We'd have gotten there earlier of course, but the instructions were written by a juggler who passes alternates - left, right, what's the difference?
The hall was pretty empty of jugglers when we got there. There were about a dozen people standing around, just no-one juggling. Having neither shame nor scruples (they're in the mail) we three started off chucking some clubs around as the numbers slowly increased. You could ever have said it was exactly crowded though. To be generous, the event was spaciously accomodated.
Not many big names in the hall - Kit Summers was hanging around, AllenK (hi) demonstrated ball passing with about 2.5 million objects and gave me a hint on the best perspective for it - underneath. Nice one Allen, but maybe you spent just a little too long on the west coast man..? Looked up from feeding to see an old friend from the Oxford club - turned out he was in Washington for a few months. Small world. He and Eddie and I formed a British contingent happily passing on the right...
Big deal of the weekend? Brian from Washington teaching us a pattern calle dthe Shooting Star - details in another post. It's a passing pattern that got lots of people asking to be taught it.
The public show was mostly local and amateur stuff, as you'd expect for a small convention. The first half seemed like amateur night at The Farting Ferret, my local, which offers a pickled egg and half a pint of warm bitter to the best act. This stuff was sandwiched between The Ground Crew (white bread Vegas act) and Cindy Marvell (a kind of rye with crunchy chewy bits) who wore Gold Lame and walked around the stage a lot inbetween some really rather good 3 club juggling.
The 2nd half was an improvement - they changed compere for a start, but nothing stunning happened. For a $0 budget though they did pretty well. Better than the SSC will do on a few billion dollars for sure.
Sunday rolled in with the sweet song of birds and the chime of church bells. Mixed in with the entire population of Philadelphia doing a sponsored walk around the juggling hall in support of Alzheimers. Someone forgot to tell us this was on and it made it tricky to reach the hall as barricades and cops and people blocked our way. Officious organisers shouted at us that we were going the wrong way in a rather rude manner. We were quite rude back.
Inside was even quieter than the Saturday. We'd just about have made it into a decent sized elevator with a squeeze. Frand and Eddie and I buggered off around 2pm to get some fried crud into ur systems and by the time we got back everyone had gone. Even the dustclouds had deserted the ghosttown.
So, it was an OK convention - just nothing special. Not enough people to make an atmosphere I guess. The best parts for me were outside the con - embarrassing waitresses in a pizza place and IHOP, staying in a YH packed with Christian campers chasing after our ping pong ball for a treasure hunt and contemplating ritual sacrifice of a chicken over Cindy Marvell's hooters (it's a long and very strange story, and I'm not going to tell it here).
So, when's the next con?