So this all starts in 2013, when my friend and I catch wind that there’s gonna be a Tumblr convention and Welcome to Night Vale is going to be there. When we find out that it’s going to be hosted in our state, I ask my mom if I could go and she somehow said she would take me if I made enough money to get the tickets. I worked under the table at the town pool’s snack shack that summer to raise money to go, and by that October my friend and I had made enough money to not only go, but to make costumes which we wore that Halloween.
Notice my claw hands? Yeah, we didn’t set our makeup.
Fast forward to that June, and my mom surprised my friend and I with a motel reservation in Schaumburg for that weekend: we had both made enough money to go for those three days, plus enough to see the Welcome to Night Vale live show. The weekend finally comes, and my poor mother drives a seven year old and two teenagers in unset gray body paint screaming to Homestuck fan music on their iPods three hours to Schaumburg. By this point, I think she was tired of us, so she checked us into the hotel, gave us some pizza money, and told us she’d pick us up at noon Sunday.
Which gave a 14 year old and a 15 year old who had never so much as a night home alone unsupervised access to the city.
We get to the convention center and realize there was basically no security. So after going and ogling at what we couldn’t afford at the artist’s alley, the first thing we do is try and sneak into an 18+ panel. They let us in with no questions asked, so we decide that this is how we’re going to spend our night before the Tumblr prom.
When that rolls around and the admins announce that they needed $20k to keep the convention rolling, we realized we didn’t have any coins for the coffers so we left for the night. I’m pretty sure I slept in my costume that night and just reapplied Ben Nye in the morning, as one does.
So the next day is the WTNV live show day. We get up bright and early, go to a few panels, and by the time 11 rolls around we’re sitting in the panel room and waiting.
And waiting.
And waiting.
An admin eventually showed up and told us they weren’t coming, and we couldn’t get refunds. Both of us got an extra hour in the ball pit instead of some of the other “prizes” I remember there being, and the ball pit was tiny and smelled like pee. By the end of the night the ball pit was just gone.
We decided that this day was a bust, but we still went to other panels -- I remember Doug Jones being super nice, and I remember watching Pacific Rim. By this point I was upset and overstimulated and I don’t remember much from this day. I do remember that we decided to not even go to the last day and sleep in instead, and when my mom picked us up and we went home, we burned the badges and agreed to not talk about it if anyone at school asked us.
Flash forward to 2019. I was in college at this point, and my little brother convinces my mom to take him to a fishing convention to meet his favorite fishing YouTubers and also to network because he wants to be a professional fisherman. It was at the same goddamned convention center. And I swear, among all the old men trading big fish tales and selling homemade tackle. I could smell it.
The smell of unset Ben Nye gray MagiColor, body odor, inflatable bounce houses, and piss.
...
All in all, it wasn’t really that bad. I met some friends that I still talk to to this day. If I had hindsight to guide me, would I go? Hell no. But what happened, happened -- and I have great memories from it.
