Dinner with Joss Whedon 07/27
Pictures here, for those of you passing through: http://pics.livejournal.com/errabunda/

I haven’t put up photos of the other winners, as I have no doubt they’ll post them if they wish.

Now, for those of you who asked for details…

I just flew back from Comic-con this morning with this howling cough and a headache that made me wonder if I could do my job with only my left-brain, while my right-brain recuperated in a Petri-dish, so this is the earliest I could make this post… and I’m still not sure if I can articulate anything more than !!!!!!!!!!!

When I arrived in San Diego on Thursday night I went to the Vagabond Inn in Point Loma, which is where you end up when you come out of the airport, see the signs toward downtown and then drive the other way. The Vagabond Inn smells like cigarettes on the inside and fish on the outside and has no working internet. Glamorous.

On Friday, I met up with the other winning bidders at the rendezvous. We were:

* Suzanne Brockman, a writer, and her husband, also a writer.
* Karen, a lyricist active in environmental philanthropy
* Paul, a businessman from the Silicon valley
* myself, a software engineer from the Silicon valley

We were interviewed by IFC News, and I prepped for the interview by watching Suzanne, who did an awesome job, but then they threw me off-course by asking different questions. I hope I didn’t come across as a complete idiot, but Suzanne reassured me they’ll edit for content, so I don’t think I’ll even really show up.

Then Joss showed up. Honestly, my first thought was, “He’s really tall!” And then my brain just stopped working, and did the dance of awe instead. He was wearing a suit, but seemed to have forgotten his tie. Also, sneakers. That reassured me. Here I was, in the presence of a veritable demigod, and he was wearing sneakers.

As we walked toward the restaurant for dinner, Joss commented on my outfit… and really, there is absolutely nothing as validating as having the stamp of shiny from Joss Whedon. Not only is he the brilliant and witty genius behind Buffy, Angel, Firefly, Fray and other things, he is one of the most warm, sensitive, curious and kind people I’ve ever met. He takes such genuine interest in the people around him, their lives and aspirations, and he managed over the course of dinner to draw each one of us out and make us feel comfortable.

We shared stories—our favourite Buffy episodes, characters, moments—and I’ll put mine up here briefly for the record, since it came up and I’m sure whedonesque will connect to this post in a matter of hours. It’s Hush, from Season 4, the episode with half an hour of dialogue silence. Why? Because it was the first episode that made me realize this wasn’t a show I could watch without paying attention while I was chopping vegetables for lunch. The absence of dialogue made me realize how much of television is heard, how often the auditory cues there provide for us a conversational path that is expected—this intonation implies a joke on its way; oh it’s a fight scene, I can do the carrots now—and in Hush, it is not only the characters but the audience who must fumble around in the dark, suddenly having their sensitivity heightened to nuances in people’s faces, having to really focus on communicating. There’s more personal stuff that goes behind my love for the episode, but in general I thought Hush was terrifying, musical, and profoundly lonely, and it was unlike anything I had ever seen on television before.

Other conversation topics: feminism, blood sacrifice and womb envy, lyrics and cadence in Serenity, casting anecdotes, the incredible talent and courteousness of all the actors, the unfathomable depths of Wesley-love, Riley love, Buffy’s relationship with her mother, misogyny, misandry, Stephen Sondheim, Princess Di, religious fanaticism and emotional genuineness, the work of collaborative writing, Xander’s character growth, marriage, relationships in the Joss-verse, myths of romance in the minds of high-school girls, Angel’s foray into the martial arts and its replacement by boxing, the Oedipal nature of Angel S4, ballet, musicals, homophobia and probably a hundred other things I’ve already forgotten.

Dinner was in a private room at a steakhouse in the Gaslamp quarter. Greystone or something, wasn’t paying attention to the name.

The others had to head home after the dinner, since they had not been able to find a place to stay the night, but I was heading to Comic-con the next day. Joss then offered to let me come backstage before the panel, and the next day, when I realized that the room was filled to capacity and they had even closed the waiting line 45 minutes before the panel, but I had somehow ended up in the front row, I was completely overwhelmed. Having never been to Comic-con I didn’t know that people had camped out in front of the room hours beforehand to get a seat, so I felt enormously privileged to be sitting where I was. 

There’s more. At Comic-con, from time to time, the audience would call out names of characters in the Joss-verse. Anya! Wesley! WASH! WASH! Oz! This, I felt, was very different from all the other panels I’d seen. Nobody called for Sarah, David, Emma, Amy or even Joss himself. In other panels, fans screamed out the names of the people onstage, or cheered for the actors. (Although seriously, the number of people screaming “Jensen!” at the SPN panel freaked me the hell out.)  Joss writes characters who are not sock-puppets or soapboxes, characters who take on a life of their own, characters who are so true to themselves and written with such integrity that it is no longer surprising to me that they can come back from the dead. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle once grew jealous of Sherlock Holmes and killed him… and was forced to bring him back, as some characters simply cannot die.  How, after all, can death touch the immortal?

It was a pleasant surprise to me to discover that even in a cruel, and often justly scorned and mocked industry, there are people with such integrity, who have the courage to allow their creations a real and separate existence. It isn’t just Joss, though. The people around him, Scott Allie, Mike, and the others I met, were so helpful and warm and completely unpretentious. Utterly devoted to the work they do, and yet they would never make anyone feel they didn’t have time for them.

And as if my shiny weekend couldn’t get any more shiny, on Saturday night I saw Jewel Staite at the W… and seeing her made me want to slap Simon for his Kaylie-related cluelessness. Then when I returned to the Hyatt, where I was staying, I heard Seth Green was around and tried looking for him. Couldn’t find him, and just as I gave up and started walking toward the elevator I saw him walking past me. I don’t think I could have strung together a single coherent sentence since it was past 1 AM, but still, yay!

Thank you Joss, Scott, Mike, and everyone at Dark Horse, for a ginormously fabulous weekend.

That's all folks!