So, here I am in my XOC T-shirt, sitting in one row of chairs behind and in front of other fans.  I finally got to meet LadyKate a few seconds ago!  She’s as interesting in person as online, and I’m looking forward to getting to know her more tonight.

 

The plane flight was uneventful (ZZZZ).  It was raining when the plane set down in Burbank.  I spent a few minutes that were more eventful than my flight in trying to find the baggage claim.  (So far I’ve wandered lost on three different occasions, and it’s only the first day!)  Once I was safely settled with my purple suitcase, waiting in line for the hotel shuttle, I struck up a conversation with a Xenite who’d flown in from Flagstaff for the convention.  I recognized her because she was wearing a “Lucy Lawless in Concert” T-Shirt.  She’s really nice, and so far she’s already waved to me a few other times during the convention.  I hope I get to know her better.

 

Lavender Jane came to meet me.  We had a few seconds to get upstairs and drop off luggage, so she gave me a brief update on marching with the writer’s strike, and Only One WXE’s party last night (she said it was fun).  She also introduced me to the XOC members who are here.  So far I haven’t been able to spend as much time with them as I’d hoped.  Everyone is at Lucy’s concert tonight.  Oh, well, there’s always the rest of the weekend.  I can put faces to the people I’ve met online now.

 

When we headed in to the convention, Adrienne Wilkinson was on stage.  She’s so personable and funny.  She was talking about filming the fight scenes, and how, if there’s a fake prop that’s supposed to break, you have to hit someone with it all-out, and then it doesn’t hurt at all.  Later, she took a question about which persona was more fun to play, Livia or Eve.  She said definitely Livia, because Eve had more restrictions on the things she would do.  Except for the episode You Are There  Adrienne said her character had been praying for three episodes, and then suddenly the directors were telling her she could use any curse word she wanted to, as many times as she wanted to.  She also said how, when Livia first premiered, her mother called her to ask if she had any unresolved anger toward her mother!  Adrienne said that she responded that no, she didn’t, and she certainly wouldn’t kill a village because she was mad.  That had everyone in hysterics.

 

The rest of the afternoon has been filled with more question and answer presentations, spaced with videos and chances to get up and talk with each other.  It’s been neat just to be here.  Everyone’s been so nice, and I feel more connected to the Xenaverse on the whole than I did this morning.  I kept saying when I left that my first purpose in coming was to meet all these people I’ve been chatting with online for the past two years.  That’s still true, but as an added bonus, today I got to talk face to face with Steve Sears about the philosophy of redemption in the Xenaverse.  Man, I enjoyed that!

 

When the autograph session started, I realized that I didn’t have a lot of things for the various celebrities to sign.  So I went and splurged in the dealer’s room.  I have several frame-worthy photographs now, one of Eve signed by Adrienne Wilkinson, and a copy of the script to Destiny signed by both Steve Sears and Jeff Vamino.

 

Some things that I didn’t know before:

 

*  Katherine Fugate, who wrote When Fates Collide (one of my favorite episodes), actually received some criticism for her romanticism in writing.  Wow.  Guess we never know who’s going to like what.  One of the beauties of Xena…while there are some things that are universally acclaimed, there are many that some people love and some people hate, and without that experimenting it wouldn’t be the show it is.

 

*  Katherine Fugate also had some neat thoughts.  She said that all the choices we make have meanings, that there is something at the core of you, and the rest is circumstance based on free will.  I think I want that for my XOC signature file.

 

*  No one seems to have even seen A Friend In Need!  I had to laugh hearing how many people said “well, I didn’t see the end of the series.”  Thanks to time and the fanfic A Different Peace, I’m not as upset about AFIN as I once was.  I did get the chance to tell one fan about how maybe When Fates Collide was chronologically the last episode instead.

 

*  Actors don’t get a lot of information before trying out for roles.  And, it’s the auditioning that’s one of the time-consuming parts of their jobs.  Once they have the jobs, they’re always on call.

 

When the question and answer period for Steve Sears came up, I had the courage to raise my hand and bring up a question that’s come up on Xena Online Community recently.  I asked, “What did Xena mean when she said Gabrielle was her ‘light’?”  In various episodes, throughout the show, Xena has said that before she met Gabrielle, her life was darkness, and then when Gabrielle came, she gave Xena’s life meaning and purpose.  I’ve always found that at the same time incredibly special, and yet morally difficult.  It’s not possible for one person to be another’s conscience, and there’s a purpose for life beyond being in relationship.  Steve Sears made everything click, though.

 

Here’s what I jotted down in my notebook as he was speaking:

 

Xena was dead at the beginning of the series, to all intents and purposes.  She didn’t want to do good, per se; she’d lost her whole sense of reality.  By burying her armor at the beginning of Sins of the Past, she was committing suicide.  She was trying to get rid of everything, and she wouldn’t have survived long without her armor in the situations she tended to get herself into.  Then, she saw Gabrielle standing up for herself and her village, and she saw a little pinprick of light.  This was the first time something was manifest in her absolute darkness, and that light grew with time.  After long enough, what Gabrielle was to Xena, seemed to pale in the light that Gabrielle could offer to the world, and then Xena had a purpose, to feed that light and give it to the world.

 

That puts a lot of pressure on Gabrielle, but there was always a lot of pressure on Xena.  Steve mentioned that he and Rob Tapert and R.J. Stewart all had different perspectives.  They thought Xena was seeking redemption, while he thought that Xena knew she couldn’t be redeemed, that she just needed a life-path to do what good she could in the present.  He said that he envisioned the end of the series with Xena dying, but with her obviously giving her life in order to protect Gabrielle.  He saw the last scene as a Star Wars type scene, with this invisible misty Warrior Princess with her hand on Gabrielle’s shoulder.

 

 I think I would have liked that better.  I would have been less heartbroken at AFIN if I’d known that Xena and Gabrielle were definitely going to go on together, and that Gabrielle was on the path she was meant to be on (rather than still in the grey area between warrior and bard).

 

I am putting in lots of speculation on the Xenaverse, but I just did go to a five-hour geek out session about the show, after all!

 

I joined LadyKate and two of her other friends for dinner.  We had a wonderful time.  First we discussed our lives, then our Xena stories, then our favorite episodes and arcs, then back to our lives, and back and forth for the rest of the evening.  LadyKate is an incredible person, and I’m so glad to have these three days with her face to face.

 

And that’s it, as I type at this moment.  It’s late Friday evening.  I finished loading in all of my pictures for today, making computerized scrapbook pages to send to Kinko’s soon, and I am just putting in the finishing touches to this entry as I wait for Lavender Jane to get home from Lucy’s concert.  I’ve had such a good day.

 

Later: I finished updating the livejournal files and read Harry Potter fanfiction for a little while.  Then Lavender Jane sent me a text message saying that she and some of the others were back, and would I like to join them in the bar downstairs.  So she, I, and Xenasgrrl and her daughter sat and chatted for awhile.  I was a little sorry I’d missed Lucy’s concert!  Lavender Jane said that Lucy sang a lot of 70s and 80s music, and that Renee O’Connor even came out for one song.  Xenasgrrl and her daughter went up to bed at about midnight, and then Twinkletoes and her boyfriend came to join us.  They’re awesome.  They’re from England, and I could just sit and listen to them talk for hours.  Conversation ranged from Xena and subtext to comparisons in British/American eating habits to tattoos.  It was great.  When we finally went upstairs, we ran into LadyKate waiting for her cab, and talked some more.