TARCon 6

(Warning: if you don't watch The Amazing Race, much of this won't make sense. If you watch it but don't read the recaps on Television Without Pity, it still might not make sense. Quickly: I'm in New York and one of the reasons is so I could go to TARCon, a big party for watching the finale with other people from the boards, and it's big enough that people from the show (and other shows) stop by.

Okay, here's my brief TARCon 6 report: I had fun and it was a really wel-organized and impressive shindig, but I didn't really feel like hanging out all night to meet reality TV stars.

Now, here's my longer report, with pictures!

I went on the tour of Madison Square Garden that was held before the Con; since there weren't any other events in the Garden tonight, we got to see pretty much everything.

Here's our tour guide. He was pretty funny, but it was hard to escape the impression that he'd written his routine a long time ago. It was kind of . . . Jungle Cruise-esque. And also, it had a number of elements that were frankly dated. Like the Howard Cosell imitations. And the Senor Wences line. And the Get Smart shoe-phone gag. And the Andy Rooney impersonation. I realize Andy Rooney is still going on, but it's still an awfully dated joke.

He did have some spontaneous gags, like when he was asked how many movies had been shot at the Garden and confidently answered "63" before admitting that he just made that up. But for the most part, it was very much as if he was relying on material that had always worked and if the kids today didn't laugh at the "see this trash can? It looks like R2-D2!" joke, that was their problem, not his.

That picture was taken at theMSG theater; we also saw the arena (from both the floor and one of the absurdly expensive suites) and the locker rooms for both the Knicks and the Rangers. Oh, wait -- I believe in hockey it's called a "dressing room". Although it looks pretty much the same if you ask me. Well, not exactly the same:

Apparently, now that the hockey season has been called off, they're just using this room as storage. That's kind of a shame. Two notes, though, although I don't care much about hockey: we couldn't go in right away because New York Ranger Legend Rod Gilbert was shooting a commercial in there. He came out and shook some hands, which made a couple of people on the tour very happy indeed. Also, you might be interested to know that the locker with the towel was Wayne Gretzky's. Or you might not. How should I know?

Also, there was a no-smoking sign that had the fanciest curl of smoke I've ever seen.

Okay! Enough tour; now the TARCon itself.

There were goodie bags, which looked much like this:

Before the show, there were about two hours to kill (for people who paid for VIP attendance; everyone else had only one hour). At first, I was at a table by myself, which wasn't much fun. I occupied myself by writing that stuff about the tour guide on my Sidekick 2, and then I forced myself to join some conversations and move to a table with other people at it. That worked pretty well, and we watched the show and had fun. I thought it was a good finale, with lots of tension and running around; I attribute this largely to the absence of bunching (there was really only one spot that forced the teams together, and it was at the beginning of the two-hour show).

It's also more fun than I expected to watch the show in a huge group like that with people cheering and booing lustily. It was more of a group thing than usual, which made it more visceral somehow. However, it did mean that my witty comments (which usually only needed to be heard by the other person on the couch) needed to be shouted in order to be heard. And that's a lot of pressure, you know? It's easy to have a bon mot that's funny enough to be muttered, but not everything is shout-worthy. I got some laughs, though, and isn't that what's really important?

This is Miss Alli, the Amazing Race recapper for Television Without Pity; she's also on Damn Hell Ass Kings and I talked to her very briefly. This picture was taken from my seat, so you can see that her table was pretty close to mine, but we didn't get into any conversations or anything. I didn't see Sars, but I'm pretty sure she was there somewhere. Or maybe she got there after I left. I wanted to talk to her, but it might be best that I didn't, because I'm sure at some point (after complimenting her on her various sites) I would have blurted out something along the lines of "so . . . I've recapped a couple of things -- I wanna be a regular recapper! Please! Aw, c'mon! I'd be good, I promise!" And then it would have been awkward. Awkward for me, anyway, because she probably would have shown no hesitation in just saying "No". I'm sure she gets that kind of thing a lot.

Anyway, after the show (which I watched with Hawkwild, Officedrone, and Mrs. Drone, who have real-life names too), there was a pause while people waited for the star power to show up. The crowd already had one person who'd been on The Amazing Race (Charla, who was watching in the overflow room) -- I said "hi" to her but didn't get a picture. After awhile, Chip and Kim showed up and got a big hand, because everyone's still so happy that nice people won.

It's not very clear from this picture, but there was kind of a greeting line for people showing up late. That made me feel kind of weird, because, well, it's reality tv, you know? I started feeling weirder when I noticed people getting their pictures taken with other people and I didn't know which one was the star. Maybe I don't pay enough attention to television (which hardly seems possible), but I'm not even sure I could tell the difference between Jon (of Kris and Jon, who finished second tonight) and Freddy (of Freddy and Kendra, who won), frankly. So I figured that waiting around all night to meet people would be a little weird. And I left.

But! On my way down the stairs, I passed Jon and Al (the clowns!) going up. And I recognized them, of course, because they're great. And I was able to tell them so on my way out, which is pretty cool.

And then I came back to my hotel and, well, wrote this. Incidentally, here's the view out my window:

It's a Starbucks! So it's a lot like not having left Seattle at all.