It was history in the making

So geeked out, but in a good way.

It was a bit of a wait, but I saw all nine original cast members of Star Trek: the Next Generation do a panel together tonight and it was awesome. :-D The nine of them had never done a panel together before, so it was literally history in the making. To quote Firefly (I know, wrong show, but it fits), the Expo did the impossible and that makes them mighty.

I've seen some of them before, at other conventions, but when you put all nine of them together, it's something different. They're a big family and you can see it. They joke so easily with each other and it's so amusing to watch. There was a lot of hugging and kissing, actually, lots of kissing. At one point, John de Lancie, Q, who wasn't even announced as a guest, showed up with a bouquet of flowers for "John Luck Pickerd" and the room went nuts. But anyway, suddenly, Patrick Stewart has these flowers, so he starts handing them out to the rest of the cast, giving them each a kiss. Even the band, who was forced to play a lot before the cast showed up, got flowers from Sir Patrick.

Then, randomly, Gates McFadden starts picking them up from everyone, giving out kisses on the cheek along the way. When she got to Patrick Stewart, it was every Picard/Beverly shipper's dream. A kiss, right on the lips, and then Patrick Stewart pulled in Gates McFadden for an embrace. It's so great how relaxed it was.

Not so great was how late the panel started. It started on time; they had a message from the mayor, who couldn't be there, and then a 20 minute video showing other celebrities talking about Next Gen. Then there was a 30 minute intermission. Wha? There was nothing to change on stage; everything was set up. My pet theory is, the cast, done for the day, went out for dinner (without a handler), had some drinks, and then totally lost track of time. So the Expo had to scramble while they tracked down the cast. Hence, the band on stage was forced to keep playing while all the geeks in the room were angrily tweeting away. But that's just my theory.

I'll ramble a bit more about this tomorrow, if I survive the day. So many people at this year's Expo...

Full frontal nerdity done for the year

Whew, I survived this year's CCEE. Wow, there were a lot of people this year. And I mean a lot. It was so epic, the fire marshal was called in and had to shut down the place for awhile while they counted heads. Not cool for all of the geeks outside of the building. And just to be clear, no codes were violated; the fire department just had to do their jobs.

I'll talk more about this once I have had a good night's sleep, but the highlight of the day was definitely meeting Sir Patrick Stewart twice. Once to get his autograph, a birthday present for my sister, and once again for his photo-op. Yup, we did a family photo with him. We are a family of geeks. I didn't get to say anything to the man, but it was still nice to stand next to him for all of two seconds.

Despite all of the hiccups this year, I'm confident that the Expo people will sort it out and have next year working like clockwork. It happened last year. The year before that was a bit of a gong show but they fixed all of the problems by the next expo. I'm just not sure where they can go from here. What other TV cast could they reunite? I vote for the Firefly cast. It'd probably be the only way to get Nathan Fillion to come to the city.

Okay, I'm going to bed now.