DaveCon 2002
What's the Deal with AFLers and Giant Trip Reports?
Helen's Huge, Massive, Big Honkin' Trip Report
by Helen P. Read
Part IV: The Post-Show Festivities
Well, the show is over, and the pages are herding all the audience members to the exits. During the last commercial break Traci and I waved at Tony Mendez, but now he was nowhere in sight, and Traci was worried that he wasn't coming back. Well, this is exactly what happened at the end of the show last year--Tony ran off stage in a hurry to dump the cue cards, then came back for us--and sure enough, it happened again. Just as I'm standing up and gathering my things, I see Tony on the stage, waving me to come on up. I immediately leapt up the steps to shake Tony's hand, with Traci and the others hot on my heels. Tony introduces me (he calls me "Little Helen") to Walter Kim, who has a camera in his hands, and it's running. That's right, we are on the Tony Mendez Show!!! We are on it, right now. Wheeeeee!
As the rest of the AFL group filed up onto the stage, Tony told me to tell him who is in the group. "We don't want anyone else coming up here," he said in his best TMS voice. I told him each person's name (which you can't really hear on the TMS), and Dominic (from Late Show security) called out that there were 26 of us--he was probably counting as we filed up onto the stage one by one. You saw all this, right? If not, get yourself over there right now and watch the TMS from Thursday June 20 and Friday June 21, 2002. For that matter, check out Wednesday the 19th, where Tony is warning us the show is cancelled, and the shows from the week of June 24. It's Wednesday the 26th as I write this, and Tony is still talking about us (with Mike on Monday, Jude on Tuesday, and, "Dave" on Wednesday), and still wearing the DaveCon button and the T-shirt, which he has now ripped to shreds (it's becoming an annual tradition).
So, as you saw on the TMS, Tony asked us where we were from, what have we been doing since we got here, and so on, and basically let us loose on the stage, with Walter taping the whole time. Even after they split the tape into two episodes and edited it down a bit, these are quite long episodes, as TMS shows go.
At one point during the TMS (first episode, I think) Tony asks if everyone was here last year. Some people were not, so he says in that case he'll have to give us a tour. Much like last year, we took a lot of pictures on the stage, including at Dave's desk, and then Tony took us downstairs to check out the control room, the second green room, and so forth. Mike McIntee was on hand for all of this, and like last year, he helped Tony take pictures of people posing at Dave's desk. It's amazing how much patience the two of them have.
I got to talk to Mike for a minute, mostly about the Wahoo Archive, which he said was rumored to be coming back on Monday (it did, though it only goes back to October).
And of course, we all talked to Tony. Tony told us how much he loves working for Dave, and that all the people he works with are great, because the boss is great. He told us about some of the famous celebrities he has worked for over the years, and when the boss is a jerk (he named names, but I'm not sure I ought to put them in writing), some of the people below the boss are usually jerks too. He also talked about how much he loves working at the Ed Sullivan Theater, because of all the history it has. He watched the Ed Sullivan Show when he was growing up in Cuba, and it's a thrill to be working there. Tony said he's glad Dave didn't go to ABC. He would have gone wherever Dave said, but he'd much rather stay at the Ed.
Oh, one other thing I found out from Tony. Remember when he was gone for a few days (a week or so before DaveCon), the story being that he was doing missionary work ("clipping toenails"), and literally phoned in the TMS? Some people were speculating on AFL that he was calling from down the hall, and that the background noise was all a fake. Well, he really was totally out of town, taking care of some personal business, and called in from a bar in Miami. He held up the phone hoping we could hear the disco music, but you really couldn't make it out on the TMS. Everyone in the bar thought he was nuts, by the way, screaming into the phone like that.
Well, it was getting late, and we finally got the boot from the theater. The doors were all locked up by then, and we had to follow Corky out through the office building entrance. I recognized the security guard who was posted there from a guest appearance that she did on the TMS a while back (I think her name is Dorothy). By now we were seriously late for dinner (the reservation was for 8:30), but Karen had called Martini's from the theater and they were really nice about holding our table for us. Tony, when we pressed him about coming to dinner, kept saying in his TMS voice "Maybe later."
It was after 9:00 by the time we were seated on the patio at Martini's (we were within eyeshot of the Late Show marquee, by the way, which was a nice bonus). I'd been up since 4:30 a.m., and hadn't had a thing to eat or drink since lunch at the Chili Company. The combination of hunger, dehydration, and exhaustion was finally catching up with me, and by the time I sat down I suddenly felt horrible. I perked up a little bit when I finally got a piece of bread and some ginger ale in me, but was still feeling kind of out of it.
Oh, an odd thing happened. We had been given a choice of appetizers and entrees weeks in advance, and had to send in our selections to Traci (who passed them on to Karen) no later than June 4. Our dinners were all planned, or so we thought. Well, our waiter soon informed us that the menu had changed, and we had to order from a completely different set of appetizers and entrees. The waiter was a riot, by the way. He called everyone "baby" or "hon" or "sweetie" throughout the evening (I don't know if he started it, or one of our group did, but he played it to the hilt), and even put on one of the candy necklaces that Traci had brought. I think someone got a picture of Traci (or someone?) biting one of the candies off his neck by the end of the evening.
So, finally, around 10:20 p.m., the entrees were brought out, and I almost immediately started feeling better once I got some real food into me. At just about this time, Tony Mendez and Mike McIntee surprised us all by dropping by. Nice, nice guys, both of them; I hope that next year we can talk them into dinner, our treat. They stayed for a few minutes, long enough to say hi to everyone and for Marilyn to put a candy necklace on Tony. Traci did the honors of biting one of the candies off his neck. I haven't seen the photo yet, but look around, I think Brad has it.
Dinner was as much a family gathering as lunch had been, and now we had lots of new things to talk about. Someone called up Tom "Pie Boy" Cronin on a cell phone, and passed the phone around the table for people to say hi. When Tom's evil twin, Brad Hill, got hold of the phone, the first words out of his mouth were "You ruined my childhood." :-) We wanted to call Kathie (kathie8) Freeman, but couldn't reach her.
Well, all good things must come to an end, and eventually we had to say our good-byes and go our separate ways. I actually got a proper good-bye from Brad this year, for the first time ever, but I hear that he blew off a lot of other folks. I walked back to my hotel (the crowds out on Broadway at that hour are amazing), and got up to the room around 11:45. Now, I was completely wiped out, but somehow too wired to sleep, so I put on the Late Show (this was Thursday's show, taped earlier in the day; our show would air on Friday). They were in the middle of Know Your Current Events when I tuned in. After Harrison Ford's interview, I decided to skip the musical guest and get ready for bed, having been up for 20 straight hours by then.
What an incredible day. I can still barely believe this all happened.
Part 5: But Wait, There's More! After the Post-Show Festivities