Budging Out of the Box

The hot pink bubble-bouffant in black tiered lace is really a man selling vintage clothing. The curvy lady in loin-cloth-with-scabbard has places to go. Then there are those dressed monochrome; the orange is particularly eye-catching. It’s the hawker’s fair at Bay Con, the once-a-year Silicon Valley science-fiction festival over Memorial Day weekend. I’m an unlikely participant. I got in the door by helping my friend Ed who has written and published his novel after years of writing and many drafts. So I sit at a dealer’s table and watch the parade, and my optimism about our humanity is restored. This is living poetry.

The booksellers are here too. Peter Beagle is to my right; his books The Last Unicorn and A Fine and Private Place are cult classics. Tee-shirt vendors, chain-mail makers, bolt and leather clothtiers. Men in black with silver ponytails.

“I used to work at Stanford for many years,” someone mentions, walking by. Others work at nearby animation studios or in the virtual world of dot.coms. More than a few are simply secretaries and sales clerks, and it is likely many others are in the burgeoning ranks of the unemployed. Quite a few of the women have hairy legs and arm-pits under their long weighty gowns and corseted bodices; the men tend toward pot bellies and pale complexions. In fact, it would seem zaftig in women and men is more of the aesthetic, though one mustn’t forget the Lara Croft athleticism popular in contemporary culture. But there are more than a few people in wheelchairs scooting along with guidedogs and dexterous turns around booths, and men with canes, the long, knotty mythical ones carved of yew or oak.

It’s been such a down week. I have my personal plights which seem insignificant compared to the millions of gallons of oil spilling into the Gulf of New Mexico, poisoning sea life and heading toward shoreline. There’s some asshole head of a “Return the American Family to the Way it Ways” coalition claiming that Hitler was homosexual and used homosexuals to pull off most of his atrocities (what is he drinking?). 

The stock market hit its lowest since 1940 today, or so I was told. Yes, there are reasons to be depressed. But, here at a festival of geeks and wizards, people who want to dress in costumes--whether meticulously handcrafted or quickly assembled from objects long ago lost on the closet floor--, and others who are here just to partay down, there’s an unexpected sweetness born of being part of a strange galactic alliance of book lovers and fantasy afficionados. My weeklong depression is lifting as I watch imagination restored to humanity.