I registered for the convention and got a bag of stuff. Con materials, flyers, goodies, and a T-shirt. I checked the schedule, and found to my dismay that the first puppet show, the one I'd hoped to participate in, had been scheduled for Thursday night! What kind of dumb idea was that? I'll bet nobody went anyway.
MFM is what's called a relax-a-con, and that's what I did: relaxed, chatted with furs, and drew weird things in my sketchbook, such as Mongeese on a Plane, the snake version of Snakes on a Plane.
Around 4:00 was Opening Ceremonies. This was the 10th anniversary of Mephit Furmeet, and the theme was "Welcome Home". There was a video presentation showing photos from various previous MFMs. Then Tyger Cowboy promised us "beef and noodles" at the Furry Frolic Dinner.
The Furry Frolic Dinner, as usual, was held in the hotel restaurant, where the "beef and noodles" turned out
to be spaghetti and meat sauce. Oh well, it was good. Also, some of the waitresses were getting into the spirit
of things by wearing tails!
Someone put a life-size cutout of Marina Sirtis as Deanna Troi from Star Trek: The Next Generation behind the coffee counter in the lobby. I took a picture of Nexxus standing beside her.
At 7:00, there was a game of Pictionary hosted by Guest of Honor J3T and her boyfriend Stickdevil. First, they handed out cards and pens and had us write a variety of different things; names of movies, places, objects, and so on. Then they picked teams; Stickdevil's team vs. J3T's team. I got to be on Stickdevil's team. We took turns drawing. An impartial judge kept time and showed each card to whoever was drawing each turn. It turned out to be a rather silly idea to let the players write the cards, as I discovered when I drew a reptilian monster's head with a crown on top and someone on our team called out, "Godzilla, King of the Beasts!"
One guy on the other team drew a bizarrely deformed outline of the continental U.S. in order to clue the word
"Alaska", and Stickdevil was astounded that they got it right. "Oh, of course, that's clearly America"
became a sarcastic in-joke for Stickdevil for the rest of the game.
Possibly the worst attempt ever at a Pictionary drawing was that of a girl on the other team, who tried to clue
"An Officer and a Gentleman" by drawing an officer's badge and a (gentle?)man's face, and then drawing an arrow
from them to what looked like a door between two coils of rope. Apparently the door and rope was supposed to be
a videotape, indicating that the target phrase was a movie title. I only know all this because after the round,
I asked her to explain it.
During one round, I was given the word "bluebells". I worried about how I was going to illustrate that, until the judge pointed out there were several different colors of Sharpie on the table and I could pick any one. I said, "Oh, yeaaah!" and picked up a blue one, then drew a couple of bells. We got that one, though some people disputed the impartiality of the judge for helping me like that!
As if to make karmic payment for the "bluebells" round, Stickdevil failed to get us to guess "Brazil" in time.
He drew a blank on what the country looked like, as well as what continent it was on, so he tried to indicate it
by syllables by drawing a bra + Godzilla. "Bra-Godzilla?" We weren't getting it. So he tried to indicate
syllables, by writing _____ + ____X over it. "Bra-God?" Then it occurred to him to add another X:
_____ + X____X. I finally figured it out and blurted out "Brazil!" but not before the judge called
"Time!" D'oh.
The game ended in a tie, so the judge decided to have a tiebreaker round. He thought of a phrase and drew it, allowing both teams to try to guess it. I can't for the life of me remember what it was, which is probably because J3T's team guessed it first, winning the game. Stickdevil agreed to draw "WINNER" badges for J3T's team members and "LOSER" badges for ours.
At 9:00, in the same room as the Pictionary game, there was a reception for the GOH, with alcoholic beverages,
and snaaaaacks. Cookies, eggrolls, cocktail weenies and meatballs! I ate lots of things.
At 10:00, there was supposed to be open karaoke, but it was in the form of "MFM Idol", a takeoff on American
Idol, which was karaoke plus some furs pretending to be Simon Cowell, Paula Abdul and whatever that black guy's
name is. I didn't feel like being judged on my performance; I just wanted to have fun. So I didn't sing.
At 11:00, it was time for "Film At 11". Drabek and Protius showed real films on a real film projector! We saw
scenes from previous conventions, and then they showed something I'd never seen more than a few seconds of:
Mike Jittlov's "The Wizard of Speed and Time"! It's a short film, done mostly in stop-motion animation
using live actors, about a guy in a big wizard robe who can run really fast. He sees a woman hitchhiking
to Hollywood, and carries her there in a matter of seconds! The film ends with the Wizard in his studio,
surrounded by dancing stop-motion cameras and stacks of film reels, singing a song.
After that, I got sleepy and went to bed.
