After being delayed a year and half the much loved local pop culture convention returned to Kansas City today. Through a series of conflicting schedules we only had today to attend and only Bridget and I were available at that. This works fine as Bridget and I get along pretty well and have loads of fun by ourselves. Wanting to capitalize on as much of it as we could we arrived nearly an hour before the doors opened and snaked our way through the length of Bartle Hall and wrapped around, back down the stairs and found our place behind a few thousand other would be Comicon nerds.
You could feel the excitement and see tons of well crafted costumes resulting from the extra 18 months to tinker and perfect. Masks were required and social distancing was surprisingly at play through most of it. Friday is the ideal day to go anyway as it has the lowest attendance. Saturday costs a lot more to get in and you have massive throngs of people to content with. Upon hitting the con floor we made our way directly to the celebrity area and found a non existent line to meet Irene Bedard the voice and artistic representation for Disney's Pocahontas. She was very polite and patient. We got an autographed picture and a selfie with her asking her a few questions and finding a loving caring person happy to meet us.
I had originally planned to stand in line for Brent Spiner, Gates McFadden and/or Spencer Wilding but they all cancelled. Lou Ferrigno was an exciting addition but he wasn't signing photos till much later. Instead we made our way through the booths. In true 9 year old fashion Bridget started asking for all sorts of things that spoke to her pop culture likes. Trying to keep her in check I reminder her of our strategy, we walk the whole con at least once before we make a purchase (and almost did).
It took us at little more than 4 hours to make it from one end of the massive convention hall to the other. It was about the half way point that it occurred to me to start recording small videos. I was able to piece together a few fun moment to make a video for our YouTube channel. We encountered our geocaching buddies the Travelling Armadillo family, Ed who is a mover and shaker in creating new tabletop game stores and tons of other nerd community friends.
The cosplay was fun, the food was overpriced and the geek gear was everywhere! It was a blast and I can't wait to return next year.
8/20/2021