The Circus Must Be Back In Town: Psuedocon

Well, so far, my last post...well, at least its out there until the sun ignites and fries everything or until I inadvertently delete the Internet while programming my Comcast TV remote. Beth Massie (in b&w, above, from Beth Gwinn's DARK DREAMERS) posted Abe on her Skeeryvilletown blog, and we are mutual friends of this GW Ferguson. (CapCom also posted on her blog, which I assume will confuse many viewers of the TV show LOST). Yes, the same GW who wrote about me knowing the lyrics to "Do You Think I'm Psycho, Mama?" Well Beth and GW have known each other since grade school, but I didn't meet him until the early 90s. It falls out like this: World Fantasy was going to be held in London in, I think, 1988, and a bunch of us, being basically new at writing and pretty much broke, said screw that. I said I'd watch BBC when Chicago cable finally gets it in the year 2000; I'm a visionary that way. Well, Beth decided to host the first of many Psuedocons on a billion-acre stretch of land with her house, her sister Barb's, a bunch of talking cows, and Beth's bro-in-law Charlie's collection of VW Beetle models (visible from space, actually). Where to start. Any and every writer and/or artist was invited and there was a rotating attendees over the years. Each year we took a phrase to use for the following year, and the second time I visited, as we took our trek to the Kroger's for a bunch of crap to eat while watching USA's Up All Night or MST3K, this quaint little woman in tiny little Waynesboro, Virginia (where quaint little women are really fat Wiccan demon-whores who have collections of everything HP Lovecraft ever wrote hidden in their pantries. No, pantries. I said pantries!)muttered to her husband that the circus must be back in town. I'm sure she just meant it as a jolly jape, just as I'm certain that now that she has likely died that another jolly jape is that she has to smoke a gigantic turd the size of a blunt in purgatory before she can get anyplace else. But the crazy things we did back then! Lip synch. Charades. Marshmallow mumbles! Driving Go-Karts! One year, there was karaoke which the guys gave up on, but the women just kept on singing until dawn. This, THIS PLACE, is where I met Mr. G.W.Ferguson. Most everybody else I knew, Yvonne Navarro was still living in Chicago (that's me carrying her at World Horror in Toronto last year), and there's me, Brian Hodge and Kurt Wimberger in front of one of those VW's I mentioned earlier. Man, the kinds of crap that went on over 72 hours. One year Jeff Osier and Cathy Van Patten up and got themselves married (that's them fretting over a picture book of myself, I think), and the whole ceremony was in this huge cavern of bats of quaint little vampire women who shop at Kroger's in a town called Grottoes and half the people were scared of Dracul's and Am'tyville haints. All fun eventually comes to an end, even after ten years of Beth Cons and ten without, well, there are still plenty of memories, many I haven't mentioned here. But, anyhow, those summer weekends were better than most real cons I've been to, my only real regret is that there wasn't a better pain medication for me back then, and it was the only time I dressed in drag, the year we had to sing wedding songs to Jeff and Cathy, and I sang the Kinky Friedman-written "Throbbing Python Of Love." I'm certain that if our trips to the Shenendoah Valley had continued, next year's Psuedocon's catch-phrase would have been Fishnets For Vigoda.