarecrow Men! A great Femme Three, the Victorian dancers, A fun sketch with Seven, Mel and a host of Red vs. Blue Kangs, Vastra and Jack the Ripper, A boy wheeled out on a dolly as Dead Rory (Really dead this time!), A ballerina Dalek who was a real on-toe ballerina ("FIRST POSITION. SECOND POSITION. EXTERMINATE POSITION!"), And wrapping up the show a very gutsy Sexy Churchill, whose outfit had gone a biiit more risque than on Friday! But it was all in good fun.

It went too smoothly as it turned out because there was a lot of time left over after all 36 contestants had gone on. So Tony Lee came up and did an audience participation story called "The Scarlet Blade" that involved qob again as the villain, TWO captain Jacks as the hero Scarlet Blade (the boisterous one from the earlier panel and the Friday group pic above, and another woman version. They... did the whole skit as a conjoined twin hero), the ballerina Dalek as the princess-in-distress, and Dead Rory as the plucky sidekick Bucky. We as the audience provided sound effects, cheers and boos, as appropriate. There was some re-writing going on in which the princess gains agency by knocking out a guard and escaping on her own, and a choose-your-own ending. It was amusing because qob had to die, AGAIN, and Tony Lee seemed a bit taken aback that he actually had a whole handkerchief of blood all ready.

Also the various endings involved the Scarlet Blade and/or Bucky getting killed off. But of course, the Scarlet Blade was immortal Jack Harkness, and Bucky was Rory. Tony Lee soon realized "We may be here for a while!" :D In the end we voted for the villain qob to run off with the emcee (eg, the Master).

So the judges reconvened and gave out awards! auntiemeesh and I won for best workmanship in the Novice category, which was really cool! Next time, I think we will be emboldened to enter as journeymen, even though it will be stiffer competition. We are looking at doing Riddell and Nefertiti at some point. That should be fun :) Madame Vastra won best in show, of course! Well deserved. And the Ian McNeice "KBO" award went to Sexy Churchill. Kudos to her for doing that on a dare! She got a kiss from "Real Churchill" for her efforts.

After the Masquerade, auntiemeesh and I indulged in celebratory drinks. We each had two whole drinks. That is like, two more than we usually have at cons. We saw briefly calapine again and I pestered her about old unfinished or forgotten fics of hers, and rather tipsily tried to recount the Troughton episodes I'd seen. We stopped a con-goer with a hand-made Seventh Doctor scarf and I pestered her for a picture, not learning until after I got back home and looked at lj that it was ghost2 whom I knew from friends of friends and common fic comments. We met various Sevens and I grabbed pics.

We met with a great costumer dressed as Amy from The Girl Who Waited; she and her friends were also DragonCon goers, and we swapped stories about that. Best story, her and a group of five friends dressed as the Yip-yip aliens from Classic Sesame Street... running into another group of completely unrelated people also dressed as Yip-Yip aliens! on a con elevator. Only at D*C...

I also talked with wiliqueen then and she showed me her River earrings which were cleverly crafted from Christmas lights. Too much fun. auntiemeesh and I got some coffee at some point that night but again we were early birds. We didn't make it up late enough for Dalek Karaoke.

Pics!

Ballerina Dalek. She was great in the Masquerade and the "Scarlet Blade" interim parlour show. Oh and you can also see wiliqueen in the background as River Song. I thought I had a picture of her but it must not have come out b/c it's not on my camera :(


DragonCon Cosplayer as Amy from TGWW. We both shared "OMG we brought too many costumes!" stories.


Another of the D*C group: "They're Dalek Bumps!" The Master from Curse of Fatal Death


A great Vampires of Venice Amy and Rory. We missed them when we were dressed as Calvierri girls, bummer!


The Old School Cyberman again with Idris.


A Paradox of Sevens of various stripe.


Me bullying ghost2 into a picture! What a lovely scarf pattern :) Oh, and you can see the zig-zag pattern on my vest in this pic. It was red/blue/tan zig-zags; I still can't believe I found a fabric with colors that so matched "the sweater".


Jenny; who got dressed up especially so Madame Vastra could have a Jenny for pics after the Masquerade. She was a Blue Kang in the actual Masquerade. I would NOT have made the connection if she hadn't mentioned it!

That was Saturday! It was loads of fun.




Sunday:

Sunday was a much more low-key day. auntiemeesh and I had our check-out pushed to 1pm but it wasn't enough time to do any costumes and have anywhere to change. So we just went in plain clothes for this day. We ventured out for breakfast over to the Egg Harbor Cafe in the mall and had much-needed protein and caffeine. (Note to self, if we go back we will have to bring a cooler of food or plan out deliveries if we plan to be in costumes for much of the time. It is not quite like DragonCon where the nearby food courts get overtaken by thousands of geeks in costume). Breakfast was yummy enough that I remembered to take a picture before I scarfed it all down:



We packed up all our stuff back into the car. "You brought a sewing machine?" someone asked me in the elevator. "Are you an exhibitor?" No, I replied. Just a crazy costumer. We ran into lizbee again in the elevator and said hi, and basically hung out in the lobby for a bit with some down time. We saw more fun costumes.

Adric and K-9, brother and sister duo


Blue Kang/AKA Jenny/AKA Mary Poppins: Time Lord. Complete with a TARDIS key and a carpet bag that's bigger on the inside. AKA booksavvy, who was very nice.


Hoon from the Voyage of the Damned! Took me a bit to remember who she was, but, ha, fantastic!

We went to two panels on Sunday: the first was "Prop-making large and small" which was basially like, "Top Gear" if Top Gear were about building Daleks and Cybermen :) It was definitely an engineer's panel and heavy on the "large" props! It was like car talk but with Daleks substituted for cars. BUT I found out about this neat technique called PeppaKura which is basically elaborate paper folding reinforced with glue or fiberglass or similar, and got a guidebook and a CD. I think it would be cool for making replica weapons for various sci-fi characters. If I ever get the time. The promoter of the PeppaKura method had made an entire Cybus version Cyberman out of the technique, as well as a Sontaran. Impressive! And the technique is pedantic and small-scale-to-large-scale enough that it quite appeals to me. I just need a printer...

The other panel we went to was Ace takes the Place with Sophie Aldred. It was fun hearing her talk about how she got the part of Ace (apparently a hand-written note on the back of her head shot: "Has Own Leathers" was quite instrumental). She talked about how you should never let Sylvester McCoy drive in a car rigged with cameras. And she talked about how her kids react to Doctor Who. How her son is finally realizing that it's quite cool that his mum was on the show, and tries every once in a while to make note of it on places like trains. "SO MUM, when You were on DOCTOR WHO, what was it like?" LOL...

The con was winding down, and Meeshie and I were ready to get going. We had one final stop to make before heading out on the trip back home, and that was to meet up with ladymercury_10 as she was heading back to grad school. There was a bit of confusion with the train, the weather had turned and it was quite cold! But we met up, and found a nice little cafe nearly right next to the train station, that not only had very good desserts, but honest to goodness, the cashier had spent time at WVU and Pittsburgh, and so she and auntiemeesh reminisced about clubs that are no longer there in the strip district (not a red light district, just "the strip").

We got hot drinks and talked about the con and school and math, and fic and family and such for a few hours until the next train came by. Which we almost missed! But not quite; we got her back on the train back to school with no harm done, if a little bit chilled for none of us except Meeshie having a warm coat. It was a good time, and very cool to meet ladymercury_10 in person. *waves*

After that, four hours back had us again at a Holiday Inn in the middle of Ohio. After the Indiana turnpike automatic toll gate decided I was a 5-axle truck and charged me $32 for what should have been a $7.70 toll (I eventually fixed that but it took emails and phone calls over a week! The whole trip was tolls most of the way. I think it cost us upwards of $60 round trip). We had a relatively leisurely morning the next morning until I realized it was a Monday and I didn't want to be driving through Pittsburgh anywhere near rush hour. But it worked out okay; I got Meeshie home by 2:30 and was home myself by 3:15.

I... still haven't unpacked my costuming suitcase.

Comments

[eve11]

Hah, there is one fic that I know, that I recc-ed on Calufrax, but it also involves a teensy bit of ridiculous (and somewhat explicit) slash to go along with "Hex and Rory meet in a bar"... totally not thinking of that fic at all when I asked the question... of course not... ;D

And yes, the hat was very strange!

[ladymercury-10.livejournal.com]

I may have, um, read that one, too. :P

[eve11]

LOL *evil grin*