Saturday
Despite being one of the last people to go to bed on Friday, I woke up on Saturday morning in time to avail myself of the free breakfast. I sat with filkerdave, and after finishing my food, later sat and chatted with katyhh and tarkrai. At some point, I realized the time and caught the last half of Lady Mondegreen’s “Choose Your Own Adventure Workshop”, where they had put a bunch of topics into a hat and drew a new one out every time they exhausted the previous topic.
Once that was done, I wandered out into the lounge area and chatted with various people, so I missed the next couple of concerts. I was in and out of the Main Concert, but I did fortunately catch the Crooklets singing “Alien Salad Abduction” and also demoneyes brilliant parody of callylevy‘s “Just Beyond”. I had stepped out to fetch some folks for filkerdave‘s spot when I got waylaid by the charming photographer who was at the con to cover the vent for an Irish youth magazine, and I spent a good deal of the next hour chatting with her and letting her take my picture.
The main concert was followed by a reunion of the original lineup of Three Weird Sisters. Since all three of them happened to be at the con, they decided to put on an hour set, and, while I admit to being greatly biased, they were fantastic. if you had told a total stranger that these three hadn’t performed together in over a year, I’m not sure you could have convinced them. The set was tight, high energy, and a hell of a lot of fun, and it was really nice to see the old dynamic still exists when they get on stage.
After the 3WS concert was supposed to be dinner, but that was when the first of the major hotel snafus struck. It seems that somehow the hotel had interpreted “Dinner from 5-7pm” as “Dinner at 7pm”, so there was a scramble to get dinner out. Worse, at this time we discovered that the hotel had, despite a contractual prohibition against booking other noisy events into the facility, booked a disco and a skittle alley for Saturday night; in fact, they rather comically wanted to set the skittle alley up in the main Programming room. This led to a great number of the concom having to jump into crisis mode, but fortunately, everything was eventually sorted out, with the skittles being put out of doors, dinner moved to a function room on the far end of the hotel, and coordination between the disco DJ and the con’s sound tech crew to try and ensure there’d be little interference from the dance.
The fears of the noisy disco also required a slight rearrangement of the evening programming, moving UK GOH Mike Richards up an hour, as he would tend to be quieter than the other two performers. What with the delay of dinner and lending support to the committee, I didn’t get to catch all of it, but I really enjoyed what I heard.
After Mike was the band Chimes, who aptly demonstrated how you can make sure everyone at the con gets a concert slot despite limited time. I lost track of the number of personnel changes the band went through, as various people filled in for the band members who were sidelined by illness. All of it was amazing, but my favourite song had to be “Thief in Little Pieces”, wherein little_cinnamon learned to not to let Phil rewrite his lyrics without checking on them beforehand. This rule belongs in the same category as “Don’t look at Judi Miller while you’re on stage.”
The evening wrapped up with the absolutely fabulous Lady Mondegreen, who delivered everything I’d come to expect from them over the years since they debuted. I’m a sucker for harmony and pretty girls, and LMG is rather obviously strong in both suits, and I’m biased to begin with for various personal reasons, but to say they blew the room away is rank understatement. I especially loved the ultra funky filk of “Lady Marmelade”, with fleetfootmike and demoneyes providing guitar and drum backing. The only regret I have is having the camera battery die shortly after sweetmusic_27 joined the band to turn the trio into a quartet. But not being able to take pictures meant I got to kick back and enjoy the music.
Once the concerts were officially over, I went to hang out with cadhla and sweetmusic_27, and we played the exciting parlour game called “Quick! Find something Seanan can eat!” This is no mean feat after 10pm on a Saturday night in Basingstoke, but the game was finally won by securing an expensive but indifferent cheese-and-veg pizza from room service. Once fortified, we wandered into Open Filk, where I recall singing a couple of adamselzer‘s songs, and I don’t remember what else. We stayed up until way too late singing, and then Amy and I stayed up talking until later still, and I finally got to sleep somewhere around 5am.
End Part the Third…
(Coming soon: Part the fourth, in which there is oversleeping, closing ceremonies, and we get in trouble for singing in a pub. Don’t miss the thrilling conclusion, next time on Flashback!)