Mythcon

We're back from the Mythcon in Minnesota.

On the personal level, this was a debilitating crisis, though not so agonizing as having lost my bag in the Atlanta airport on my way to Mythcon 6 years ago. Despite fervent mask-wearing, on Sunday I came down with a cold (covid tests negative, at least so far) which prevented me from attending the banquet (someone ferried my pre-paid meal to my hotel room) or playing my accustomed role as narrator of what was announced as the last ever performance of the Not Ready for Mythcon Players. Bonnie Rauscher, an excellent actress, took it on instead and paid a nice tribute to me which I saw on video later.

Nor could I deliver my paper on John Wain on Monday morning, so papers coordinator Melody Green read it to the audience, it having fortunately been written in full, which is not always true of my papers. So thank you, Bonnie and Melody. And I was feeling better enough on Tuesday that the scheduled trip home was feasible.

The venue, a large DoubleTree in a shopping center in the Minneapolis suburbs, was not ideal. The bulk of the programming rooms, though compactly adjacent to each other, were a long trudge at the other end of the complex from the sleeping room tower. The elevators in that tower were already beginning a nervous breakdown when we arrived and it only got worse (though promptly fixed on Monday, see comment below about service). The hotel restaurant didn't serve lunch, and though there were box lunches for con workers, the rest of us had only 90 minutes to head out and find something. There were some places within walking distance, assuming that you could walk farther than we can and didn't mind the heat (on Friday and Saturday) or the torrential rain (on Monday), but most places worth dining at were much further off and challenging to get to due to the extreme disruptions of Minnesota road-repair season. Also, the hotel was repaving its parking lot and those with cars had to keep moving them around as different areas were blocked off and only a tiny sufficiency of spaces were left.

But! That having been said, this was in many respects a splendid Mythcon. The papers and speeches were interesting, the social side was chewy and full of substantive discussion (not true of the last in-person Mythcon), the hard-working committee did everything possible to keep the show running smoothly, the hotel staff earned gold stars in courtesy and helpfulness, the woman who was distressed over losing her eyeglasses eventually found them on the floor of her hotel room. And lastly I should report that, though B. and I flew on Delta, everything happened on time, no delays, no hitches except the e-mail system getting confused about what to send which one if either of us. Though at least one other person got stranded in the airport homebound due to missing a connecting flight.

Best line of the convention, from Juanita Redfield as Eric Rauscher, running a workshop session, was trying to encourage everyone to move up to the front of the room and sit in a circle: "We're Episcopalians. We always sit in the back pews because there are no pews in the parking lot."