The Winkie Convention (so far)...

So after the dramatics of trying to get here, so far the convention itself has been going pretty smooth, and has been a lot of fun (like it usually is). Last night, the evening program started off with Show and Tell, and I got to show off my new T-shirt that Lisa sent me from Kansas, plus a few recent interesting DVD acquisitions. Then came a new event, which I believe is now being retroactively called the Ragbag Raffle. An item is held up, and if you want a chance to get it, you throw a quarter into a basket (or, on some items, two or four quarters). Then, if your number is pulled out of the bag, you get the item. I put in a few quarters, but my main job was to pull the numbers out of the bag. After doing this for about thirty minutes, we got started with the more serious stuff as Peter Hanff gave a centennial talk on Queen Zixi of Ix, first published (as a book) in 1905. Then Angelica Carpenter presented a show on the connections between Oz and Wonderland. This was somewhat the reverse of a talk she gave earlier this year to the British Lewis Carroll Society, as there she was trying to explain Baum to Carroll fans; here, it was explaining Carroll to Oz fans.

Saturday morning brought out the costumed characters. While it was a small bunch, it was larger than we've had in recent years, and there were some great costumes. (Yes, I have pictures, but no, I haven't figured out how to post them here yet. I'm working on it, but I may not get to show them to you until after I get back to Seattle.) Karyl and I had a lot of fun, as she came as a terrific Miss Piggy as the Wicked Witch of the West from the recent Muppets' Wizard of Oz, while I got dressed up as Kermit the Frog as the Scarecrow. Meanwhile, we had a whole passle of characters from The Tin Woodman of Oz -- Polychrome as the canary, Woot as the green monkey, Mrs. Yoop, Chopfyt, and the Blue Rabbit. We also had Glinda the Good, and Princess Langwidere from Ozma of Oz -- complete with a set of her extra heads. (One of those heads needed a shave...).

Then a few Winkies braved the quizzes. For the second year in a row, Melissa Hollister was the only entrant in the children's division, so she was the winner. There was a little more competition in the adults' category, over Queen Zixi of Ix, and Susan Hall came out the winner. In the meantime, Peter Hanff and Bill Thompson moderated a panel about buying and collecting Oz and other books.

And now, it's the middle of the auction on Saturday afternoon, so I'm going to just mention that at the business meeting a few hours ago, we decided that we're going to come back to Asilomar, at least for the foreseeable future, next year's theme will be the 150th anniversary of L. Frank Baum's birth, and in 2007 it will be the Oz Club's fiftieth anniversary. Oh, yeah, and I offered to be part of the programming committee. (I was sort of on the edges this year anyway, so I thought I'd make it official.)