Where the hell was I on 9/8?

I imagine a few inquiring minds want to know, given that so much crap happened that weekend -- thanks to VT Athletics for not taking into account the fact that people might want to (gasp!) do something other than go to a football game on a weekend.

I was with satal, dvantmonkmiroku, aburatsubodream, and Deidre (whose LJ user name escapes me) for the weekend. I came down to see them, and to go to the Faerie Festival in Abingdon, which was celebrating an exhibit at the local arts center of the illustrations of Charles Vess, the artist who illustrated Neil Gaiman's Stardust for Vertigo. He, living in Abingdon, showed up at the festival. It was a lot of fun -- I chatted with a bunch of cool people, danced, ate funnel cake, and got my copy of Stardust signed. Much merriment was had by all.

Afterward, my friends and I went to see the Stardust movie, since I had never been. satal was talking it up to everyone at the festival, and the five of us went to the grocery store to get tickets (you can see a movie after opening day in Abingdon for only $4.50 by buying tix at the grocery store -- very nice). To satal's shock and glee, everyone -- even Charles Vess! -- showed up. It was quite awesome.

There were a few down moments...like what happened right before the movie. The five of us had just gotten in, and the rest of the group hadn't arrived yet. Before the movie began, the theater was playing local commercials with its digital projectors, and we started to mock them...at which point, the people in the row in front of us shushed us, saying they were trying to listen. Yeeeah...OK, so we talked a bit softer. At one point during the ad-fest, there was one of those "this ad segment can be yours" deals, with the ad seller's logo on it. The logo in question was a pot of gold next to a Jesus fish. So, satal said, "What are they trying to say, Jesus was a moneygrubber?"

At that point, the female unit of the shusher family snapped her head around and said something to the effect of, "I don't want you saying that in front of my daughter. Whatever you think about Jesus is your business, but I do not want to hear the words 'Jesus' and 'motherfucker' [emphasis mine here] in the same sentence in front of my daughter again." Which flabbergasted us, saying as how we were on our best behavior (at satal's urging) and I never heard a mofo escape our lips. There was a bit of awkward silence -- at which I contemplated telling her off, saying that she didn't have the right to not be offended -- and then satal said, "I said Jesus was a moneygrubber. I think you misheard us." To her credit, Mrs. Shusher conceded that she thinks she did. But she also gave us this spiel about how her daughter was 14, and she wanted to protect her from ideas that Jesus was bad.

The situation annoyed me. It made livid others in our number. In the end, though, it was a minor setback; the other festival folk arrived in numbers, and were talking and laughing with us, and the Shushers shut up. The movie itself made the Shusher parental units uncomfortable, despite their daughter smiling and laughing at it and us, and her parents took her out of the theater 30 minutes in.

The movie was great, and worth watching again. It adds some superfluous elements (like the sky pirates and the canned lightning and the Wall guard who Knows Kung Fu), which serve to add action and excitement to an otherwise straightforward plot. I'm kinda ambivalent about the changes, but it's not as bad as a typical Hollywoodization of the book would have been -- prolly because the studios have realized that Neil Gaiman can write, and have left him mostly alone. That prolly did the movie a service right there.

The rest of the weekend was spent chatting and having miscellaneous merriment with satal et al. I remember going to Wal-Mart (for the first time in months), and getting a double-DVD set of WarGames and Space Camp, thus bringing my 80s-camp movie archive closer to completion, as well as playing games, and being silly. Alas, it had to end. Still had fun though.

And now you know...the rest of the story.