My Day at GalaxyCon
Communing with America’s beloved celebrities on a busman’s holiday
Starring
William Shatner, Wil Wheaton, Richard Dreyfuss, Terry Farrell, Walter Koenig, Jonathan Frakes, Brent Spiner, Gates McFadden, LeVar Burton, Armin Shimerman, Todd Stashwick, Terry Matalas, Harvey Guillén, Dave Foley, Steve Burns, Fake Vincent D’Onofrio and more, a supporting cast of thousands, and more…and oh yeah, me
Arriving at close to the last minute at the suburban train station to catch the 10:05 MetroRail Red Line car for the 35-minute ride to downtown and the convention center, my son Luka and I sprint towards the arriving train and in the mad rush I forget my phone in the car. I realize this once we’re seated and the train is moving, as I rifle through my canvas bag and find little else but assorted printed matter and several chocolate treats to get me through the day. Damn, I think, but at least this will force me to experience the day as it happens, without any social media filters, and I hope the phone will be okay on this very hot day (Luka left the con later that afternoon, earlier than I did, to get to his job, and retrieved the phone; it had gotten hot indeed but was fine, in the end).
Arriving downtown, we walk and walk and walk until we find the back of the line, which snakes endlessly around one corner after another of the huge building. We end up waiting in line for over an hour — maybe 70 minutes? — in the 100 degree heat Austin’s suffered through for the past two months, occasionally completely exposed to the glaring sun, before we reach the security checkpoint at the entry. For the entire ordeal, Luka and I were directly behind an older man and his son; the dad, defying the stereotype about GalaxyCon attendees being liberal, tolerant types, was wearing a shirt on whose back was emblazoned the legend Let’s Go Brandon.
About halfway through our wait, we come upon a woman who had collapsed from heat exhaustion; people were surrounding her and shouting for someone to let her in through an emergency entrance.
Perhaps 30 percent of the attendees are in some sort of costume; lots of Starfleet personnel, anime characters Luka but not I would be familiar with, Star Wars people and so forth. (My only regret about not having my phone on hand is missing the opportunity to take a snapshot of my favorite cosplayers, a thirtyish couple dressed as Boimler and Mariner from the Star Trek: Lower Decks animated series.) Much of GalaxyCon is far more Luka’s world than mine; an 18-year-old gamer and fan of anime and cosplaying, he knows tons more references than I do; on the other hand, I’m also far from the oldest person at the con, though I generally get called Sir these days instead of dude (weird). Though I’m an avid viewer of most things Trek-related, until now I haven’t attended these kinds of conventions, nor do I walk around in a Starfleet uniform or funny ears in any case. But let it not be said that I’m not open to new experiences.
I’m a journalist, but I’m not on assignment. I’m carrying a notepad, but it’s only for this blog post. I’m only here for myself, which means I’m basically useless to anyone else today. I imagine that my feelings are similar to that of a professional musician who goes to an outdoor music festival as a regular punter, sans guitar and all-access pass. On the one hand, I’m relieved that I don’t have to turn in a piece on deadline with a predetermined word count; on the other hand, I feel kind of neutered, one hand tied behind my back, an undercover agent without an assignment. Oh, well. Let’s see what’s out there.
At one point I keep myself busy — reminding myself who I am? — by writing down the names of every celebrity I can remember having spoken with for print.
Even with thousands of attendees, a huge exhibition floor and tons of panels, GalaxyCon appears to take up less than half the available space in the vast Austin Convention Center, best known for hosting SXSW every March. The scale of the event astonishes me. The MAGA dad aside, GalaxyCon is, indeed, the place to get your LGBTQ/nerd/geek persona on and expect nothing in return but full acceptance. Call me naive, but if these people only harnessed their beliefs for political action, who knows what could change in Texas?
After Luka and I get our day badges, I make a beeline to see — who else? — William Shatner, his talk already in progress.
Ah, Mr. Shatner, with whom I had a memorable phone interview for a newspaper profile over a decade ago, when he was a mere 81 and taking his one-man show on the road to Austin (I specifically requested that the copy editor not use a headline like “Shatner Beams Down to Austin” for the piece because it would have been such a cringeworthy cliche; happily, they took my advice). Now at the venerable age of 92, Shatner, sitting alone on the Main Stage in a casual collared shirt in front of a respectable horde in the cavernous room, appeared only slightly puffier of face than a decade ago and was as good a raconteur as ever, spinning stories about his time performing in the Broadway play “The World of Suzie Wong” in the late 1950s, and much more recently, hunting wallabies and visiting an opal mine in the town of Coober Pedy, Australia (in connection with a project aired just this year involving the Fox TV reality show Stars on Mars), as well as ruminating on the consequences of technology. Shatner is a singular figure: Yes, he may be a self-centered jerk of renown, but he’s our beloved self-centered jerk of renown, as constant in our lives as Queen Liz was in the U.K., if not quite as reserved. At this late stage he might be thinking, “Maybe Star Trek was just an opportunity for me to get famous enough so that I could eventually sit on a chair on a stage for 45 minutes in front of a lot of people and talk about subjects that really matter to me, and damn it, they’ll listen.” And less than two years ago, of course, he actually flew to space on a comped voyage aboard Jeff Bezos’s penile rocket, so there’s that.
If by some remote chance you haven’t been aware, SAG-AFTRA and the WGA (Writers Guild of America) are currently on strike, which means that while actors can, and do, go to conventions like this, they are literally enjoined from talking about their current and past projects while on panels. This means that some imagination is called for: they can talk about how they got started in The Biz, how wonderfully they get along with their acting partners, spouses and pets, how they narrowly escaped death while rafting down the Colorado River in 2016, their new podcast (doesn’t every special guest here have one?) and so on. Some do better at this than others; I have nothing against ex-Kid in the Hall Dave Foley, but listening to him talk about ghostly encounters and aliens…I’ll pass.
The main exhibitor hall is home not only to peddlers of vintage comics, anime figures, clever $30 posters of fake superhero-themed cereal boxes, R2D2 bots, cosplayer swords, lightsabers and so forth, not to mention autograph authenticators, but a whole passel of celebrities, quasi-celebrities and not-quite-celebrities, both way past and in their prime, including people who write and draw comics, many of them signing autographs and posing for selfies for a price as they meet their eager public. Here in the USA we love and worship our celebrities, who can do no wrong even if they sometimes do many things wrong, even bad, evil things, but all is eventually forgiven if not forgotten. I glance from table to table, where the celebrities are arrayed for public inspection like exotic sausages and fruits on display at a downtown urban market’s central food hall (don’t squeeze the merch before you buy).
Oh hey, there’s Walter Koenig, the original Ensign Chekov on the original Star Trek, cast on the show back in ’66 (so the story goes) due to his resemblance to Davy Jones of the Monkees, to bring in the kids. Koenig was 30 and balding even then, and now, at 86, wrinkled, diminutive and quite bald, he looks forlorn sitting alone at his table save for a handler. Is this any way to close out an interesting career? Armin Shimerman, best known as Quark the Ferengi tavernkeeper on DS9, sits, out of makeup, equally unattended. Someone, please get this man a beer.
Koenig, Shatner, and the not-in-attendance George (King of the Internet) Takei are the last original Trek regulars still standing. But the ’90s Next Generation- DS9 era casts, many of them most recently active in the valedictory and recently concluded Star Trek: Picard, are here in force and generally thriving. Wil Wheaton, Jonathan Frakes, Terry Farrell are here, all gregarious and cheerful as they engage the faithful for a price (generally $40 to $100 for an autograph, about the same for a selfie, but combo specials!; also your chance to get a photo with four or five Next Gen stars for north of $300). Next Gen vets LeVar Burton, Brent Spiner and Gates McFadden are also on display, looking regal surveying the unwashed hordes from their lofty perches.
I sit in on Wil Wheaton’s interview at the Super Stage in front of hundreds of eager fans. Like them — hey, like seemingly everyone these days — I like Wil: he’s self-aware, honest, smart, a good writer, rides in the punk rock camp, happily admits to the crowd that he’s “one of them” (or as the title of his latest memoir puts it, Still Just a Geek), Celebrity Jeopardy champion. Wheaton bemusedly admits to having become at this point one of the Trek elder statesmen (at 51, he’s now older than Patrick Stewart was when he first donned Captain Picard’s uniform; chew on that for awhile). He got off some good one-liners (“The Black Flag logo is the Live, Laugh, Love of my generation”) and spoke very knowledgeably about tabletop games and early 21st-century online discussion boards.
Harvey Guillén, who plays Guillermo the vampire’s familiar in one of my favorite sitcoms of the moment, What We Do in the Shadows (you should watch it), charms with his cheerfulness and positive nature as he spins tales of his childhood in an LA barrio.
I throw some side-eye at Kevin Clash, formerly Sesame Street’s Elmo (not my childhood puppet, Bubba) before being forced off the show after allegations of, uh, personal impropriety (cases since dismissed, and Clash has returned to puppetry and personal appearances). One thing you can say about puppeteers, they always know which strings to pull…
Looking from table to table, it’s beginning to seem like a live-action Comedy Central roast; I half expect to see Don Rickles and Charo stroll by, or at least Jeff Ross. Steve Burns is here! The original host of Blue’s Clues from 1996 to 2002 (nothing against him, but also definitely not one of my childhood heroes) is reconnecting with his former kiddie fans all grown up, with one female admirer wearing that green striped rugby shirt in tribute.
Looking for somewhere to pass the time for 15 minutes, I sit in on a talk with the actress Emily Bett Rickards, who I’ve never heard of before but who seems nice enough.
Richard Dreyfuss is here all the way from the ‘70s, an elfin, amiable presence looking every one of his 75 years, attracting a respectable scrum of fans around his table as he signs photos and movie posters. (The most common response I get when I mention Dreyfuss was there was “What was he doing there?” Well, there’s an actor’s strike on and not much else going on, so…)
I stop by the table of Todd Stashwick, a cool dude who played an abrasive captain in Star Trek: Picard, telling him that I like Trek fine but that to me he’s Deacon in 12 Monkeys (the terrific twenty-teens four-season time-travel TV series, not the 1995 Bruce Willis movie) and that I thought they all deserved Emmys, especially him and the fabulous Emily Hampshire. “Love Emily Hampshire,” he says, and thanks me graciously. I also speak for a minute with Terry Matalas, showrunner of not only 12 Monkeys but Star Trek: Picard, marveling at how well he handled two so very different shows within the sci-fi genre.
For a couple of minutes I consider, half seriously, what would happen if I sat down at the table of a celeb around my age and assumed his identity, greeting skeptical guests who notice I don’t really look like the photos with “Hi, I’m Vincent D’Onofrio. Call me Vin! I was in Full Metal Jacket! Want a signed pic? That’ll be 70 bucks. Special combo deal today with a selfie, just a hundo. I’ll be glad to do it. I’ve got nothing else going on today.”
I wonder what the cut on autographs and selfies is for the house, and figure it’s a 50/50 split between them and the celeb. Maybe Shatner and a couple of others get more. Depends on their pull, of course.
It’s getting on in the afternoon. I sit in on an interesting discussion in a smaller room, about creating antiheroes in comic books, with several veteran comic artists and writers weighing in thoughtfully and entertainingly on the topic while, of course, taking the matter absolutely seriously. Asking whether the original version of Batman in Detective Comics in 1939 could be considered the original modern antihero, I was tactfully pointed to characters in pulp magazines and Westerns going back decades before that (not to mention thousands of years before that, to ancient Greece and the Epic of Gilgamesh!).
After sitting in for a while on a standup comedy showcase, I head for the exit, regrettably missing the 9 p.m. panel “Ad Icon Fights” (capsule description: “Ever wonder who would win a fight between the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man (from Ghostbusters) and the Jolly Green Giant? What about Colonel Sanders and Cap’n Crunch? Here’s where it all goes down!” For what it’s worth, my money would be on the Colonel because I have the feeling he’d fight dirty, and besides, Cap’n Crunch is a doofus.)
I end up logging over 15,000 steps on my Fitbit, and take the entire next day to stay home and recover. But I think, all in all, that it was worth it.
