May
30
Written by:
John Jackson Miller
5/30/2007 12:00 AM
One of the things I've always wanted to do was travel to the West Coast old-style -- taking the train from the Midwest, through the Rockies, and down to Los Angeles. Star Wars Celebration IV gave me the chance to do that -- and get a little writing done along the way.
And unlike the anonymous shuffling through airports that air travel has become, you get to meet some interesting people. At one point an older gentleman was seated at lunch with us -- and in conversation I learned he was Tony Vaccaro, a soldier-photographer during World War II who later photographed everyone from Pablo Picasso to Frank Lloyd Wright for Life and Look magazines, among others. Amazon sells Mr. Vaccaro's book, Entering Germany -- and he has another coming soon.
I met a number of people on the way to Los Angeles who were headed to Celebration. You can kind of tell -- one young woman I met was working on a poem in Huttese.
Summer runs The Complete Wermo's Guide to Huttese, a fansite for that and other Star Wars languages -- and if she hadn't told me what she was dressing up as, I never would have recognized her when I spotted her later at the convention center. At left, you can see her as I first met her...
And then you couldn't have missed her at the Convention Center, dressed as Darth Talon from Legacy!
Most of the Dark Horse folks stayed in Little Tokyo, and as I haven't spent much time in Los Angeles before, I got to go exploring. Perhaps the most interesting thing was the plaza right outside the hotel memorializing Ellison Onizuka, one of the seven astronauts killed aboard the Challenger in 1986. It's a huge scale model, with plaques on all sides around it. I never knew such a memorial existed, so it really was a surprise to walk right up to it!
But I digress. You're looking for more costumes. Coming right up -- in the next post...
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