MoCCA Day 1

Last night we did our annual ritual of taking in an evening of burlesque at the Slipper Room. It was easily the best show we've seen in our time there, and that's saying something. It was The Hot Box's turn on the stage (Miss Saturn, Gigi La Femme, Queen LaQueefa, Ekaterina and Bunny Love), and they were fantastic! Miss Saturn works with Hula hoops, and when she took up an LED-lit hoop to (I think it was) "Electric Eye" by David Bowie, it was staggering. Ekaterina's take on a troubled contortionist was also a hoot. It really turned the day's events around for us.

Today, alas, started with some drama. The folks who came to check in this morning arrived to find their packages with table assignments and badges and wristbands not there. So exhibitors wait from about 9 to 10 am for those. It turns out we have another packet in this batch. After my emailed protests (also described in this blog), an effort was made to redo our badges. This is much better than the original response, to be sure; but the company name was still wrong. We'd done some surgery on our Candlelit Press badges last night, so we just tossed the new unimproved ones.
This year, for the first time, we participated in a deal where we pay 120 dollars to have MoCCA accept our UPSed books and deliver them to our table. The really big publishers do this as a matter of course, and we did it just to see if it was easier.When the posted show opening time of 11am came and went without our books, we knew we were in another mess. The organizers chose to keep the doors closed until the books finally arrived and were distributed. This was about an hour. They announced to us that they would keep the doors open until 7pm to compensate, but since nobody told the customers, business essentially dropped off shortly after 6 anyway.When the books came up the elevator, many exhibitors approached quickly and started hunting for their books. Volunteers kept asking us to wait for our books to be delivered to our tables, but that didn't hold.
We spotted our boxes, collected them, and set up. After that, the day perked up. We sold books, chatted folks up and went along pretty happily. That said, the new venue is a bit warm. Like the proverbial frog in a frying pan, before we knew it the place was roasting hot. With the extended hours, things got even steamier.
Above is Will, sketching. To his right is Joe, our excellent table-neighbor. Check out his stuff at dasbear.com
We're happy that after all this agitating that at least some effort was made to right things, but if the scuttlebutt we heard over lunch was right, the panels were pretty mixed up too. It's clearly a rebuilding year for the new MoCCA Art Fest. That said, the people are coming and we're doing our best to sell to them. Plus I need to photograph the urinals in the Armory. Some of them are insane.

--John