Notes on TPfest
June 25-27, 2004 : NYC
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FRIDAY, part 1
We all met up at the Hotel Pennsylvania -- right across the street from
Penn Station and Madison Square Garden, and a few blocks away from the
Empire State Building. So you'd think we'd be able to find our way back to
it pretty easily. Yeah.
Jog had gotten there first, maybe six days early or something. Guillermo and his ubercool parents had come the day before. Ryan got there in the morning. They were all out having breakfast when I arrived.
Scott and Martha drove together; they got in about 10am, which means that they had left Boston about 5am, which means that if they had half a brain between them, they would have gone to bed at maybe 10pm. But no. Scott was up all night making CDs and whatever, Martha was up doing frog knows what. Martha'd had maybe four hours of sleep. Scott had two.
Thus begins the major theme of the weekend: We Are So Stupid.
So the six of us meet up, plus David Hirsch -- aka Splurge on Muppet Central. David H lives in NY, and Jog and Guillermo invited him to hang with us for the early part of Friday. (We also briefly met G's parents, Denise and Bob. They're super friendly, really happy to meet us and to be in New York. While G was hanging with us, they were seeing four shows in three days. We liked them a lot.)
We couldn't check in until 3pm, so we all went up to Jog's room to store our bags. We had a bit of a shock when we got there, because Jog's room, as we later figured out, was the ghetto room. I don't know what he did to offend the Hotel Pennsylvania, but he got the tiniest, nastiest looking room in the whole hotel. It was basically a chair, a bed and a crappy little TV. Paint and wallpaper were peeling all over. Happiness Hotel jokes were made. We were all a bit worried that our rooms were going to be like that too, but Guillermo assured us that his room was way better, which it was. (G had the superstar corner room.)
So here's my quick character sketch of everybody who was there at that
point, for everyone who hasn't met us in person.
Scott is taller than people thought he was -- six feet tall except when he slumps a little, which is all the time. Really cute light-Boston accent, which he can ramp up to a heavy-Boston accent when he wants to. He's fucking hot, too -- you know how everybody talks about how hot Scott is? He's that hot. Everybody remarked on it, often. But he doesn't believe that he's hot or cool, cause he has sort of a neurotic self-esteem problem, which makes him even hotter and cooler.
Take a look at Martha's MuppetHugging picture in the Cheat Sheet. That picture is Martha, physically and emotionally. We had a couple little running gags about her being upset and sarcastic, but I never saw her sincerely annoyed with anything the whole weekend. When she showed up on Friday, she was wearing a Bert and Ernie T-shirt; one of her socks had Bert on it, the other had Ernie. Martha is cool.
Ryan is such a cutie. We had to keep reminding ourselves that he's 16,
cause he seems so much older and more mature. (Then again, the rest of us
were acting like 16 year olds ourselves, so we kind of met in the middle.)
For the time that he was there on Friday, Ryan was struggling with two
conflicting emotions -- sad that he had to leave so soon, and really happy
that he was there with us. He wanted to give us things and love us all as
much as he could while he was there. Ryan is full of love.
Guillermo has long straight black hair and a really engaging, sweet smile. When he's listening to you, he'll look right at you -- but when he talks, he has to look down at the floor. That has the effect of making him seem sweet and shy all the time. He was always smiling. Because he can be looking down, he sometimes didn't notice when the group was turning and walking in a different direction -- so we had to keep an eye on him, and herd him over with us. It's very easy to feel protective and loving towards Guillermo. We wanted to put him in our pockets and keep him. We love G.
Jog is completely wild. He has a crazy shock of black and white hair that
blows in the breeze like Fraggle hair. His eyes are always wide open -- he
had the most energy of anyone, and he never seemed tired even when the
rest of us were. Every once in a while, he'll just bust out with a
startlingly accurate Muppet voice -- Kermit, Wembley, Lew Zealand. We'd
just be walking down the street talking, and if something came up that
reminded him of a Muppet reference, he'd call it out in an appropriate
voice. That's an amazing feature.
And then I am me. I look like me, and I talk like Danny Monster approximately 85% of the time.
So we went up to Jog's room to mess around and wait for more people to arrive.
Martha had made 2003 Yearbooks for us all, which she started to give out. They're little chunky spiral-bound books that she made at Staples. They include the whole 2003 yearbook document, plus birthdays, Ryan's Tough Pigs Glossary, and then all the Cheat Sheet profiles, including the MuppetHugging pics in color. It was an awesome present; we all loved them. Then in the back she put some blank pages so we could all sign them for each other, like real yearbooks. They're fun to flip through and fun to read.
Both Jog and Ryan brought some puppets, and we started messin' with puppets. Jog had brought Nergil, who has a long funny nose, a little giraffe, and a purple guy who ended up on Scott's hand and was instantly renamed Wicked Pissah. Wicked Pissah is a very funny little guy with a heavy Boston accent -- everything is "wicked hahdcore" for our man WP. He's tough and impatient, and likely to tell you to "screw." He's kind of Oscar, without the softer side.
Ryan had the new version of Danny Monster's head, but without fur. He was very very cute; he's going to make a great puppet. His eyes were just taped on, and one fell off while I was operating him, which provoked the predictable amount of screaming. Ryan also brought Beamer, and a bunch of new monsters that he'd made -- and Orville, the big orange guy who has two working hands. Orville is an awesome puppet, and we did a little two-handed action with me doing the head and left hand and Scott doing the right hand. We tried to clap. It's not as easy as you might think.
Guillermo shot some video footage of me, Jog, Ryan and Scott puppeting around. I think it includes a cool rendition of "Bein' Green" featuring Orville and Kermit. G is going to send a copy to Scott, so hopefully selected bits of the tape will be online at some point.
We also oohed and aahed over Jog's pictures -- he brought little albums with photos of his trip to the Henson workshop, and photos of his enormous collection. Lots of cool international PVC's, old posters and junk.
Ryan brought a bag of presents -- stuff that he had lying around that he didn't want anymore. I snagged a Muppet Magazine and a Scary Scary Monsters book, Scott got a book about Kermit and the human body. I forget what other people grabbed. There was a bunch of stuff, including a really ugly Baby Fozzie and an ugly Baby Kermit with a rattle in its head that was the focus of much fun later.
By this point, we're getting hungry, so we went out into the streets of
New York for the first time, puppets akimbo. We did puppet shit all down
the street, making the obvious spectacle of ourselves. We stopped in at a
deli and had some sandwiches.
Then we walked down a little bit to a really groovy comics store right across from the Empire State Building, Jim Hanley's Universe. They had an amazing selection of comics and comic-related books, as well as toys and associated paraphenalia, and we spent like an hour there. We had our first Muppet-stuff sighting: the Muppet antenna toppers and some charm danglers, as well as something we hadn't seen before -- the big Muppet candles. One candle was Animal at his drum set in front of a big sign of his name, the other was Gonzo in his cannon. They were both based on the same designs as the Palisades figures, so they were neat to see.
Then we sort of prowled around and poked at Peanuts books and stuff. We were getting loud and over-excited by this point, and we got some weird looks from people in the store.
I'll repeat that: We got weird looks from PEOPLE IN THE COMICS STORE.
We were that out of control, that early.
Anyway, here's the deal with the Stupidfriends:
Right off the bat, we were all so giddy and over-excited just being there that we started making really bad decisions. We took wrong turns. We forgot things. We were inappropriate. We were easily distracted. We didn't sleep, we drank too much, we walked for half an hour in the pouring rain.
I forget exactly who came up with it, but right around the time that
Kellie arrived, we named ourselves the Stupidfriends, and it became the
theme of the weekend.
By Sunday, we had two Stupidfriends theme songs -- the overcomplicated written-out one (we'll get to that later), and the easier Stupid Mix.
Here's the Stupid Mix, sung more or less to the tune of John Williams' Superman theme:
Stupidfriends! We are the Stupidfriends!
Stupidfriends! We are the Stupidfriends!
We are the Stuuuuuu-pidfriends!
We are the Stuuuuuu-pidfriends!
We are the Stupidfriends! We're the Stupidfriends.
Rinse and repeat.
If you hum that through the whole rest of these notes, then you'll get a good sense of what the weekend was like.
Kellie and her husband Tom arrived at this point, and met us in Jog's room. My vague impression of Tom is that he's really nice, but I would hardly know. He showed up, said hi to everybody, looked at all of us giggling and playing with puppets, and politely took his leave. "I'm going to the Strand," he said, and then he was gone. Tom is cool enough to come all the way to New York for TPfest, and smart enough to go hang out with his own friends most of the time. There was supposedly a Tom sighting on Saturday morning, but I personally didn't see him for another 48 hours. Occasionally, Kellie would get a phone call that I suspect was staged.
Anyway, Kellie was my big surprise for the weekend. I'd met her pretty
briefly back in September at the Henson statue dedication in Maryland, but
that was maybe for a couple hours, so we didn't get to know each other
that well. She's been posting for a while, but never in the top 25, or
even in the top 35. (PS to Kellie: Post more.) Turns out that Kellie is
really really funny. Of all of us who were there, she's the one who could
most easily pass for a grown-up. When I saw her in MD, she was in her work
clothes, and I could still see her that way even in her Fraggle Rock
baby-doll. But there is comedy in Kellie. My first sign of this was that
she came up with the first Stupidfriends character, Captain Wrongfloor,
and our nemesis, Mr Smartypants. I suspect that she may even have come up
with the Stupidfriends name in the first place, but I can't verify that.
Kellie rocks.
Anyway, by now it's close to 3, so those of us who need to check in go downstairs to check in. We meet up again in Guillermo's room -- a spacious corner rom which is the opposite of Jog's Happiness Hotel disaster area. Except the toilet leaks. (Running a hotel is too hard!)
Ryan has brought a tape for everybody to watch, including Muppet rarities
and the behind the scenes blooper-reel for our Gift of the Magi Christmas
video. Unfortunately, we had all stupidly assumed that the TV's in the
hotel would have VCR's in them, despite the fact that hotel TV's never
have VCR's in them. (We're so dumb.) There are RCA jacks on the TV's and
we could plug in a VCR if we had one, but we don't have one. We never end
up watching any tapes.
Sadly, Ryan has to leave by 3:30 -- his dad has been out driving around in circles all day, and he's gonna take Ryan home. There is a series of tense negotiations over the phone. They get even more tense when I call Craig Shemin, and find out that we're meeting him tonight for dinner. But there is ultimately a breakdown in the talks, and Ryan's got to go. We are sad pandas.
At this point, those of us who got there early are a little droopy. (We're so dumb.) Scott and I go off to our room for a nap. Our room is okay -- not dingy like Jog's at all, but pretty damn small. When we lie down on the bed, our feet stick off the bottom. But who cares. It's a bed. We nap.
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