I don't even want to think about this travesty. The Federation clubs just. . . ugh! Don't get me started. I mean it.

This, my second Dover Peace Conference, marks the premiere of Kordite's Metal Things. I carry a box of metal pins and things with me at Friday night's festivities and profits pay for my hotel room and my ticket. I could really get to like this business thing.

I am called upon by Admiral Kishin at Saturday night's banquet to reprise last years hand kissing lesson. I didn't catch the name of the object of my demonstration but her color change indicated that I did an acceptable job.

I receive a warning handwritten on this month's issue of "Mindscanner" from the Thought Admiral. If I ever please his consort again he will have my head on his battle standard. Thick skulled as I am, I take days to come to the realization that the object of my hand-kissing lesson at Dover was none other than Kris's consort. Kishin even sent me an implicating photograph.

At the premier of "First Contact" I again set up my massive display. A Feddie shows up saying that she is from the USS Potemkin and they were supposed to set up a display as well. We tell her we know nothing about it but, since she is not in uniform, she's welcome to loiter with us.

After a while she wanders off. Later, another Feddie shows up with the same story. He too, waits around for a while and eventually disappears. Maybe if they had decided on a time people would be there.

It's not till much later that the captain of the Potemkin shows up with one assistant. Their display consists of a stack of flyers for their ship and a call for a letter-writing campaign for Paramount to open their sets to the public.(Never mind that Paramount has already done this for a one-time, special event at $200 a ticket.)

One Feddie that was particularly harassing eventually engaged me in a reasonable conversation. He liked my Classic Disruptor and offered to buy it from me. I had spent 2 years searching for it before finally finding it at TorontoTrek, I wasn't going to turn around and sell it to some prop-collecting Feddie.

He said, "Of course you realize that your color scheme is off." He was a collector and was somewhat anal on authenticity. He was trying to get me interested in a source that sells props with lights and sounds and a hefty price tag.

And what would I do with such a thing? Lock it in a cabinet at home, dividing my time between gazing upon it and gazing upon the massive void in my checkbook? No. I want to play with it. Show it off. If I can't take it to events like this and have people say, "Wow! This is really cool!" then what good is having it?

He was amazed that I had nearly my entire collection on tables where the great, unenlightened masses can handle it. He wouldn't dream of doing such a thing with his collection.

"So, where's the fun in that?" I said.

A local television station called me to do a feature on me. Since all my stuff is still in the car from after the movie premier I meet the reporter and his camera-man at the Science Center where I work. I set up everything, do some mundane work things, get dressed and made up and do a full-length interview on being Klingon. They shoot over an hour of tape, depleting one camera battery in the process.

The article airs the following week, the hour of footage being cut down to three minutes. Actually, the reporter liked all the footage he had gotten so much he squeezed another 15 seconds on the air. Fifteen seconds of the nightly news is a long time.

Andy Warhol said that everyone will get 15 minutes of fame, I have 11 minutes and 45 seconds still owed me.

http://www.tasigh.org/kordite/events-1996.html -- Revised: 18 May 2002 Copyright © 2002 Kevin A. Geiselman