It’s Thursday, so the new Green Felt Journal is up at last:my weekend at the Star Trek convention, condensed to about 760 words, for Vegas Seven:
Anthony and Deidre Flood Jenkins are about to have the moment of a lifetime. Pavilion Room 4 at the Las Vegas Hilton might seem a funny place for this, but that’s where George Takei and Walter Koenig—who played Sulu and Chekov, respectively, in the original Star Trek—are taking pictures with fans. Anthony, who watched the show in its original run, is a bookseller; Deidre is a schoolteacher. Takei’s unmistakable baritone carries all the way through the line. The Jenkinses are about to meet their heroes.
via Trekkies teach Vegas how to live long and prosper | Vegas Seven.
Please click through and read it–this one was a lot of fun to research and very difficult to write. There were at least a dozen stories that I could have told, but this one–what we can learn from what goes on at the convention–seemed the most appropriate to the audience. Talking to Scott MacDonald and Randy Oglesby, the underlying truth of what they were saying dawned on me: this isn’t what we planned for, but this is great. It seemed that was an attitude we could use more of in Las Vegas today.
I’d like to thank everyone who talked with me over the weekend for sharing their insights and experiences. Even if they didn’t make it into the final cut, those thoughts helped me understand the convention much better.
Trying to edit this down, it occurred to me that this would make a great chapter in a book about Las Vegas–it would take five to seven thousand words to do it justice and really get into what’s going on.
I’m going to look at another facet of the convention for the Las Vegas Business Press in next-next week’s column, so keep your hailing frequencies open.