NameThatCon 13 -- MooGooGaiCon
NameThatCon 13, MooGooGai Con, (hilled as "a new dish for a new millenium") was held over the weekend of April 14-16, 200 at the Ramada Inn at Six Flags in Eureka, Missouri, just west of St. Louis on I-44. This hotel has a rather unusual arrangement with a number of rooms opening on an area right beside the enclosed pool and games arcade. All the dealers were placed in these rooms, and we were able to put merchandise in our rooms as well as our tables in the open area outside them. This gave us a lot more flexible space to work with, without some of the common problems of the "hall of hucksters" method of selling out of one's room.
Unfortunately, I had come down with a cold that weekend. It started with a sore throat on Thursday when we drove from Indianapolis to the St. Louis area and stayed the night at one of the inexpensive motels in Collinsville not far from where Archon is held in October. By Friday morning I was getting some definite nasal congestion and general miserable feeling, but I dragged myself through the process of loading in all our merchandise and getting it set up. I also went up to the art show on the third floor and got my art set up.
Then we settled in to sell. We got a lot of lookers, but not a whole lot of buyers. I did a fair amount of work on a story I'd brought with me to finish writing.
In the evening, we went to the hot tub and soaked for a while to work out the aches and pains of bringing in so much merchandise. Then we sat in the sauna for a while to bake out my cold.
After that, we went around to the parties. There were a few, but we ended up turning in early.
Saturday morning we got up early and got our shop opened for business. We continued to have a lot of people looking but not many following through and buying. I did a fair amount of writing on my story, although I was still miserable from the cold.
In the evening we took another soak in the hot tub, although this time it wasn't very hot, more like bathwater temperature. Then we looked around for parties, but couldn't find any. Because I was feeling so sick, we decided not to participate in the Midnight Madness sale, and went to bed early. Unfortunately, the people who were participating in it were making enough noise that it was difficult to get any actual sleep.
Sunday morning I woke up really miserable, with larangytis and an earache. To make matters worse, people would keep telling me to rest my voice and then turn around and try to make conversation with me, often with questions that couldn't be answered with a head movement or hand gesture, so I'd have to try to croak out words. The imperative to make conversation with socially visible people is just that powerful, and I just don't have the talent of making myself socially invisible like some people do.
Because we were having almost no sales and a storm was on its way, we started packing early. We had just gotten everything back into the van when the storm actually hit. We were just about to drive out when the tornado sirens went off, so we ended up staying another hour to let the tornado go on through.
Copyright 2012 by Leigh Kimmel
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Last updated October 21, 2012.