Zenkaikon, Eyeshine and Cielito lindo

I know a number of people who routinely attend cons: Worldcon, Fairiecon and any number of other Sci-Fi-fantasy-Star-Trek-and-video-gaming conventions around the nation.

Until this weekend the only conventions I had ever attended were annual meetings of the American Association of Museums, Investigative Reporters and Editors and several press associations – not exactly sober affairs, but still imbued with a veneer of professionalism.

But my daughter’s been looking forward to Zenkaikon – the premier Philadelphia-area anime and manga convention – for the past six months, and last weekend was my initiation into a very different world of “cons.”

Let me just say that AAM and IRE could learn a thing or two about throwing a party.

But first things first.

Anime is Japanese animation; manga are Japanese comic books more akin to graphic novels than to most Marvel and DC creations. It has been my daughter’s dream, for some years now, to grow up to be a manga artist/writer/editor. From her first attempts let me tell you, she’s got the chops.

Anime and manga devotees – particularly those in their teens and twenties – often dress up as characters from anime and manga and games such as “Kingdom Hearts,” and sometimes act as those characters – breaking spontaneously into songs associated with them, or performing full-fledged skits. All of which is known as “cosplay.”

With me so far?

Anyway, cosplayers don’t only congregate at cons (there’s a contingent that goes to the annual Sakura Sunday celebration in Fairmount Park so reliably that they’ve been given a stage on which to perform by organizers of the event) but the con is clearly their natural habitat.

Of the thousands of people at Zenkaikon Nov. 7 and 8, I’d guess 85 percent were cosplaying. The rest were artists selling drawing commissions and handmade t-shirts and ceramics, vendors of mass-produced merchandise … and parents. We recognized each other by the amazed look in our eyes. Who knew that so many young people shared our children’s delight in this art form?

The staff at the Radisson – the venue for the event – didn’t know what hit them. A lot of them looked perplexed throughout.

The thing is, there are a lot of anime and manga buffs. And they all lined up early to enter the con. Since the Zenkaikon organizers were understaffed and a little unprepared for attendance to double this year, the lines stretched across much of the Radisson’s property. For hours and hours.

Irritating, but nothing those of us who commuted into Philadelphia during the SEPTA strike hadn’t experienced for the past week.

Only a whole lot better.

Somehow, these young people knew something we SEPTA commuters didn’t. How to enjoy the wait. They called out each other’s character’s names. They smiled and waved and performed for each other. They evinced an easy camaraderie and a ready friendship with each other that, frankly, stunned me. They asked politely if they could hug each other – and then did. I’ve never seen so many people hugging while in line. Or anywhere, for that matter.

And in the two days we were there I saw only one instance of obnoxious behavior -- when one girl cosplaying character from the wildly popular “Naruto” series (fittingly, dressed as one of the villainous characters) shoved another while waiting in line to get an autograph from voice actor Johnny Yong Bosch.

It’s not that I think they all behaved like angels, but at least none of them threw themselves down at the front of the line and refused to budge until the police was called -- like one middle-aged, otherwise sensible-looking woman did at Suburban Station during the SEPTA strike.

At one point during the con my husband and I were standing outside, watching our daughter play a cosplay version of “Duck, Duck, Goose” with a group of other kids. I fretted as my daughter ran around in a long and voluminous dress convinced that any second she would trip and hurt herself and have to be carted out in an ambulance. She didn’t. But we struck up a conversation then with another parent standing by watching her own child in the group.

“I just can’t believe it,” she said to us. “My daughter has Asperger’s [a form of high-functioning autism] and usually doesn’t interact with others well. She spends a lot of her time alone, in her room. But look at her….”

We watched her daughter, not cosplaying, but engaged, having fun, interacting easily.

“I’m shocked,” the girl’s mother said. “She’s out there, making friends.”

None of the dreaded teenage love of social hierarchy was in evidence at this con, and little of the cliquey standoffishness those years are known for. These kids acted more like family and friends than a group of strangers -- tweens and teens and twentysomethings -- who hadn’t met until that day.

Maybe it was the costumes that did it.

And I find myself wishing – however quirky the context -- that this were the way of the world: exuberant and enthusiastic, accepting of difference and warmly convivial.

I’m not sure I can yet count all the gifts that this unusual weekend granted me.

I had real conversations with teenagers and twentysomethings who were articulate and creative and smart and kind. They give me hope that their generation will not muck up the world as badly as my generation did. Maybe, in fact, they’ll mop up our mess.

I was there for my daughter’s first live indie, edge-rock band mini-concert. I saw the look on her face the moment she realized that Eyeshine (www.eyeshine.net) had just become her new favorite band.

And then, as I stood in line to buy Eyeshine’s CD for her, and have it autographed by the band members, I realized that they, too, were not what I had anticipated. Talented. Charismatic. And amiable, rather than emo or surly which I note with some surprise I seem to have expected. I forgive them for finding it so astonishing that someone as old and unhip as me would like their music – if they forgive me the slide into generational prejudice about imagined attitude.

And in the end, the weekend was all about how expectations confound.

As we get older we seem to expect always to see the worst of human nature – particularly in large crowds, particularly surrounded by those whose enthusiasms we don’t share or quite understand.

Moreso if they stand a little bit on the edge of convention (yeah, pun intended).

Sometimes we’re reminded unwittingly, people are just better – more generous, tolerant and loving – than we imagine they are.

The last lesson of the convention? I’m checking out of the Radisson on the second day and the distinguished and dapper concierge asks me why I’ve chosen to stay at the hotel that weekend. Remembering the looks of perplexity bordering on panic I’ve seen on some of the hotel staff’s faces during the con, I hesitate to admit that I’ve been there for that.

But I do admit it.

Accompanying my daughter, I hasten to add.

“Say it with pride,” the concierge says to me. “Think about all the trouble they could be getting into instead of being here, enjoying themselves. I know at their age I was doing much worse things.

“And you’re here with your daughter,” he says. “You’re here experiencing this with her. Isn’t that a great thing?”

It is.

How many Septa regional rail workers does it take to help passengers off a burning railroad car?

None.

At least that's what I heard last night from a passenger who was aboard the Septa regional rail train that caught fire on its way from the Overbrook station into 30th Street station on Wednesday morning.

You can read the full CBS 3 report of the incident here: http://cbs3.com/local/SEPTA.train.fire.2.1290842.html.

Here's a snippet:

SEPTA officials confirmed that several minutes before flames erupted, smoke had been detected inside the train at the Overbrook Station stop. However, after disconnecting a power supply and moving passengers out of the first car, the train was permitted to continue its trip.
Then a mile down the tracks, the first car was fully engulfed in flames.
"Obviously had an open flame been detected at any point, the procedure would have been quite different. The train would have been completely evacuated," SEPTA's Assistant General Manager for Public and Operational Safety James Jordan explained.

Well, that doesn't quite mesh with the story Barb from PNC (who was actually in the second car of the burning train) tells.

People were indeed moved out of the first car into the second, Barb tells me, but no announcement was made about why.

They sat somewhere between Overbrook and 30th Street stations for what seemed a long time. The passengers waited, crammed into the second and subsequent cars --many of them standing since there weren't enough seats.

But then the amount of smoke billowing in to the car started to alarm them. (From the cell phone photo Barb showed me, they were soon to be engulfed by smoke.) Did the conductors make an announcement then -- either to direct the passengers or allay their fears?

Nope. According to Barb, not a word made its way to the passengers from any Septa staff.

Eventually -- Barb couldn't give me an estimate of how long it took -- the passengers became alarmed enough to start pounding on the windows, and after some effort, popped open the emergency window and started exiting the second car of the train.

Barb saw the Septa personnel already standing on the railroad bed, well away from the train -- her car's conductor with his hands firmly planted in his pockets.

The Septa staff didn't move from where they were standing, even as they watched the passengers emerge from the emergency window, she says.

The drop from the emergency exit window to the railroad bed below was unexpectedly long. Even Barb, who is fairly tall, couldn't be reached by the up-stretched arms of the passengers who had exited before her. She had to trust that she'd be caught after she dropped. She was.

"The passengers were such Good Samaritans," she says to me.

They helped the elderly passengers evacuate through the emergency windows by carrying them over sill and dropping them onto the sea of passengers waiting to catch them.

You notice, of course, that Barb's account is all about the passengers waiting to catch each other as they evacuated from the smoke-filled car. Not a single member of the Septa personnel moved to help them, Barb says.

What's more, they said nothing to any of the passengers after the self-evacuation, Barb tells. Nothing, that is, until the buses came to retrieve the passengers from Overbrook to take them into Center City. At which point, Barb tells me (with plenty of both irony and outrage) the Septa staffer in charge yelled at the passengers to "behave like adults."

As this Septa strike has played out, I haven't overheard much sympathy for the striking workers from my fellow passengers waiting on the platforms at 30th Street or Suburban stations. Still, I haven't heard all that much grousing either.

I've observed that the regional rail trains drive extra slow through the stations that would normally be served by the striking Septa union workers -- then resume normal speed once they're in territory where the services don't overlap. Septa regional rail personnel are part of a separate union (because of federal regulations dating back to World War II, I'm told) and if they want to show support for their sister union members by chugging through the overlapping stations at a turtle's pace, I'm not going to begrudge them -- at least I'm riding, and if it tacks an extra 30 minutes onto my ride, so be it.

But that sort solidarity takes on a much more sinister look when Septa personnel stands apart ("Hands in pockets!" Barb tells me a second time, for emphasis) as panicked passengers struggle to get out of the rail car adjacent to one that is burning.

How can you see people in this sort of situation and not lend a hand?

I don't know. You'll have to ask Septa.



Image of fire alarm from wikimedia commons.