The Artist Formerly Known as sweetafton23

So since the last time I posted a blog, I played at two midwestern W00tstocks, went to VidCon, refereed a rather successful game of Calvinball, got invited to a cruise, did another W00tstock, and went to ComicCon.

Those things are awesome, but the closing of Star Tours sucks, so I’m going to talk about the closing of Star Tours first.

Tonight, the Star Tours ride at Disneyland is taking its last flight to the moon of Endor. For the uninitiated, on Star Tours you board a flight for the Endor Moon, but the bumbling droid pilot Captain Rex is on his first flight and ends up taking an accidental detour through a comet’s tail, into a tractor beam, and ultimately gets taken in by a fleet of X-Wing fighters mid-combat, who then blow up the Death Star and jump to lightspeed. The robot is voiced by Paul Reubens pre-Pee Wee, and the special effects from 1987 still hold up today. I know the entire thing verbatim. Back when I had an annual pass, my family would go to Disneyland once a week, and we would always hit Star Tours first because the line was always so scenic and short. It’s simple and perfect, and it’s closing.

Since I’ve found out about Star Tours’s closing, I’ve probably ridden it more than 20 times. Most of the time, I can keep my cool. Sometimes I sort of sing along as loud as I can, other times I try to take in as much of the ride as possible, and other times I listen to the other people reacting. I filmed it on my phone from every angle, pressing it to my forehead to stabilize it. This one time I paid particular attention to the little boy next to me, who was maybe 4 or 5. He was completely in awe of the whole thing, the combat, going into lightspeed; I thought about how I used to ride Star Tours when I was his age, and thought about how cool it was, and how much better the ride was when I didn’t understand how the simulation worked at all. Then I got something in my eye.

I’ve nearly come to terms with the idea that all the things I love are transitory and impermanent. Living things will die, goods will be discontinued, businesses will close, TV shows will be canceled. The city of Long Beach closed Acres of Books, one of my favorite establishments in the world, in favor of developing luxury condos in the downtown. Sarah’s Smash Shack went out of business before I could even get to it. There used to be a $2 second-run movie theater, a bowling alley, and a candy shop within a block of my house, and before I was old enough to use any of them on my own, they were knocked down and replaced by a wine tasting bar and a spa. It’s the march of progress.

Disney tends to function in the way that Apple and Facebook do by which I mean that they will decide to change things that absolutely did not need changing, and you’re only left to assume that it’s for your own good. They have a limited amount of real estate and I understand this, but they took out Circlevision and replaced it with a Buzz Lightyear ride. They took out Country Bear Jamboree and replaced it with some Winnie The Pooh thing. Combine this with George Lucas’s knack for gratuitous revisions and you’ve got yourself a dangerous concoction.

My summer pass allows for three visits to the parks this summer, and I used my third visit a couple weeks ago with a big group of friends from VidCon. The first time we went on Star Tours I pressed my phone to my forehead and took video of the screen to the best of my ability. We came back in the evening and rode it again; I held Chris’s hand, and recited all the words along with it, aloud, from takeoff to landing. My friend James was on the other side of me, and he leaned in closer to me as the ride went on, listening to every word. My inflection was pitch perfect. My timing was right on the nose. When the ride was over, James shook my hand and congratulated me. I took my sweet time collecting my things from under my seat, and got something in my eye.

The new ride will feature the annoyingly CGI planet of Coruscant and the desert planet of Tattooine, and it will (as I had feared) be in 3D. But the most maddening thing about the new Star Tours is that it will center around a lengthy podracing sequence. I mean, in the original Star Tours, your shuttle gets sidetracked and you end up blowing up the freaking Death Star in the Battle of Yavin. The Death Star embodies everything that is sinister and evil about the Dark Side. It represents the complete corruption of the Republic, and Anakin’s God complex. You get to share a victory with the Rebel Alliance against this hugely sinister weapon of mass destruction; apart from it being a monumental win for the underdog, it’s also a huge and satisfying explosion, and you get to be there, and that’s awesome. Podracing, on the other hand, is a gambling outlet on the slummy desert world of Tattooine, a planet that harbors criminals and slaveowners; podracing is the illegal street racing of the Star Wars universe no matter how you slice it. I understand that in The Phantom Menace Anakin wins his own freedom in a podrace, but I can’t imagine how we’re going to pick up that level of individual narrative from inside the cabin of a Starspeeder. It’ll just be the standard Lucasfilm CGI drivel, which will be so dense with mindless action and movement that it’ll all blur together and become background noise.

I normally wouldn’t care, but Star Tours means a lot to me. I appreciate the multimedia engineering that goes into this new ride, and I understand that adding high definition 3D movie to simulator rides may open a whole new world of possibility for these kinds of rides. I just wish they hadn’t started with Star Tours.

I went back yesterday with my friends Jonathan and Malia, who graciously offered Chris and I free passes for the day. After Jonathan and Malia left in the evening, Chris and I resolved to ride Star Tours at least once more before the park closed. We watched all the other pilgrims in line taking pictures of everything, and I talked to Chris about how I wish I could be like The Giver in the Lois Lowry book, and just pass the experience of Star Tours to my children. We were sorted into the first two spots in the front row, right in front of Captain Rex. The ride operator checked all of our seatbelts, and said “Well, folks, this is one of the last flights to the Endor moon, and specifically it will be my last flight to the Endor moon.” Everyone in the ship hooted and applauded. He saluted us as the cabin doors closed and said “May the Force be with you.” I held Chris’s hand, and sang along to the whole ride. I turned to Chris as we were landing and said, “That was the last time we’ll ever experience light speed!” I was holding my composure as best as I could, until the very end of the ride when we have landed safely at port and Captain Rex says, “Sorry, folks! I’m sure to do better next time! It was my first flight and I’m still getting used to my programming!” I thought about how there wouldn’t be a next time, and then I got something in my eye.

On the day before my 8th birthday, I rolled up into a ball on my bed and cried hysterically because I wasn’t going to be 7 anymore and there was nothing I could do about it. (I guess I really liked being 7, but I can’t account for it now.) My mom told me that it would be ok, that soon all my friends would turn 8 and we could all be 8 together; and that she had really enjoyed her 8th year, it was one of her favorite years in her childhood. This helped me.

I was born mid-morning on Thanksgiving. I share my birthday with Harpo Marx, Billy The Kid, Boris Karloff, Miley Cyrus, Chris Hardwick, and our 14th president Franklin Pierce. I was born exactly 2 weeks after the Berlin Wall fell.

In my family we lump all the aunt/grandchild birthdays into one monthly party at my grandma’s house, so all the June-August birthdays or all the January birthdays will be compressed into one shindig, and each gets their own cake and each gets their own presents. I was born on Thanksgiving, and so my birthday was always celebrated when we went up to grandma’s on Thanksgiving day. We’d have a big turkey dinner, and then we’d have cake and presents. I’ve never told my parents this, but until I was in the 2nd grade I thought that my birthday WAS Thanksgiving, and it, too, shifted around from year to year. I mean, I absolutely knew that I was born on November 23rd, but when you’re ever asked your birthday, they usually ask for the year too, and in 1989 Thanksgiving fell on November 23rd.

My dad used to tell me that “the whole Thanksgiving thing” was kind of dying out, and year after year people would sit around the turkey going “well, this is lame, what are we supposed to be thankful for?” But then I was born, and everyone went “MOLLY’S HERE!” and Thanksgiving was saved.


I still don’t really know where I sit on the subject of age, exactly. I heartily subscribe to the “age is just a number” principle, but I’m also fascinated by the half+7 rule of non-creepy dating. My friend Leslie said that I’m a score old, which made me feel REALLY old. Paul & Storm mentioned once that some people were incredulous that I was “only 19.”

I spent the last day of my 19th year watching New Moon (which life is too short to even talk about) with my floormates, and then sleeping to try and get New Moon off my palate. I will close it out by finishing a paper about Ben Franklin’s “The Speech of Polly Baker” and eating Smarties and Snapple. This paper is due in my 10:00 AM American Literature class, and I was born at 9:59 AM… There’s some meaning to be inferred there, but I don’t know what it is.


The idea of turning 20 freaks me out, moreso than the idea of turning 21. I spent Saturday in Seattle, and at the end of the day my back hurt from carrying my uke and my books and CDs, and so I crashed on my bed as soon as I got back to my room. I was laying there with my legs hanging off the side of my tiny dorm bed, both my shoes on, and the bottom of my pants still wet from puddles — when a thought hit me, and compelled me to roll out of bed and zombie-walk across the hall to my friend Lyanna’s room.

“I’ve been thinking this whole time, ‘Oh, last day I’ll be 19, on Monday I’ll be a different age, how weird,’” I said to her, “but it never occurred to me that tomorrow is the last day of my teenage years. It’s my last day as a teenager.”
She nodded, “According to my calculations, yeah.” I stood there for a moment, letting the idea steep in my head.
“I feel like I need to go start on some wacky teen movie romp, you know? Like, I have to go on some legendary hilarious sexy one-night-only hijinks, and then Snag My Dream Guy, or SOMETHING. It’s my last day as a teenager, I feel like I have to make it count.” Lyanna shrugged.
“Well, we got you a cake.”
“…I like cake.”

Every day I check here and here to see if any new pictures or video have gone up.
And so far I don’t have PAXflu. [knock on wood]

I ended up falling heir to an unused PAX badge about a week before, so I already knew I was going to show up and sort of planned to surprise Jonathan Coulton and Paul & Storm at their signing table. Maybe. Or something. But they texted me in the 24 hours leading up and asked if I wanted a badge, and when I said I already had one, they told me to bring my uke. Not wanting to go into the city by myself, I asked for the extra badge anyway and offered it to my next door neighbor Chris, who is a gamer and Coulton/Paul&Storm fan himself. My original plan was to use the 3-day pass for myself on Saturday and then let him use it on Friday or Sunday, but when I was offered an extra pass it was only logical to give it to him.

I’ve joked with Chris and my friend Jeannie about how JoCo is giving me less and less notice on performing with him; I had about a month of notice on the show at the Triple Door, about 3 weeks notice on the Moore/Aladdin shows, about 48 hours on the Largo show, and roughly 24 hours notice on this one. Predictably it will keep halving, and I’ll get 12 hours notice, and then 6 hours, until one day I’ll get a call, “We’re outside. There’s no time for questions, just grab your uke and get in the tour van.“

I can’t find a word to describe how enormous the theater is, other than “enormous.” Because it was enormous. Enormously enormous, even. There were chairs for maybe 300 people in the back, and then standing room from there all the way up to the front. There was about as much floorspace as there is grassy space in a football field. Evidently it fit about 6,000 people that evening, comfortably, safely. Paul met us and led us into the hall as JoCo was testing Mr. Fancy Pants on the ZenDrum. “They are going to flip their shit when they hear this remix thing he’s doing,” Paul kept saying. “They are totally going to go nuts.”

After soundcheck was through I asked Jonathan what time I should be back, and he said “Well, my show starts at midnight…” It was 10:30 in the morning.
“So I have 13 hours to kill, huh?”
“Yeah, sorry. Paul and Storm should go on around 10:30, so you could show up then… I’m going to take a nap.”

Since Chris and I had a crapton of time to kill we decided the best thing to do was go to the actual expo. On the way there, I stopped to take a picture with the Prince of the Cosmos, and got recognized by a woman in a kickass GLaDOS costume and another guy in a Swedish Chef costume – simultaneously. We had a mutual admiration society for a minute, and I got sort of punch-drunk off it for the next hour or so. The coolest thing about getting recognized by people was that about 5 minutes later they would Twitter about it, and I would see it because they would say something like “Just met @Molly23, huzzar. #PAX” or “Passed @Molly23 in the other direction on the escalator.” and it was like a nametag on whomever said hi to me.

The expo hall was rows upon rows of booths and displays and vendors. There was this huge rumbling sound from one of the games as soon as you walked through the doors, and it was this rush of people and colors and lights and gunfire foley and free crap. We ended up playing Tekken 6, in which I chose to play as both a bracelet-wearing panda, and a kangaroo+joey with boxing gloves, while Chris chose the standard Tekken-type characters – a man with a leopard head, a black man with a bad haircut, etc. Pfft. Boys.

When we went to grab lunch, we noticed an abnormal percentage of men wearing kilts. It was exactly noon, and so I pulled a notecard out of my bag and started keeping a tally that I would call “KiltWatch.” About an hour later I would start “CorsetWatch” for comparative purposes, and would maintain a steady 3:1 kilt:corset ratio all day.

Chris had a pretty dense schedule of talks for himself, so I knew I would have a lot of time to kill on my own. I wandered around by myself for a while, played Beatles Rock Band and peoplewatched for a bit before I’d had my fill. They had what they called the “handheld lounge,” which was 2 rooms carpeted wall-to-wall with beanbags, in which you could sit and play DS or whatever else. I crashed in one of these for about an hour and solved my Rubik’s cube, and felt VERY heretical and naughty for it.

Around 4:00 I got tired of wandering, and so I left and went to the movie theater across the street to hopefully kill 2 hours, but all the movies were rated R except for The Proposal, Ice Age, and Harry Potter, and I still have no ID with my birthday on it (except my passport). I decided to go to the Gameworks on the same block, put $10 onto a token card, and played Galaga and cheap shooter games to my heart’s content. At Gameworks each credit is worth $.25, and each shooter game cost 1 or 2 credits per player, so I kept entering credit for two players and playing in what I call “Lara Croft mode”, putting a gun in each hand and shooting at two different screens at the same time. Chris called me to let me know that he was done with his panels, and I answered with “Can I call you back?! I’m playing House Of The Dead 3!“
“Uh, ok, I guess I’ll—”
“AAAAAH!” [click]

It was nearing the dinner hour, so I told him to come to Gameworks so we could use up the credits on the card faster, and spent it on skeeball and more expensive/realistic shooter games. (Did you know that there’s an arcade shooter game version of Rambo? You’re welcome.) In the middle of a game of skeeball, the little boy next to me stopped his game and stared at me bewildered for a few seconds. “Are you wearing a wig?” he asked. I laughed and said no I wasn’t but I’d just gotten a haircut. His dad wasn’t as apologetic as I would’ve been were I in his shoes, and I wanted to lighten things up by making some joke about how bald his dad was in comparison but I figured that wouldn’t be appropriate.

We had to walk a ways to get food because there weren’t a lot of vegetarian options for him, and on the way we passed the Triple Door, where I was a guest of JC and Paul & Storm for the first time almost a year and a half ago. With Chris there I didn’t have time to wax nostalgic about it, or reflect on how much I’d matured as a performer since then, or how I hadn’t expected to ever EVER have a day like that again — but I did stop to take a picture and send it to my dad.

When we got back to the convention center, I went back to the handheld lounge and flopped into what beanbag I could find, and took a nap. Around 9:30 I found Chris again and we went to the main theater, where Freezepop was playing. I sat and watched until about the middle of their set, and then I wandered up the perimeter of the room towards the stage and sat down in a folding chair at stage left. Paul was running back and forth trying to organize t-shirts and write a set list out, and after about 20 minutes of that he said hi.
“Man, it’s so loud in here!” I said.
“WHAT?! (Get it?)” he said, and pointed towards the back of the room. “Go through that door, it’s quiet outside!”

I was standing outside with Paul and Storm when the door opened and Wil Wheaton came out, accompanied by the winners of some contest earlier that day. At the Largo show I had grabbed my uke and run like a scared rabbit when Wil Wheaton entered the room and I was determined to redeem myself this time, so I looked him in the eye, said “Hi, Wil!” and received a hug. I asked him to also sign my badge, which he did, and took up a generous amount of space. I said “ohh, you didn’t leave room for anyone else…” He raised his eyebrows at me as he crossed his T. “I’m kidding,” I added.
He said, “When you grow up in a large ensemble cast like I did, you learn to take up a lot of real estate whenever you sign things first, so that all the others have to cram in around you.”
“They call that the Hancock complex,” Paul said.

At the top of Paul & Storm’s set, Wil Wheaton issued a proclamation that named Jonathan the 2009 recipient of the Presidential D20 of Geekdom, which Paul and Storm received on his behalf. Paul & Storm played a wild and crazy set, including the song about Frogger with which they challenged me in the final round of Song Fu. They mentioned in the introduction that they had written it for the Masters round of Song Fu, and that they had lost. (“Awwwww.”) My dad always asks if they mention that I’m the one who defeated them in Song Fu, but I don’t really think it’s important.

I always get a little jittery before I go onto any stage, but this time I wasn’t at all worried about getting up in front of 6,000 people, I wasn’t worried about forgetting words or chords or anything. I was worried because geek darling Felicia Day was the guest performer the year before, and I was afraid that JoCo would say I’d like to invite another guest to the stage, she’s from the internet, and everyone would go Can it be?? I thought she was at DragonCon! and then be intensely disappointed when short, not-Felicia me popped up from backstage. I was completely prepared to disappoint a lot of nerds.

So then Jonathan went onstage, he played for a while, and then Paul and Storm went up for a few songs, and then I was introduced, and heard a fair amount of “YAAAAAAAA” from the crowd when my name was called. Ha! Not-Felicia triumphantly takes the stage!
And then this happened:

We played My Monkey (Wil Wheaton), Bills Bills Bills, and Always The Moon. I came back up for Sweet Caroline, the encore, but then there were 2 more encores for which I was unprepared.

After the third encore they shut the curtain, and Paul said “You’re signing things with us.” They went out and took their places at their respective tables, but I felt uncomfortable seating myself at either table and so I stood near where the lines spat out once their stuff had been signed, and caught a few people. In a lull as I was standing there Wil Wheaton stopped by and thanked me for being part of his serenade, that it was by far the peak of his PAX experience.
“Are you going to get up there and sign things?” he said.
“I think I’m just going to loiter here awkwardly by myself…” He nodded. “…because that’s what I do.”
“Good plan. And then occasionally people will gravitate over and loiter with you for a bit.”
“Exactly,” I said, “and then I’m not quite as awkward.”
“Exactly. I would join you myself, but it is way past Wil Wheaton’s bedtime.” I shook his hand and then he left.

It was almost 4 in the morning, so I said goodbye to Jonathan and Paul and Storm. Jonathan said thanks for showing up as he does after each of these shows, which always feels really backwards to me. (Thank me? Thank YOU.) I called a taxi to get back to campus. As Chris and I went down the huge dramatic line of escalators to find it, I was hopping up and down and taking the steps two at a time. “I’m excited,” I said.
“About what?” asked Chris.
“Just – everything.”

The final count on KiltWatch was 37 kilts, 10 corsets.