Serenity Road Trip
Jun. 24th, 2005 08:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
annathepiperThis being my spoiler-free description of yesterday's road trip to Vancouver! Spoilers, both for the movie and for Jewel Staite's more spoiler-y Q&A tidbits, will follow in my Serenity-filtered part 2 of this post.
And not that I think I really have to mention this to anyone who currently reads my journal, but just in case--find the Firefly DVDs. Then catch the movie. It was a lot of fun indeed.
It turned out to be a bit of an exciting morning to be taking half the day off. I've been learning in detail all about the process of running a bunch of tests I'm about to have to take over--and the girl who's been training me actually wasn't in yesterday! So I got to do a whole trial-by-fire thing, till it was finally time for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
mamishka to come and pick me up. By then I was more than ready to flee for a road trip.
We had half an hour to kill before we could pick upjessicac, so we wound up heading over to the bank so I could get money--both U.S. and Canadian. Then we fetched Jessica from the RedWest campus, got food from Wendy's, let Jessica take her turn at getting cash, and finally got on the road around 1:30 or so.
Jessica discovered to her bemusement that she had keys tokathryn's truck in her purse. This necessitated a quick call to Kathryn to make certain that she had no huge screaming problems with her keys taking a trip to Canada; fortunately, Kathryn had plenty of spare keys.
So off we were, north up 405 till it merged with I-5. We made incredibly good time; traveling in mid-afternoon on a weekday as we were, we ran into hardly any traffic at all. I had brought my iPod to have music available if we wanted, but Meems had also brought several CDs, so we wound up listening to a stand-up disc by (I believe his name was) Craig Schumacher. A little raunchier sometimes than I prefer, but very funny nonetheless--and he did hysterical impersonations of Snagglepuss and Barney Fife. ;)
Around three we reached the Canadian border, and at 3:10 I marked the time we joined the lineup of cars, just to see how long it would take us to get through. The answer to this question: about 20 minutes. And before we crossed, Jessica piped up cheerily from the back seat her proposal for how to answer the question of what brought us to Canada today: "Husbands!"
We did not say that.
But we wanted to.
Ahem. Anyway, the Canadian guard didn't ask for our papers at all, and we got through in only about 20 minutes. After that we had a nice clear shot up to Vancouver itself, and we reached the right part of the city around 4ish. Our directions for how to find the theater were even almost perfect; they had but one little glitch about them, and that was the location of the theater on the final street we had to find.
But we found it, with plenty of time to kill, and with plenty of time to find parking as well. We wound up parking in the underground levels beneath the theater, which was incredibly convenient and not too terribly expensive, either. Which was good--because we discovered that the parking meters on the streets ran until eight PM, charged 25 cents for every 7 and a half minutes with a two hour mimit, and did not allow you to repeat meter.
Jessica volunteered to go get our tickets while Meems and I looked for parking, to which we were amenable. I spotted Jessica waiting for us on the corner after she had done this, when we were swinging back around after a pass around the block. Mimi told me to get her attention, so I rolled down my window and called out, "Hey, hot American babe!"
That worked. ;)
Once parked, we wandered around in the radius of a few blocks. We noticed that the Vancouver Artgallery had a sculpture exhibit going on, thanks to a huge hanging picture of "The Thinker" on the outside of the building; if we'd had more time to kill and more money, we might have gone. We wound up spending time in a Chapters instead. This was mostly because I wanted to see if I could find Urban Shaman on the shelves there--which I did. It was very cool to seemizkit's book on Canadian bookstore shelves. :)
The other cool thing about the bookstore stop was seeing that they were selling the British editions of the Harry Potter novels--which only made sense, though I hadn't ever really realized that those would be the versions sold north of the border. Again, if there had been extra money, I'd have gotten a couple. I'm interested from a craft-of-writing perspective in the word choices she made, and what got changed for the American versions.
Ah well, next time. :)
Let's see, what else... we popped by the theater early, just because we wanted to find a ladies' room. Technically we weren't allowed into the lobby where the theaters were without getting our stubs taken, but since we were there to see Serenity, the guy manning the ticket-taker stand let us pop on in anyway. This was quite nice of him, and pleasantly reminded me of the last big group I'd taken to Vancouver to see GBS and the various nice, mannerly people we ran into then.
Speaking of nice, mannerly people, we ran into a local contingent of the Browncoats who had set up a table with a huge piece of paper, on which they were letting people write happy birthday wishes for Joss Whedon. That was all very cool. They seemed amused that we'd come all the way up from Seattle to see the movie, too.
And they recommended the nearby Thai restaurant we'd already spotted as a good choice for dinner, so we headed over there for exactly that. Dinner was pad thai for Jessica and me, garlic beef for Mimi (artistically arranged on a pig-shaped plate, we noted wryly), and pleasant conversation for us all. We talked about Harry Potter and whether Harry does indeed get whinier as the series progresses, and about none of us having the foresight to think of bringing a game we could play while we were waiting in line. Once we finished dinner, we decided, Meems and Jessica would go back to poke around Chapters and see if they could find us a game of some kind, while I would go and hold our place in the line in the theater.
Which we did.
Jessica and Meems took quite a while actually finding a game, but that was okay. I spent a good chunk of my time in line re-reading Susanna Kearsley's The Shadowy Horses, just because I was in the mood for a re-read and I'd been carrying the book around with me for the past several days working my way through it.
I also chatted a bit with a couple of the surrounding folks in line: one young blond guy who asked me if I had an extra ticket (and who later scored one for THIRTY DOLLARS from someone else in the line); another one of the local Browncoats group who was carrying around a Firefly boxed set and asking people to sign it to give to Jewel Staite, who would be on hand for the showing; a girl who went along the line offering everybody frosted sugar cookies that she'd made in the shape of fireflies. (The bugs, not the ship class, but they were still quite tasty.)
I saw several people wearing Serenity t-shirts which we later learned were custom made, with the movie logo on the front and a collage of the characters on the back; Mimi called it, too, commenting that the collage looked like fandom-type work to her. And we saw at least half a dozen people, men and women both, wearing variations on Jayne's hat. Hee.
I read, and I drank a green Koolaid slushie, and I watched the loop of movie trailers on the screens stationed in view around the lobby. (Including Cinderella Man, which of course triggered my Russell Crowe Radar, and Batman Begins, which we'll be seeing on Sunday.)
Finally Jessica and Meems returned, with a game that they'd bought, though by then I was playing with my handheld. So we didn't actually play anything. We just yakked. But that was OKAY!
It turned out that while we were lining up on the second floor, the actual auditorium we were using was on the third. And they had to let us up in small groups in order to let the ticket-taker finally take our stubs and to let another guy inspect our various handbags and backpacks and to make sure we didn't have any recording devices.
And finally, we were in!
A couple of funny things happened before the movie started. The Browncoat type who'd been organizing the signing of the big card for Joss Whedon went up front and got everybody to sing "Happy Birthday", which was cute. What was cuter was that same woman being amused enough by us all singing that she asked us if we knew any other songs. Somebody yelled out "The Hero of Canton!" Unfortunately, nobody actually knew the lyrics.
And unsurprisingly, at least a small knot of diehard fans actually did start singing the Firefly theme song.
Jewel Staite showed up and was introduced before the movie, and given a rousing round of applause. She was very cute and perky-looking, and welcomed us all to the showing, and said she'd be answering questions after the movie. And then she stepped aside.
And then there was Serenity movie goodness.
A pause, in which Anna will NOT elaborate about the movie, which will instead be shunted over to a Serenity-filtered post
Jewel came out again after we were done with the movie, and cheerily and perkily answered questions from various members of the audience.
The funniest thing out of all of it for me was the telling of the ongoing competition between her and Nathan Fillion as to which of them can find a more creative way to give the other the bird. This apparently got started between the two of them while they were filming the movie, as a sort of point of camaraderie between the two of them as they were 'the two Canadians' in the cast. Nathan started it off one day just turning to her after a big meeting, completely deadpan, and flipping her off. She gleefully reciprocated, and things got progressively wackier from there. Nathan hid his hand under a handkerchief and whisked it off to show her his finger... and later made her an elaborate jewel box as a gift, which he then presented to her with a flourish and asked her to open it. Unbeknowst to her, he'd cut the bottom out of the box and stuck his finger up inside it, so there it was when she opened the top. ;)
Jewel, however, totally upped the stakes when she stuck the scariest, stalker-iest, "If you don't love me I'm going to kill myself" kind of Valentine's Day card she could find in his mailbox in front of his house. Nathan was understandably somewhat concerned by finding this--until he found the smaller envelope within it, which turned out to contain a photo of Jewel proudly flipping him off. She then proceeded to tell us all about how she'd gotten audiences to flip him off in unison for her at conventions, and how she's even planning to make t-shirts: "HEY NATHAN! LOVE, JEWEL", and the appropriate symbol. Muahahaha.
After she told us that she was going to appear in an upcoming episode of Stargate: Atlantis, one audience member asked her if she was going to be attending any upcoming conventions. Jewel told us that she loved to attend conventions--if she got invited.
To this, a guy raised his hand and said, "Jewel, I'm having a convention in my living room... it's called Scottcon... and you're invited!"
We all died laughing, and Jewel perkily pointed elsewhere into the audience and said, "That's my agent sitting over there!"
She shot down the rumor going around that because of the unexpected strong reaction to the sneak previews, the release date of the movie might be bumped earlier into the summer. She was most definite about that not happening.
And above all, she told us that if we liked the movie, if it affected us, we should tell people.
Several of her other comments were spoiler-rific, so I'm going to include those in my filtered post.
On the way out, though, Jessica managed to corner Jewel and get her to sign the promo poster handout thingies that we were given--sign it for Mimi, that is. YAY!
Driving home was trouble-free, happily. I zonked out in the back seat, while Jessica and Meems talked up front. Crossing the border did require us to get out our driver's licenses and birth certificates, but we had a nice chat with the older guy manning the station at that hour. As he asked us what we'd been doing in Vancouver and we told him we'd been seeing a special movie preview, Jessica and Meems proceeded to tell him gushily all about why he ought to go see the film. He seemed to be an SF fan, and recognized the name of Joss Whedon, though half of me does also wonder if he was mostly humoring us because we were a car full of cute young women. Hee.
Anyway, I fell asleep again after we crossed the border and didn't wake up till we were driving into Bothell to drop off Jessica. I managed to stay awake from there to Kenmore, then staggered in through our front door around 3:30am or so.solarbird came down to give me a hug, since she woke up when Meems' car came up the drive.
And then I was all about the sleep, content to be home again after a fun trip.
EDIT 6/25/05 9:10am: Correction of the typo of JOSS Whedon's name, as impishly pointed out to me bymamishka!
EDIT 6/25/05 9:26am: Also added in a mention of Jewel Staite shooting down a rumor about the movie's release date changing.
And not that I think I really have to mention this to anyone who currently reads my journal, but just in case--find the Firefly DVDs. Then catch the movie. It was a lot of fun indeed.
It turned out to be a bit of an exciting morning to be taking half the day off. I've been learning in detail all about the process of running a bunch of tests I'm about to have to take over--and the girl who's been training me actually wasn't in yesterday! So I got to do a whole trial-by-fire thing, till it was finally time for
mamishka to come and pick me up. By then I was more than ready to flee for a road trip.We had half an hour to kill before we could pick up
jessicac, so we wound up heading over to the bank so I could get money--both U.S. and Canadian. Then we fetched Jessica from the RedWest campus, got food from Wendy's, let Jessica take her turn at getting cash, and finally got on the road around 1:30 or so.Jessica discovered to her bemusement that she had keys to
kathryn's truck in her purse. This necessitated a quick call to Kathryn to make certain that she had no huge screaming problems with her keys taking a trip to Canada; fortunately, Kathryn had plenty of spare keys.So off we were, north up 405 till it merged with I-5. We made incredibly good time; traveling in mid-afternoon on a weekday as we were, we ran into hardly any traffic at all. I had brought my iPod to have music available if we wanted, but Meems had also brought several CDs, so we wound up listening to a stand-up disc by (I believe his name was) Craig Schumacher. A little raunchier sometimes than I prefer, but very funny nonetheless--and he did hysterical impersonations of Snagglepuss and Barney Fife. ;)
Around three we reached the Canadian border, and at 3:10 I marked the time we joined the lineup of cars, just to see how long it would take us to get through. The answer to this question: about 20 minutes. And before we crossed, Jessica piped up cheerily from the back seat her proposal for how to answer the question of what brought us to Canada today: "Husbands!"
We did not say that.
But we wanted to.
Ahem. Anyway, the Canadian guard didn't ask for our papers at all, and we got through in only about 20 minutes. After that we had a nice clear shot up to Vancouver itself, and we reached the right part of the city around 4ish. Our directions for how to find the theater were even almost perfect; they had but one little glitch about them, and that was the location of the theater on the final street we had to find.
But we found it, with plenty of time to kill, and with plenty of time to find parking as well. We wound up parking in the underground levels beneath the theater, which was incredibly convenient and not too terribly expensive, either. Which was good--because we discovered that the parking meters on the streets ran until eight PM, charged 25 cents for every 7 and a half minutes with a two hour mimit, and did not allow you to repeat meter.
Jessica volunteered to go get our tickets while Meems and I looked for parking, to which we were amenable. I spotted Jessica waiting for us on the corner after she had done this, when we were swinging back around after a pass around the block. Mimi told me to get her attention, so I rolled down my window and called out, "Hey, hot American babe!"
That worked. ;)
Once parked, we wandered around in the radius of a few blocks. We noticed that the Vancouver Artgallery had a sculpture exhibit going on, thanks to a huge hanging picture of "The Thinker" on the outside of the building; if we'd had more time to kill and more money, we might have gone. We wound up spending time in a Chapters instead. This was mostly because I wanted to see if I could find Urban Shaman on the shelves there--which I did. It was very cool to see
mizkit's book on Canadian bookstore shelves. :)The other cool thing about the bookstore stop was seeing that they were selling the British editions of the Harry Potter novels--which only made sense, though I hadn't ever really realized that those would be the versions sold north of the border. Again, if there had been extra money, I'd have gotten a couple. I'm interested from a craft-of-writing perspective in the word choices she made, and what got changed for the American versions.
Ah well, next time. :)
Let's see, what else... we popped by the theater early, just because we wanted to find a ladies' room. Technically we weren't allowed into the lobby where the theaters were without getting our stubs taken, but since we were there to see Serenity, the guy manning the ticket-taker stand let us pop on in anyway. This was quite nice of him, and pleasantly reminded me of the last big group I'd taken to Vancouver to see GBS and the various nice, mannerly people we ran into then.
Speaking of nice, mannerly people, we ran into a local contingent of the Browncoats who had set up a table with a huge piece of paper, on which they were letting people write happy birthday wishes for Joss Whedon. That was all very cool. They seemed amused that we'd come all the way up from Seattle to see the movie, too.
And they recommended the nearby Thai restaurant we'd already spotted as a good choice for dinner, so we headed over there for exactly that. Dinner was pad thai for Jessica and me, garlic beef for Mimi (artistically arranged on a pig-shaped plate, we noted wryly), and pleasant conversation for us all. We talked about Harry Potter and whether Harry does indeed get whinier as the series progresses, and about none of us having the foresight to think of bringing a game we could play while we were waiting in line. Once we finished dinner, we decided, Meems and Jessica would go back to poke around Chapters and see if they could find us a game of some kind, while I would go and hold our place in the line in the theater.
Which we did.
Jessica and Meems took quite a while actually finding a game, but that was okay. I spent a good chunk of my time in line re-reading Susanna Kearsley's The Shadowy Horses, just because I was in the mood for a re-read and I'd been carrying the book around with me for the past several days working my way through it.
I also chatted a bit with a couple of the surrounding folks in line: one young blond guy who asked me if I had an extra ticket (and who later scored one for THIRTY DOLLARS from someone else in the line); another one of the local Browncoats group who was carrying around a Firefly boxed set and asking people to sign it to give to Jewel Staite, who would be on hand for the showing; a girl who went along the line offering everybody frosted sugar cookies that she'd made in the shape of fireflies. (The bugs, not the ship class, but they were still quite tasty.)
I saw several people wearing Serenity t-shirts which we later learned were custom made, with the movie logo on the front and a collage of the characters on the back; Mimi called it, too, commenting that the collage looked like fandom-type work to her. And we saw at least half a dozen people, men and women both, wearing variations on Jayne's hat. Hee.
I read, and I drank a green Koolaid slushie, and I watched the loop of movie trailers on the screens stationed in view around the lobby. (Including Cinderella Man, which of course triggered my Russell Crowe Radar, and Batman Begins, which we'll be seeing on Sunday.)
Finally Jessica and Meems returned, with a game that they'd bought, though by then I was playing with my handheld. So we didn't actually play anything. We just yakked. But that was OKAY!
It turned out that while we were lining up on the second floor, the actual auditorium we were using was on the third. And they had to let us up in small groups in order to let the ticket-taker finally take our stubs and to let another guy inspect our various handbags and backpacks and to make sure we didn't have any recording devices.
And finally, we were in!
A couple of funny things happened before the movie started. The Browncoat type who'd been organizing the signing of the big card for Joss Whedon went up front and got everybody to sing "Happy Birthday", which was cute. What was cuter was that same woman being amused enough by us all singing that she asked us if we knew any other songs. Somebody yelled out "The Hero of Canton!" Unfortunately, nobody actually knew the lyrics.
And unsurprisingly, at least a small knot of diehard fans actually did start singing the Firefly theme song.
Jewel Staite showed up and was introduced before the movie, and given a rousing round of applause. She was very cute and perky-looking, and welcomed us all to the showing, and said she'd be answering questions after the movie. And then she stepped aside.
And then there was Serenity movie goodness.
A pause, in which Anna will NOT elaborate about the movie, which will instead be shunted over to a Serenity-filtered post
Jewel came out again after we were done with the movie, and cheerily and perkily answered questions from various members of the audience.
The funniest thing out of all of it for me was the telling of the ongoing competition between her and Nathan Fillion as to which of them can find a more creative way to give the other the bird. This apparently got started between the two of them while they were filming the movie, as a sort of point of camaraderie between the two of them as they were 'the two Canadians' in the cast. Nathan started it off one day just turning to her after a big meeting, completely deadpan, and flipping her off. She gleefully reciprocated, and things got progressively wackier from there. Nathan hid his hand under a handkerchief and whisked it off to show her his finger... and later made her an elaborate jewel box as a gift, which he then presented to her with a flourish and asked her to open it. Unbeknowst to her, he'd cut the bottom out of the box and stuck his finger up inside it, so there it was when she opened the top. ;)
Jewel, however, totally upped the stakes when she stuck the scariest, stalker-iest, "If you don't love me I'm going to kill myself" kind of Valentine's Day card she could find in his mailbox in front of his house. Nathan was understandably somewhat concerned by finding this--until he found the smaller envelope within it, which turned out to contain a photo of Jewel proudly flipping him off. She then proceeded to tell us all about how she'd gotten audiences to flip him off in unison for her at conventions, and how she's even planning to make t-shirts: "HEY NATHAN! LOVE, JEWEL", and the appropriate symbol. Muahahaha.
After she told us that she was going to appear in an upcoming episode of Stargate: Atlantis, one audience member asked her if she was going to be attending any upcoming conventions. Jewel told us that she loved to attend conventions--if she got invited.
To this, a guy raised his hand and said, "Jewel, I'm having a convention in my living room... it's called Scottcon... and you're invited!"
We all died laughing, and Jewel perkily pointed elsewhere into the audience and said, "That's my agent sitting over there!"
She shot down the rumor going around that because of the unexpected strong reaction to the sneak previews, the release date of the movie might be bumped earlier into the summer. She was most definite about that not happening.
And above all, she told us that if we liked the movie, if it affected us, we should tell people.
Several of her other comments were spoiler-rific, so I'm going to include those in my filtered post.
On the way out, though, Jessica managed to corner Jewel and get her to sign the promo poster handout thingies that we were given--sign it for Mimi, that is. YAY!
Driving home was trouble-free, happily. I zonked out in the back seat, while Jessica and Meems talked up front. Crossing the border did require us to get out our driver's licenses and birth certificates, but we had a nice chat with the older guy manning the station at that hour. As he asked us what we'd been doing in Vancouver and we told him we'd been seeing a special movie preview, Jessica and Meems proceeded to tell him gushily all about why he ought to go see the film. He seemed to be an SF fan, and recognized the name of Joss Whedon, though half of me does also wonder if he was mostly humoring us because we were a car full of cute young women. Hee.
Anyway, I fell asleep again after we crossed the border and didn't wake up till we were driving into Bothell to drop off Jessica. I managed to stay awake from there to Kenmore, then staggered in through our front door around 3:30am or so.
solarbird came down to give me a hug, since she woke up when Meems' car came up the drive.And then I was all about the sleep, content to be home again after a fun trip.
EDIT 6/25/05 9:10am: Correction of the typo of JOSS Whedon's name, as impishly pointed out to me by
mamishka!EDIT 6/25/05 9:26am: Also added in a mention of Jewel Staite shooting down a rumor about the movie's release date changing.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-06-25 06:25 am (UTC)Josh? JOSH?! Feh! And you call yourself a fan! >;)
no subject
Date: 2005-06-25 02:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-06-25 02:32 pm (UTC)Can't wait for the spoiler....Mmmmmm!!!!
About Harry Potter
Date: 2005-06-25 02:35 pm (UTC)I have a copy of PoA, but I want the others, damn it.
Anyway, just saying. ;)
no subject
Date: 2005-06-25 04:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-06-25 04:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-06-25 04:30 pm (UTC)Re: About Harry Potter
Date: 2005-06-25 04:31 pm (UTC)Have you read both the UK and the US editions? I've heard that the differences are fairly minor, just differences in word choices and such, aside from renaming the Philosopher's Stone to the Sorceror's Stone. (About which Mimi later remarked at dinner that that change actually kind of irked her, once she'd learned that the guy mentioned in the story was actually real.)