Festival of Fear Journal - Day #1
Due to circumstances beyond my control J. and I were unable to attend the majority of the first day of The Festival of Fear. However, we did work it enough that we were able to get there for the last hour and change, and had to decide on which aspect of the convention we would most want to see in that limited amount of time. Our choices were the convention floor or the Linda Blair Q + A. We decided to go with Blair because we could hit the salesfloor anytime. That was our first mistake.
I have the uncanny ability to sit beside the most annoying people in any given situation. If you want peace and quiet, sit anywhere other than beside me. The first twenty minutes of sitting in the auditorium were spent waiting for Linda Blair to show up and listening to the couple behind us speculate as to possible reasons why she was running late.
-Maybe she’s too busy getting her breasts powdered. Or she didn’t shave her… stuff.
-Only my generation or younger does that!
Just when I was ready to give up, Linda Blair arrived. The next fifteen minutes felt like an hour. Blair spent her Q + A preaching to the crowd about the Linda Blair World Heart Foundation, offering up surreal bon mots like the following.
“I literally gave up my career in order to take a stand for the suffering that I saw. It’s not just animals that are suffering. Children are suffering. People are suffering. The world is suffering. It is the future. But I am a grassroots organization. Everyone knows me.”
“It was like being at war. Although I have not been to war, it was the aftermath.”
“There’s alot of people we’ve taken away. There’s cities, the communities, after school sports. You’ve got drugs and gambling and guns and violence, all of that you will find, and young people following Big Brother to the dog fights. If you ask young people nowadays, alot of them have been to a dog fight but they don’t have a pet!”
I wouldn’t have minded so much if she wasn’t already 20 minutes late and if this was actually going to lead somewhere, but she also brought along a representative from the Humane Society to do a follow up. Realizing that this was going nowhere quick, we took off as soon as he took the stage. Apparently she did speak about her movie roles, which you can read about at The Rue Morturary, but even the moderator had no idea she was going to pull this stunt until three minutes before the event.
By the time we escaped it was too late to do anything else at the convention. At least I got a good story out of this disaster.