Bakersfield Comic Con helped me collect a new TV Dad!

18 Nov

As I recently posted, this past weekend had a convention in the South Valley of California and I trekked down with my partner in nerdery (my big brother and fellow nerd), James, to check it out. I was pretty blown away that it was the 12th year of the event and honestly the first time I had even heard about it. I honestly thought that ep of The Big Bang Theory was making it up!

I was wrong.

By no means was Bakersfield Comic Con a huge event. We finished walking the main halls in about an hour. The last time we timed SDCC it was over 3 hours and last years Los Angeles Comic Con took around 2. So, it’s a small event. However, they utilized space well. There were two buildings used, with an outside food court and a few booths as well. The larger building held the bulk of the booths, with crafters and sales of nerdy items. The smaller building housed the artist alley and the media guests. We found Power Rangers, so that was an immediate mark of quality convention- just need to get a wrestler. Or at least those are two things James and I discussed as being elements of conventions. Other guests included Donnie Most and Anson Williams, of Happy Days fame, Renae Jacobs, best known as “April O’Neill” in the original animated Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Dennis Christopher and John Wesley Shipp, but more on those two in a bit. The media guests were doing panels and photo ops, along with spending time at their booths chatting with fans. Also in this building, we found a gaming area with several DnD games running, a few other board or RPG games, and several video game options.

All in all… a pretty damn decent little convention.

So… Dennis Christopher. You might know him from so many things over the years, but the pieces that stand out for me are the original It miniseries and TVs Profiler, and having the pleasure of hanging out with him for a weekend back in 2005. See… there was this little Serenity convention in Burbank that December and Dennis was one of the guests hanging out in the bonus room, along with James Leary, Jonathan Woodward, and James Callis. Well, I was at the convention with some friends and basically when we were not interested in an event, we hung out in the bonus room and got drafted to help out the guests. It was my first time as a booth girl and it was so much fun. We played a game of stacking everything we could find in the middle of the room and Dennis had twister and we all played that in between hanging with the fans. There were some really interesting and inappropriate conversations among the guys, that we joined in not gonna lie. Back to today… I took a moment to say hello, again, and that it was nice to see him after all these years. We had a lovely quick chat. Delightful.

Of course, this whole trek was due to my seeing via social media that John Wesley Shipp was actually going to be at a convention in my neck of the woods. Obviously, I needed the trifecta of superhero TV dads (see also John Schneider and John Barrowman) and who can blame me for being giddy to say hello to The Flash that I grew up watching! Oh and he also played some guy named “Mitch Leery” on some teen soap called Dawson’s Creek (and the abusive dad on Teen Wolf, but we won’t talk about anyone that hurts Isaac). I am horrible at making autograph decisions and thus had him choose what to sign- he made me pick which hand had the altoids in it, and thus 90s Flash DVD is now signed to me. And we had a brief chat wherein I asked, seeing as this was his last convention appearance of 2019, what is something he enjoys about conventions. His answer, which is paraphrased because I didn’t plan any interviews, was “the microcosm, especially in this day and age, we leave politics at the door and just have a chance to connect with something we love… heart to heart.” Absolutely. James and I stuck around the convention to attend John’s panel later. Below, I will post some of the things I tweeted during the panel…