Round Robin: Fancy Dress (both kinds)

For the Round Robin Challenge: Dress Up, I asked to see "Any kind of costume ..., any dress, tux and tails, doll clothes, anything worn by anything or anyone as long as it's out of the ordinary." Although I'm feeling pretty wiped out tonight with a bad allergy attack that's gone on for the last 15 hours or so, I can supply examples in several of those categories.

My immediate inspiration was the idea of cosplay - fans making and wearing costumes that represent characters and creatures from their favorite books, movies, tv shows and comics. Over the years I've taken more than a few photos of fans in costume at Gallifrey One, the annual Doctor Who convention in Los Angeles. It's been several years since I made it to Gally, but I recently managed to buy a ticket to the 2015 convention in the 75 minute window before it was sold out. So let's celebrate that victory with memories of costumes past. I'll try to avoid reruns from past postings:

 From 2010: A Clockwork Droid threatens Reinette, 

a.k.a. Madame de Pompadour.

From 2011: Amy Pond in her Kiss-o-gram police uniform, 

with Rory Williams, the Last Centurion.

The last time I saw people in cosplay as Doctor Who characters was last year, at Disneyland of all places.

 

The Tenth Doctor, Captain Jack Harkness, 

and the Eleventh Doctor, Disneyland, May 2013.

In the U.K., "fancy dress" means a masquerade costume. Here in the U.S., it tends to have a more literal meaning.

A young woman poses for photos at Gates Pass, September 2013.

This one is a rerun: a wedding party at Reid Park, 2009. 

That green dress looks like something Tinker Bell would wear. Love it!

But let's go back to Disneyland for a moment. Come to think of it, Disneyland is full of fancy dress, and fancy dresses!

Tiana from The Princess and the Frog, Disneyland, May 2012.

I have many more, but that's enough for tonight. Let's so see what all the Robins came up with for this Challenge!


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If it's still the weekend, it's not too late to play along yourself! Go for it, I say!

Karen

Friday at Gallifrey, Revisited

Right, where was I in my painfully slow recap of Gallifrey One's Nineteeth Symphony, Opus 2008 (the con's full name)? As I look back on my entries labeled Gallifrey One, I see that I didn't even write up the stuff from before the Masque of Mandragora except for the briefest of summaries written that Friday night. The problem with not posting full details as they happen is that memories get garbled after a while. Was the VotD screening on Friday or Saturday? (Friday.) Was the Buffy singalong on Saturday? (Yes.) And so on.

Okay, then: once I got to the right hotel and checked in, I managed to cram in a number of events that day. From here on out I'm going to crib from my program book, Lee's con report and my own posts made at the time.

At 4 PM was Gary Russell's interview of Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred, after which I left the main room (which had composer-archivist-restoration specialist Mark Ayre's presentation on Doctor Who) to rush upstairs for things to be autographed. That particular autograph session was largely writer-oriented, and so I got to say hello to Steven Moffat (who jokingly characterized himself as "a disappointment" in person), story editor Andrew Cartmell (who presided over some of my favorite 1980s stories), Andy Lane (whose New Adventures novels I had foolishly left behind at home), Paul Cornell (who remembered my comment on his blog about John Lennon and Paul McCartney), and James Moran (whose interview in Doctor Who Magazine was in one of the issues I left home). Still, it was pleasant to get a quick chat in with each of these guys, especially once I tracked down my well-thumbed copy of the Discontinuity Guide, co-written by Cornell, which I had been reading over lunch at Carl's Jr.

After that was Opening Ceremonies in the main room. I was a million miles from the stage, but that didn't dim my appreciation as emcee Shaun Lyon introduced the weekend's guests.

Steak salad in the sports bar.

A break in the schedule of must-see events followed, which gave me a chance to have dinner with some of the fans in from Phoenix, including the marvelous Lee Whiteside. I had what sounded like a relatively healthy and intriguing menu option, steak salad. This turned out to be a salad with french fries dumped on top of it, and a steak on top of that. It was good, though.

The "Drunken Doctor" poses with "Martha" in the hallway

The Fifth Doctor (left) meets the Tenth Doctor

The Doctor faces "Evil Toby," which didn't happen in the story.

This brings us up to the Masque of Mandragora, which I've already covered in some depth, except that I've found some more pictures I failed to post before. Here they are.

Rob Shearman launches into a funny rant about a
Steven Moffat (left) catchphrase in Just a Minute

My post the other night ended with the Just a Minute game, except that I totally failed to communicate how fun and funny it was. Great stuff, and that's all I'm going to say about it tonight. Some of it was supposedly available online as of last week, but appears to have been taken down now.

After Just a Minute on Friday night, prize certificates (and some actual loot such as gift certificates) were handed out to about half of the costume contestants, some of them very specific to the individual's costume. Cassandra and her "boys" took Best in Show, and I remember Martha and the Cyberboy being honored as well.

This was followed by screenings of "Time Crash" (Moffat's charity piece featuring the Fifth and Tenth Doctors) "Voyage of the Damned" (the highly-rated 2007 Christmas special) and "The Infinite Quest" (an animated adventure that was originally serialized on the BBC kids' show Totally Doctor Who, with Tony Head voicing the main villain). None of these have officially been aired in the U.S., nor released on video. Nevertheless, most of the fans at the convention had already seen them, including me. But seeing them on a big screen with a bunch of other fans was a rather different experience than watching them alone on my laptop!

I was up late Friday night blogging, which made it a little hard to get up the next morning. But Saturday was a full day of stuff to write about, so I'll leave that for another time.

Karen

Before the Masque (and During): Gallifrey One Part One

I was going to write about Gallifrey One tonight, with a more general and factual perspective than my Friday night misadventure entry or my Saturday night introspection. I can't, though, because two or three hours of editing photos has left me no time to write actual words. I'll get to it, though.

All of these photos are from Friday, February 15th:

Sylvester McCoy (who played the Seventh Doctor) emerges from the TARDIS as Sophie Aldred (who played his friend Ace) rushes to follow up on Sylvester's shtick. Shaun Lyon, the emcee and public face of Gallifrey One, looks on in amusement, having just introduced Sophie.

Sylvester and Sophie put their feet up as writer-editor Gary Russell asks them a series of numbered questions. Sophie wants to know whether it's a game show.


Skipping over Opening Ceremonies, here are some shots from the Masque of Mandragora, the con's costume contest. Here is the littlest Cyberman, or Cyberboy. The premise is that like Ianto's former girlfriend in the Torchwood episode "Cyberwoman," the Cyberboy wasn't completely transformed when the Cybermen got him. The following evening, this little boy and his equally tiny sister were rolling around in the hallway as orange-suited Luke and white-hooded Leia from Star Wars.

A comedy Dalek. For some reason all my shots of the TARDIS came out skewed, and refused to be fixed by perspective and skew and arbitrary proportion-editing tools. That TARDIS also has an unfortunate tendency to come out purple in photographs. It isn't that way in the real world. Oh, and Steven Moffat says that the windows are the wrong size. (That's a running joke. Fans debated the size of the windows on the recent TARDIS props earnestly and at length, and Moffat commemorated this with a line of dialogue in his award-winning episode "Blink." But he did say it about this TARDIS as well.)

The supposedly drunk Doctor from Moffat's "The Girl in the Fireplace" sings "I Could Have Danced All Night," praises bananas and insults the audience.


Harold Saxon, the mad, murderous Prime Minister, turns his laser screwdriver on us.

Harry Saxon's deranged wife Lucy pouts prettily in her handmade satin "moll" dress.

The Seventh Doctor introduces Ace to the Second Doctor in a brief sketch, which references a Dead Ringers comedy bit about the Second Doctor's foes being "made of tin foil."


Over a decade later, fans are still upset that the Eighth Doctor claimed to be half human. How much bigger would the firestorm have been had the Eighth Doctor been female?

Another female portrayal of a male character: Captain Jack's old flame Captain John, played on tv by Buffy's James Marsters.

More tomorrow. With words, even!

Karen