LeakyCon – Day 2

In the morning we went to a presentation on how to book shows and promote a wizard rock band. Paul DeGeorge made most of the talking, but there was also Brian “Malfoy”, JustinFF, Matt-Whompy, Steph-Tonks and Alex-Lupin. I feel like I’m forgetting someone… Anyways. We learned some useful things there. Then we went for lunch. Marie-Eve asked for a Friendly’s, but the lady at the front desk looked at us weird and said that “those” were usually outside the city. Great. She gave us directions to a food court. We found it, but we weren’t too appealed by the type of food there, so we went to find another diner. Never found it, so we came back to the food court and ate chinese food. It was actually really good. We vlogged there so I won’t tell more about what happened when we were walking to find food :P Back at the hotel, we had some time on our hands until the next thing started (for me it was the Nerdfighter event and the others wanted to see a HPA presentation) so Marie-Eve suggested we went for a walk in the park we’d seen while searching for food, so we started to move when we ran into Lena (the Butterbeer Experience) who thought going to the park was a very good idea. We sat in the grass under a tree and just talked until we had to get back. At the Nerdfighter event, they served some things to eat, like oatmeal and raisin cookies and what looked like carrot cake. I don’t know if there was anything else but I took one of each without knowing what it actually was, just because it was free food I wasn’t expecting. Yay! Since that took some time (the line at the food table was huge), the places at the front were all taken, so I sat somewhere in the back where there was still a lot of space. I was alone, I didn’t want to steal the place to anyone, and it would have felt weird to sit beside someone I didn’t know. While I was eating the supposedly carrot cake which was actually a chocolate brownie, the place what starting to fill up. I’d just finished eating when I see Paul DeGeorge and his girlfriend coming near me, looking for a place to sit. He asks: “Are those seats taken?” They weren’t, obviously, so he sat right beside me and started talking. “What’s your name?
- Jacinthe. Hm, you better read it, it’s French,” I said, showing my nametag (those things have proven to be quite useful for that). He then proceeded to say it and got it right pretty quickly. He then asked where I was from, and I said Montreal, to which he responded that they’d played a show there a couple of years ago, and I said that I’d found out about that show on the day after, so I missed it. I totally should have asked him to come back but that didn’t cross my mind, haha. He, too, was eating some cookies while talking, and at some point, he said something like: “This brownie is huge. Do you want it?” And I said I’d already had one, so I didn’t get to eat it, lol. So that was the story of how Harry Potter and I almost shared a brownie, XD.

The Nerdfighter thing was alright. It didn’t blow my mind, but I can’t say I was disappointed. I’m happy I went because now I can say that I’ve been to one, but I don’t know, maybe I was expecting more out of it, but I don’t know exactly what since there can’t be much more than nerds talking at a nerd talk event, lol. Or maybe I was just too far in the back of the room to feel the awesomeness, or too annoyed at the girls sitting close to me, or too fangirly about Paul-Potter sitting beside me.

After that, in the same room, was a showing of the We Are Wizards documentary, which we’d already seen a year ago at the Boston Independant Film Festival, but before that was the premiere of the trailer for Finding Hogwarts, another documentary about the fandom made by John Noe of PotterCast, Bre Bishop (ifancythetrio on YouTube) and some others, I think, featuring Melissa Anelli, Andrew Slack, Paul DeGeorge, Frak, and I’m again surely forgetting some. The trailer is also available online since then, and you should go see it. It looks good! We didn’t stay for We Are Wizards because, as I said, we’d already seen it. We went to the Wizrocklopedia panel about the wizard rock community, but we arrived late so we were in the back and I couldn’t see anything. Marie-Eve decided to go take a nap before dinner, because she knew she’d need some energy for the wrock show that night ;) Annie and I stayed to see the announcements of the Wizrocklopedia People’s Choice Awards. Then I don’t really remember what happened. I know at some point Annie went back to the room as well but I didn’t, and I sat on a couch on the mezzanine and met a girl, Maggie, from… was it Tennessee? Anyways, she was really nice. We chatted for a bit, and then she had to get to a CD swap thing and I had to get back to the room because it was the time that Marie-Eve had asked to be woken up at. I think we only ate a soup for dinner or something. Marie-Eve and Annie went to get some ice cream at Ben and Jerry’s (I didn’t because only the smell of the sugar gave me shivers – that brownie really was sweet, too) and they ate it on a couch on the mezzanine as we were waiting for the wrock show which, according to our schedule, was supposed to be in the Imperial Ballroom right next to us, but it was actually in the castle. Because of that, we were almost late for the show again. Except we weren’t. We had time to shop for merch. While we were doing so, a guy comes up to Marie-Eve and asks her if he can borrow her “I ♥ Ron” wristband. Turns out it was Jarrod-Forge, who was performing that night, and he wanted to wear it on stage. Cool.

I can’t even describe how awesome that show was. Tonks and the Aurors, Gred and Forge, The Whomping Willows and Harry and the Potters. I knew TatA because she played at Wrock Montreal and she was great. She did a few song from her new album which were really good. Now I wonder why I didn’t buy it. Gred and Forge came as a big surprise. I had a few songs from free downloads and compilations but I don’t think I ever went to listen on MySpace or anything. It rocked! In the beginning, though, we were wondering what he’d done with the wristband, because we couldn’t see it under the jacket he was wearing. His last song, though, was “Brotherly Love”, and he removed his jacket for it, showing off the wristband in all its glory. We understood why he wanted it by listening to the song. So funny.

The Whomping Willows was amazing as always. I was looking forward to see what his new album would sound like live, and it sounded awesome. It was still new so not many people knew the lyrics – it wasn’t as successful for dancing as, say, House of Awesome or Wizard Rock Heart Throb, but it still was quite enjoyable :) He finished his set with Draco and Harry, I think, and people went mad with jumping and everything, hehe.

Harry and the Potters… I think it’s the best show I’ve seen from them yet. I’ve been debating that since I got back, because Prophecy and We Are Wizards and the Yule Ball were pretty epic shows as well. I’d never seen them do “Bacon” live (it’s one of their song, btw, they didn’t “do the bacon”, lol) and it’s honestly far from being my favourite song from them, but it was definitely a highlight of the show. They seriously distributed bacon to the crowd. Real bacon. In all its greasyness. Not only did they give us bacon, it was some special characters that gave it to us. I got mine from the Giant Squid (aka Jarrod) and also saw Santa (aka JFF) who was close. I heard there was Wandicorn and a few others, but I didn’t see them (and I don’t know who was under the costumes ;)) Hilarious. Later on they played Dumbledore, which is always emotional. I took a video of that song and Paul’s voice seems to break from the emotion, but that might just be me. There was an epic circle of love made, just as it had at the Boston Yule Ball, only waaaay more huge. I was filming everything, and then it got to the fun part where everyone jumps in the middle of the circle and starts rocking, but my camera decided she wanted to die just for that part. (It had “drop detection on” and apparently it thought I had dropped it and turned itself off). I’m SO angry and sad that I didn’t get that. Not only I didn’t get it, but I also missed that part IRL because I was busy trying to turn it back on ASAP. Anyways, after that they did the Weapon and their own version of Smells Like Teen Spirit, which wrapped up the night as it should have been: with awesome.

Back at the hotel, we tried to enter our room, but our keys didn’t work. Our roommate had caught up with us at that point, and neither of our 4 keys worked. We went back down to the lobby, and the guy basically said that it was impossible that all 4 keys would stop working at the same time, tried them in his computer and said they should work just fine. Well, they don’t! He reinitialized them, or remagnetized them anyway. We went back up, and it still didn’t work. Called security. The security guy tried it and it didn’t work either, and then they told him our room had been double-locked and we had to go to the front desk again to see why. Down there they said that no one gave them a “method of payment” on check-in. The problem is that they never asked for it at check-in. The reservation had been made on the web and they already had a credit card number from that, so everything should have been fine. We went back up to the room, but it was still locked. We figured that a security guy had to come to unlock it, so we waited, and waited, until he finally came. All of this took AT LEAST 45 minutes, and at an hour when all we wanted was to get some sleep (or get a time-turner to be at the show again, but unfortunately that’s not possible).

Next time, I’ll write about how I finally (after 21 years) spent an entire night dancing, with the help of just one drink (legal!), and how that day was basically the most epic day ever.

~ par Jacinthe le 2 juin 2009.