FULL SERIES PASS

Tuesday, May 12, 1998

I slept late this morning, because I knew I wasn't going in to work until late. I need to accomplish something: getting my Full Series pass for the Seattle Internation Film Festival.

I walked down the hill to the box office, at the Broadway Performance Hall. This is a walk I'll be taking quite often during the festival. The Perfomance Hall is an interesting building. It's romanesque stone, the last remaining part of the old Broadway High School that stood where the community college is now. They've done a good job on the renovation; it's a nice modern theater now.

I found out that I still had over an hour to wait until they opened the box office. People were running around because there was a press reception and the first press screening of the festival, taking place on the upper level. I saw my old friend Jeff Shannon, whom I know from my time working on Cinemania in 1994, but he didn't have time to do more than wave on his way up to the reception.

I sat down and began reading An Inconvenient Wife by Patricia Oliver (I bought it last night before the movie). There was a man who was taking care of the counter where people would be getting their photos laminated, who was having a complete tantrum because the database was down and some list he needed wasn't available. The guy he was berating told him that he hadn't been informed of this problem earlier because his extreme reactions to problems made him too much of a pain. "I'd rather just keep going than deal with you!" his victim said.

As it got closer to the time for the box office to open, the few folks that were waiting formed themselves into a formal line. I got to chatting with the man standing next to me, and gave him the URL to this journal. (If you are out there, send me mail!) It will be interesting to look back and see what movies were my favorites last year.

Finally I was at the head of the line. I got my full series pass, and the secret festival pass, and renewed my membership to Cinema Seattle. I should have done all this earlier, and saved some money thereby, but getting things in the mail is something that I seem to have trouble with. (Those of you who are waiting for your copy of my print zine, I swear I'll get it to you soon!) The printer wasn't working, so the volunteer gave me a funny hand-written receipt so I could get my photo taken and laminated to my badge. But the camera was upstairs, where they were using it to get pictures of the press for their passes, so I ran up there and passed through all the press folk and got my picture taken with the polaroid. I grabbed it and went back down. The volunteer cut just my head out of it, a little too soon perhaps since it remained rather pale, and laminated it to the pass. Yay! I'm so psyched about the festival. It's one of my favorite times of the year!

I walked back home by way of the piroshky store on Broadway, checked email, and drove off to work.

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I was in an IRC chat tonight, a virtual meeting for the staff of a new online project I'm involved in. Some of us aren't that experienced in IRC, so when one of the group was playing around and trying things, she kicked one of the group leaders off the server! We howled with laughter. She had thought that "kicking" would just be one of those text actions, a bit of description, rather than have a real effect!

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My friend Tom Lawrence wrote his first event report, covering our Cacophony event on Saturday. His report is much funnier than mine, I think!