Wish You Were Here!
CONTINUED
By Tim Peterson
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August 31, 2008
Thursday, August 14, 2008
DAY 1
A brief note about naming: Most
people on the message boards call themselves by screen names unrelated to
their real names. While in Colorado we usually called each other by our real
names, but for this article I'll use many of their screen names instead, to
protect the identity of the guilty, er, innocent parties.
Shadowpaw, founder of the ToO, was the
first of our group to arrive. He was an intern at Focus 6 years ago, and
this time he worked behind the scenes on the show (not to mention scoring
sleeping quarters at Nathan Hoobler's house). The ToOers arrived in
increasing numbers from Tuesday through Friday. My own flight was on
Thursday, leaving at the unearthly hour of 6:40 am from Rochester, NY.
During a layover, I arranged to meet a ToO friend who wasn't able to go to
the show but lived in the Detroit area. I arrived two time zones later in CO
around 1 pm. It was then that I met the first of the ToO group.
I had arranged with Sarah, a long-time
member of the ToO, to be picked up from the airport by she and her
grandfather. This worked out well, as they were already planning on picking
up Frank from the airport as well, her flight coming in just before mine.
(For those not in the know, Frank is, in fact, of the female variety, her
username following from her defunct fan site, Frank's Breakfast Inn.) I
didn't know what Frank looked like (nor even her real name), so I acquired
my suitcase and sat down near the entrance. Shortly thereafter, I spied
Chris and Sarah striding toward me, and they recognized me immediately.
Having greeted me, they proceeded to find Frank, who, it turns out, was
sitting in a seat almost within sight of me. We all returned to Sarah's
grandpa's car, and drove to our hotel, Homewood Suites, located conveniently
across the street from Focus on the Family.
Sarah and Chris have been running the
Unofficial Adventures in Odyssey Podcast for some time now. As Frank and I
soon learned, those two had offered their assistance to Focus, who quickly
put them to work helping with the show behind the scenes. This meant that
they would have less time to spend with the rest of us fans, but on the plus
side they'd have insider access to tell us all stories about.
Our two "special" friends, as we dubbed
them, went straight to Focus while Frank and I got settled in at the hotel.
We then went right over to visit the welcome center at Focus. Our first stop
was lunch at Whit's End (thanks, Grandpa!), for which I consumed a hamburger
and my first-ever
WodFamChocSod. Already in the building were
the Jerry and Serenity, siblings, so we called them up and had them meet us
in Whit's End. We also managed to get ahold of Lizzie, who had arrived
earlier with her family.
And so, our group complete (for now), we
explored Whit's End. One of our first stops was the fabled two-story
A-bend-a-go slide. (Unfortunately, my altitude measures significantly more
than the 5'9" height limit for the slide, so I was deprived of this
experience.) Though we didn't take as much time as we could to truly
experience it, we walked through the whole place and ended up in the
bookstore. There we discovered a large supply of the just-released Official
Guide to AIO. They had about 1000 copies in stock, in preparation for the
influx on Saturday. They also had stacks and stacks of all 50 Odyssey
albums, enough to fill out any fan's collection.
There were only five of us in the posse so
far, and we wanted to meet up with the other ToOers. To this end, we hopped
in Jerry's car and returned to Homewood, so we could fire up our laptops and
take a look at the organizational spreadsheet. We added a few numbers to our
cell phones and attempted to contact Catspaw and Jonathan, both of whom were
supposed to arrive that day. We failed at this time, and decided to play
cards in the lobby until we found something else to do.
As I've mentioned, I have never met any of
these people before in real life. It was an interesting experience in that
despite being strangers in person, we all had the common bond of being ToO
members and having corresponded for months or years already. It seemed
slightly odd to discuss matters on the ToO among real live people, but for
the first time in my life, this was the place to do it. Personally, I
had never conversed directly with any of the members there, but I knew in
general who they were. It was a strange mix of being among both strangers
and friends simultaneously. I didn't know them individually yet, but all the
same I knew they were fellow Christians and was perfectly comfortable being
around them.
We started out playing
Five Crowns, a
card game I brought from home. It was approaching five o'clock, when the
hotel was to provide complimentary dinner for its guests. Frank and I were
sitting across from Jerry and Serenity while playing the game, when Jerry
quietly pointed out, "That's Catspaw." We turned around and spied a familiar
figure eyeing the impending victuals. Frank queried, "Catspaw?" She walked
over and replied, "Frank?" After a few seconds of stunned silence, Frank
replied, "Yes!" and the greetings commenced. We figured this was as good a
time as any to have our dinner, so we caught up over personal-sized pizzas.
Once the food was consumed, we needed
something else to facilitate our hanging out, so we went in search of a deck
of cards. Catspaw took leave of her parents, and all six of us squeezed into
Jerry's vehicle and set off for Wal-Mart. On the way we prowled around the
Howard Johnson hotel, where Jonathan was supposed to be arriving, but failed
to locate his blue car. In the store, cards were soon located, pets were
duly admired, and the girls found a few items of their own to acquire. Our
errands complete, we returned to the lobby to break in our cards with a few
games of Egyptian War, I Doubt It, and other such trivialities.
Our hanging-out location for the weekend
was a set of chairs around a coffee table in front of a gas fireplace. This
fireplace was embedded in a wall dividing the tabled eating area from the
main entrance, and was glass-enclosed on both sides. We soon realized that
by leaning down we could look through the fireplace to see who had just
traversed the doors when we heard a sound. This became useful, as some time
later a shuttle arrived from the airport carrying all of the AIO actors for
the show. As Connie, Eugene, Wooton, and the rest of the celebrities
congregated around the front desk to check in, us mere fans quivered behind
the fireplace wondering if we should introduce ourselves, and peeked out to
see what they were up to.
The peeking paid off. Frank was spotted by
Darcie, who is both a ToO member and wife of Dave Griffin, voice of Jimmy
Barclay. She treated us to introductions to Dave, Will Ryan (Eugene), Katie
Leigh (Connie), and Jess Harnell (Wooton). She explained to them why we were
there and how we knew each other, as none of them but Dave was aware that
there was such an obsessed fan community online, dedicated enough to fly out
from as far as New York and Canada to meet each other. When the
introductions were complete and the actors headed up to their rooms, we took
a group photo of Dave, Darcie, and the fans who were assembled so far.
The actors returned shortly to eat and
mingle some more, before they had to head off to Focus for a rehearsal of
the much-anticipated show. As we learned later, our special friends Sarah
and Chris had been involved in a technical rehearsal prior to this, where
they together played all the voice parts in the show so the foley crew could
get all their sound effects ready to go. (Sarah was aghast to learn over the
phone that we had "mobbed" the actors upon their arrival, though I think we
managed to behave ourselves.) While they rehearsed, we returned to
card-playing. Later that evening we were treated to the return of the actors
to the hotel, joined by Sarah and Chris, Shadowpaw, and Josh and Kevin
(Focus employee and intern, respectively).
Some of the actors stayed to talk to us,
their adoring fans, while others returned to their rooms. The remainder of
the evening was spent sitting around the lobby talking to the actors and
listening to their stories. Dave Griffin, in particular, became our closest
friend of the bunch. Over the whole weekend, he spent perhaps a dozen hours
just talking with us all, telling stories from his ten years as an AIO actor
and just getting to know us.
Dave grew up with AIO, starting his run at
age ten and holding on until he was 20. One of the stories he told was of
how his character met its end when his voice began changing. The scene has
been described on the air in the episode "Inside the Studio", but we got to
hear him tell it first-hand. It went like this: Dave was in the studio
recording his lines, when suddenly his voice cracked. Both he and the crew
had been dreading this moment, and finally it had come, despite Dave's
efforts to keep his voice high and sprightly. After the dreaded sound,
everyone went quiet, and nobody looked at him. It was as if his character
had just died. Finally Katie Leigh broke the silence, by saying, "Uh-oh..."
He tried the line again, but still failed just the same. In the months
following, the writers created a coming-of-age episode and finally phased
him out of the show.
When Dave told this story, Katie Leigh and
her son Adam (Cal Jordan) were among the group. Adam shared his experience
of his voice cracking, which played out in a remarkably similar way. This
time, Katie broke the silence by laughing, leading Dave and Adam to jokingly
accuse her of killing their careers. Cal was, of course, written out of the
show, though in a less dignified manner. (He fell off of a radio tower and
landed in a coma, reportedly recovering off-air in a later episode.)
I don't even remember all the things that
were discussed that night. Adam and Dave discussed their forays into the
realm of writing and filming movies, and Katie and Dave talked about their
opinions on the show rehearsal. After that first try earlier in the day,
they weren't too enthusiastic about how much time they had to practice given
the challenges of doing a live show, but the writers made some changes
overnight and in the end the actors were all happy with how it came out.
After I left, Dave and the fans talked for at least half an hour more. I had
awoken at 5 am Eastern time, and went to bed at 12:30 am Mountain time, so I
was definitely ready for sleep after over 21 hours awake.
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