A week later, a few hours of sleep, a few days of work, and I think that I have perhaps recovered from DragonCon. Its funny. I had always wanted to go, even as far back as my junior high school days. In retrospect, going to a science fiction convention of the scope and oddity of DragonCon might have left me more than a little scarred. Let me back up… (man, weird how my mind will flip. let’s go.) Time to spin some thoughts….

I think I met Giovanna back in 6th grade, maybe the summer before my 7th. It was at church, during one of those oddly planned youth group lock-ins. Since then, I have hosted them myself and only today do I realize the kind of powder keg situation those can be. Let’s take a collection of kids on the verge of puberty, all of them rife with questions about anyone opposite to their gender, and let’s place them in a confined environment full of dark corners and hallways where we will feed them Coca-cola and pizza. An experiment in forced social interaction much like a junior high school dance, with the differences being that it lasts all night and the chaperones are typically tired youth group leaders. Now, was my meeting with Giovanna as wicked as all that? No, but we were told to separate more than once because we were talking a bit too much and paying each other too much attention.

But let me tell you, when you are 12 and a cute girl is talking to you about her favorite science fiction show, it is hard to turn away. She loved Dr Who, rebroadcast back then as it sometimes is now, latenights on PBS, Saturdays. She asked me if I had seen it, and I think I probably said “er…. yeah” — I hadn’t. It didn’t matter, she told me all about the show. Wacky British people, blue telephone boxes, time travel. I don’t think I ever thought about paradox or relativity until that night. But I was fascinated. By her, of course, but also by this amazing show that I had never seen. And that was, I think, my introduction to science fiction. (Additionally, Giovanna was probably my first “real” girlfriend and the first girl I ever really kissed — behind a fire engine during a different youth group outing.)

Immediately, I began a Saturday night ritual. I would sit quietly in our living room on the top floor of the two story house, avoiding the two squeaky boards in the floor and keeping the volume just barely audible. My parent’s bedroom was right below me, so silence was a requirement. Especially when I warned my parents that the Doctor Who shows were always of different lengths. Some were an hour, some were two. The Brits were crazy, always pulling these fast ones. But my parents tolerated it, and I soon loved it. I was hooked.

Yes, of course, I had seen reruns of the old Star Trek. It came on Sunday afternoons at my house, sometime before 60 Minutes. I knew who Kirk was and I thought Spock was cool, if maybe a bit on the creepy side. And I had also seen Star Wars in the theatre and its dark successor, The Empire Strikes Back. I loved them both, had all the action figures a kid could need, but it was more fantasy than science fiction. I think what grabbed me about Doctor Who was the intelligence behind the stories, snippets of real physics and math, the grand idea that every individual action can affect outcomes for thousands.

Of course it was silly. Looking back, watching old episodes, you have to wince at all of the horrible special effects and the costumes made from felt and foam. But that is not what mattered. What mattered was the writing, some of the best episodic sci-fi ever made. And the actors, regulars pulled from the boards of the Royal Shakespeare Company. And the incredibly original way they managed to keep the show fresh and alive for as many as two decades. When the actor playing The Doctor retired, got bored or left for any reason, they would have the character fall victim to some tragedy, then regenerate, new face and all. Same name, different character, new directions for the stories. Simply genius. And I know so many obscurely trivial things about the poor show. The names of locations: Terminus, Logopolis, Castrovalva. The quality and the ability to entertain without talking down to its audience, that is what made it stick.

So I would sit there at DragonCon, from the vantage point provided by staffing the Information Booth, and I would watch these people walk about, some aimlessly, most pointedly, many being accosted by mini-paparazzi with camcorders and point-and-shooters. And I would shake my head at the extravagance, the extremity of so many of them (is it worth it, truly, to spend a whole paycheck on a full set of large chain mail?), but then I would grin slowly and nod at the devotion of it all. The nod was also in recognition, an acceptance that somewhere inside me is that junior high school kid who would have given anything to don a floppy brown hat, oversized wool coat and long stripey scarf, just to show some kind of homage to a silly British sci-fi show, dismissed by many, ignored by most.