Saturday, August 9, 2008

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.

8 comments:

Charles Gramlich said...

Sounds like a freaky time was had by all. I'm sorry I missed out on these. I'm sure my southern sensibilities would have been scandalized, and that's a good thing.

Sidney said...

Charles has a good point. It's always good to stir things up a little.

Anonymous said...

Oh dear. Those are some memories. Beth looks like some kind of glamorous CSI detective.

James Robert Smith said...

Sometimes I forget what a total cutie Beth Massie is. Thanks for posting that.

Ah, the might-have-beens. I used to get invited every year to Pseudocon. And as I ran my own business, I could never peel myself away from the horrid and useless thing to go. Alas!

Nice to see the photo of Jeff Osier and his wife. I used to adore Jeff's work. To the point where I suppose he likely thought that there was something wrong with me. Maybe I was just his perfect reader. Who knows?

Too bad the Pseudocons ceased. I recall that when I was finally shed of my self-employed status, I asked Mark when the next Pseudocon would be held, and he informed me that there would likely never be another one. Wouldn't you know it?

Steve Malley said...

Fishnets were Vigodaed on your behalf, over on my Stranger in Paradise blog. It needed the boost!

Capcom said...

Funny stories. :-)

I remember "Up All Night", that was a good program. There's no good late night programming on TV anymore, even on cable channels. It's not fair when you come home from working the night shift and all you have to watch on TV is infomercials. :-(

traceylee said...

thanks for the nice comment on my page...I do remember a bit of TK's post but I was confused on it!!! not to sure on what it was all about

traceylee said...

Thanks for the nice comment on my page. I was a little confused on that post...not to sure on what was going on!!!