BRIEFLY: Positively Final Appearance

22 February, 2011 at 10:38 am (benjamin)

I should have folded the previous post into this one, but in the heat of excitement about seeing my name and the feeling that I need to explain what on gods’ green Earth BSATCOP was, anyway, I forgot that I had been planning a short list of my recent appearances in media. After all, what’s the point of having one’s own website, except for it to be a clearing house for the results of one’s own ego-surfing?

Oldest first: whilst cleaning up the blog after the transition from Melbatoast to SmartOvercoat, I found the remnants of a promised second post about the Springfield, VT premiere of The Simpsons Movie. After having checked the saved links from the time and found that some were no longer valid, I did a little searching for alternate sites. And found myself hiding in the background of an image archived by a Life magazine photographer. This was surprising for two reasons, the first being that it’s always a little odd to be included in a real, professional publication. The second was that I was rather under the impression that Life had shuttered its doors in 2000. I’d read the press release about its deal with Google, which had only confirmed its defunct status in my mind, but had no idea it still had a print presence, or even reporters and photographers.

Somewhat more recently, I attended w00tstock at the Wilbur Theatre in Boston on Halloween in 2010. It’s getting harder, as I get older, to find occasions to dress up for Halloween. Working at a high school, I observe that the elementary school tradition of wearing a costume dies hard with some students, and it’s always good to find an opportunity to show teenagers that their teachers have pasts and tastes and enjoy their fair share of popular culture. So I like dressing up at work. This year, however, Halloween fell on a teacher meeting day — I can’t prove that this happened because the superintendent is a stick-in-the-mud who finds Halloween costumes both frivolous and unprofessional, but I maintain my suspicions. In any case, I wanted an outlet for my cosplay urges, and wore a Cameron Frye outfit to w00tstock, gratified that other nerds would surely be dressed up at well.

w00tstock, being w00tstock, was fairly well digitally documented, and at one point someone came ’round with a camera asking all of the people in costume to identify themselves — or, more importantly, the nerd-references they had clothed themselves as. I knew I had been filmed, but it was still a surprise to see my face staring back at me from the preview screen of a playlist of videos taken at the scene.

(There’s also a picture of me in the fan photo album in the Wilbur’s Facebook page, where my face clearly shows that I suddenly got uncomfortable with the prospect of having my picture taken, and my mouth and eyebrows tried to quickly get out of shot, leaving my skull behind. No, I rather think I won’t be linking to that one.)

Read the rest of this entry »

Permalink 1 Comment