Fandom Snowflake 2021 #3: Dinner Theatre

[silveradept]

The third challenge is upon us, and it wants to us to think about who we might gather around our table.

In your own space, tell us who, from one of your fandoms, would you most want to have dinner with (or tea, or a random afternoon visit), And why? This could be a creator, an actor, a costumer, a set designer, a director, a character, a composer, anybody! What would you talk about? What are you dying to know?

My brain almost immediately pings the idea that several featured guest convention panels are, to some degree, about this very idea (the good ones, anyway) of getting people together in the same space to talk about something they either love to do or do professionally (or both). And those are fun, but sometimes the best convention experiences are when you get people who are known for one thing end up talking about something completely different. Like the "someone bribe Seanan Mcguire with Diet Dr. Pepper and ask her to talk at length about folklore. Or Ponies. Or Disney. Or previous jobs Seanan has had. Or fanfic. With others. Or we have someone known for their work on tall ships and sails known for their work reviewing sex toys just having a fireside chat that we've been invited to. (I was looking forward to Boats and Boners III: Tall Ship Drift or something similarly titled at convention this past year.) These Muppet Show-style conversations are the kinds of things that I would be interested in seeing a lot of, actually, especially for people who really are known for specific things in Fandom, so that this really good writer gets to talk music geekery with composers they are interested in.

But also, I'd like to listen in on C. Spike Trotman talking comics and running your own comics printer and publisher, and some of the fun stories from the VA booth about how you get someone to do the things that you need them to. The sort of things that happen when you put knowledgeable people together for something and let them talk without interruption.

Character-wise, I'm not as sure there are people that I would want to invite to dinner, unless it was something where they just got to take a break from adventuring and relax for a little bit. Maybe if they were the kind of people who could teach us how to use our own inmate magic or teach us some of their own (the simple kind, probably not the world changing kind), that would be nice. But mostly, because of the way that narrative seems to work, they seem to need a place to rest more than anything.

Comments

[perspi]

This is such a fun answer! Thanks for playing!

I agree that Muppet show style convos with multiple creatives would be great.

[silveradept]

It really would be. The Muppet Talk Show where they seriously went at the format while making sure that everyone was talking about things other than what they do for work would be the best thing. I think we'd learn so much fun stuff.

[sylvaine]

Oh boy, yes! Getting people to talk about something they don't normally talk about (or ar not known for talking about) is the best fun. :D

[moon_custafer]

My spouse used to volunteer at a lot of conventions so he got to do that quite a bit, either as a guest liason or just running into people in the halls. I think he mentioned having a long conversation about Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers with Andrew J. Robinson or somebody else who’d agreed to guest as a last-minute replacement for another actor and was relieved not to be getting asked Star Trek questions. He also hit it off with Terry Pratchett before even reading any of his books (they talked dinosaur fossils and Red Dwarf).

[sylvaine]

See, this is the order in which I would want to make friends with a "celebrity" - *before* I have consumed any of their work. :)

[moon_custafer]

He bought a bunch of Pterry’s books the following day so he could start reading them, and got them signed while they were both slightly hungover. I think the last time they ran into each other was at Worldcon in 2003.

[sylvaine]

Oh my, what a fantastic story. :D

[sjh2009]

Oh I love it when you can get people to talk about other aspects of their life or things they love, if they're willing to, it brings them more to life as a person, rather than just the actor of characters you love.

[silveradept]

And you learn all sorts of really interesting and fun things about them. Some of them you have to be very careful about repeating in mixed-age company, but they're good anecdotes.

[moon_custafer]

Pretty much any person whose work I like, I’d be nervous about actually meeting, in case I annoyed them or they turned out to be unpleasant. That said, I do have a lot of “I happen to encounter x in a coffee shop or somewhere and we have a pleasant conversation about something” fantasies.

[silveradept]

I often run into such things unintentionally, like when guests who ate going to be signing stop by the pop-up library that's right next door and have a pleasant book conversation without knowing already that they are a big name person. (I did pick up on the cue that this was someone important, and asked for introduction, at which point I went "Oh! Very much a big name person!"

At some panels, though, people whose books I have enjoyed turn out not to be very good at the panel experience, so there's always that danger, too.

[tsuki_no_bara]

oh, these would be great conversations! i used to follow spike on twitter (well, i still do, i'm just never on twitter) and every so often she'd get into these discourses about random non-comics shit, or sometimes stuff that was kind of comics-adjacent, and it was always so interesting. so yeah! give people a chance to geek out about stuff that's not necessarily the stuff that made them famous.

[silveradept]

Entirely! I feel like we could do some really interesting things if we were able to get the guests talking about what they like, rather than just what they're doing. Our play some of the "this interesting thing about you that you're willing to share" game.

[azurelunatic]

I would love to put Seanan, UrsulaV, and DDuane together at a dinner that we were also at.

[silveradept]

Make sure everyone has their preferred drink and also perhaps turn off all the cameras just to be sure.

[azurelunatic]

The making of that dinner would also be a riot.

http://www.europeancuisines.com/

[firecat]

Boats and Boners III: Tall Ship Drift

This is one of the best panel titles I've seen.

[silveradept]

The last one I was able to see (in 2019) was Boats and Boners: 2Boat 2Boner, so I figured they would want to keep the theme going for the next one if they could manage it.

[flamingsword]

😆😆😆 I would absolutely watch all of those panels.

[silveradept]

The one I saw was fantastic, and really was two good friends catching up with each other with an audience that happened to be in attendance. So it's not just a really good title.