CoffeeBear.net

What A Day

Posted by Mark | Filed under Life

I had orig­i­nally planned on attend­ing a Pam­pered Chef party with my wife last Sun­day. I had been think­ing it would be some pleas­ant social­iz­ing over some tasty food with a bit of some­body try­ing to sell me some pricey kitchen stuff. That is to say a not entirely unpleas­ant to spend part of one’s after­noon. Instead about an hour before the party, our friend Bryon stopped by and men­tioned that Bruce Camp­bell was in town giv­ing a short talk and pro­mot­ting his new book, Make Love the Bruce Camp­bell Way.

I thought about it for a minute, but I knew there’d be more chances for Pam­pered Chef par­ties and I doubted I’d have any bet­ter chance of get­ting to see Mr. Camp­bell in per­son. So after a quick shower¹, Bryon and I hopped into the car and drove into Iowa City. We got to the site about 40 min­utes prior to the event began. We waited around and it turned out one of my co-workers was also there². Then about 10 min­utes before Mr. Camp­bell was sched­uled to begin speak­ing; they opened one set of the doors into the audi­to­rium and let every­body in. And nat­u­rally, it wasn’t the door we’d had been wait­ing at. *sigh*

Even­tu­ally, every­body was inside and mostly seated but then the orga­niz­ers explained how the sign­ing pro­ce­dure was sup­posed to work and said the new book was for sale at the back of the audi­to­rium. So we ended up giv­ing up our fairly good seats to go get in another line. It took a while to get through the line, but it was good that we both went to the line as Laura³ showed up look­ing for us. Appar­ently, she decided the party wasn’t her cup of tea. While we were wait­ing in line; she kindly thanked me for “being so god-damn tall”.

There was a con­sid­er­able amount of wait­ing in line to get the book, but even­tu­ally we all got our copies and headed back to find new seats (the good seats we’d had were long gone). A bit after that Mr. Camp­bell started tak­ing ques­tions. It turns out he’s a very charis­matic speaker. There were a num­ber of ques­tions about him work­ing with Sam Raimi, but the only one that really stuck in my mind was:

Ques­tioner: When work­ing on Spi­der­man, did you hang out with Tobey Maguire?
Bruce Camp­bell: Why would I?

*grin*

After far too lit­tle time had passed, Mr. Camp­bell stopped tak­ing ques­tions and then made a short speech pro­mot­ing B-movies as the only place that is still cre­ative in Hollywood.

…get­ting bit­ten by a radioac­tive spi­der is a b-movie!

After the speech, they started hav­ing peo­ple come up to get their books signed. Bryon & I had rel­a­tively low num­bers but when we were going up they weren’t actu­ally check­ing peo­ples num­bers. Even­tu­ally I got up there and had Mr. Camp­bell sign my book; but I felt like a com­plete twit, the entire time I was there. I mean I have enjoyed all of his movies that I’ve seen and what I read of the book while I was in line was very amus­ing but I didn’t really have any­thing to say to him. He was very polite to me, but it was a rather uncom­fort­able moment for me. Signed mem­o­ra­bilia is nice to have I sup­pose, but it doesn’t do much for me. To tell the truth, I’m not entirely sure why I went up to have him sign the book. Other than I’d waited in line to get the sticker say­ing I could do so. *shrug* Life, go figure.

After that, we took off and headed off to meet up with some other friends for some RPGing. When we got there they were still fin­ish­ing up with the Pam­pered Chef party and I got to munch down some of the left­overs⁴. Then it was game time and after­wards off to Old Chicago for din­ner. All in all, a very pleas­ant Sunday. :)

¹ Bryon arrived before we were expect­ing any­body. And yes, I’m extra-specially lazy on the week­end; so if I’m not expect­ing com­pany I will hang around the apart­ment with­out get­ting myself up and ready for the day.
² That would be Quincy for those that are curi­ous.
³ Another friend of ours. One who was sup­posed to be at the Pam­pered Chef party.
⁴ Ah, break­fast at 3pm.…

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