From: owner-chakram-refugees-digest@smoe.org (chakram-refugees-digest) To: chakram-refugees-digest@smoe.org Subject: chakram-refugees-digest V3 #86 Reply-To: chakram-refugees@smoe.org Sender: owner-chakram-refugees-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-chakram-refugees-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk chakram-refugees-digest Saturday, March 29 2003 Volume 03 : Number 086 Today's Subjects: ----------------- [chakram-refugees] Con 03 Lucy and Renee [KTL ] Re: [chakram-refugees] Con 03 Lucy and Renee ["Maria T. Vivoni" Subject: [chakram-refugees] Con 03 Lucy and Renee My apologies for the delay in continuing with this. Real life intervened and I actually had to WORK, instead of just lounging around eating bon-bons and reminiscing over the con. (Who would have ever thought that 25 senior tourists would be willing to go on an educational tour to the Arctic in March? AND expect me to take them there? Surprised the heck out of me...) Okay. By now we had made friends with the women in our row. Some of the Xena fans are just so shy that sometimes you really have to cajole them into talking to you. And sometimes, you meet people at the con whom you've "met" on line and have had a cyber relationship with. And then you go to the con and they're like SOOOOOO bashful. They don't know what to say in person. And this is always awkward-you really have to nurture these souls along and be real patient with them as they come around to feeling safe and enjoying the company of other fans. And then there are the majority of fans who go ahead and act like big old happy doofuses (doofi?), screaming with joy at being together again to party and play all weekend. Anyway, after two days of sitting side by side, the people in our row began to chat with us. This took longer than usual. It's possible that the passion Bonnie and I show over Xena had awed them all into silence. Or perhaps it was our constant disagreements over the show that raised a little flag of caution. At any rate, FINALLY after two days of cheek by cheek contact, the shy little soul next to me began to relax and chat. As I said before, one thing I noticed is that there are huge numbers of newbies at the cons, both last year and this year. You can always tell con virgins because they have a dazed look about them. It's like they've discovered this great treasure, this hidden pearl. They look like kids who have suddenly stumbled into a fantastic playground, the one they thought only existed in their dreams. Another thing I noticed was kind of strange. I've been going to cons since 1998. Usually when you've been involved in something for 5 years or so, you wind up becoming one of the oldest people in the group. That's just natural, you know? I see this in my volunteer fire department, in the work that I'm doing, etc. If you stay in a group, other people come and go and you tend to eventually get to be an "elder" in the group. BUT at the cons, I'm seeing many more older people, mostly elderly women, far more than there used to be. All of our group noticed this. I puzzled over it and decided that maybe what had happened was that these women would never think to watch a T&A action adventure show. But they might watch Oxygen. So I wonder if they didn't stumble across XWP on Oxygen and like any decent woman would, fell in love with it. I just found this fascinating, the increase in older women at the con. So it was Lucy and Renee night at the con. As we walked over to the hall from the hotel, we got swept up with a whole bunch of quiet, very fancily dressed people, walking slowly and demurely along and not communicating by screaming at each other at the top of their lungs. I began to suspect they were not on their way to join us at the con. They were just not "us" ya know? And indeed, instead of continuing along with us, they all disappeared into the door of the skating rink that is part of the hotel/convention complex. If it hadn't been Lucy night, I MIGHT just have followed along with them just to see if they were actually going to skate or if they were just passing through the rink. So we ambled on by, went over into the hall and got into our seats. As soon as I sat down, I noticed that there were LOTS of people behind the scrim. It was just really crowded compared to all the other times when there were like only about four people at the most hanging around back there. And all the people were lined up, facing out towards us, in two rows, standing behind the table that was there. One person in the front row kept bending over at the waist, bobbing up and then down, up and then down, up and then down. It was very weird. It reminded me of those novelty birds they used to sell-the ones that had a rectangular stand holding a long-legged plastic bird next to a plastic glass. And the bird's beak was weighted so that it would bob down and take a sip of water. And its bottom was weighted also so that after taking a drink, it would then bob back upright. I watched this for a moment or two, trying to figure out what the heck this person was doing. She suddenly stopped bobbing for a moment, stood upright, shook her hair back from her face and turned to smile at someone next to her. And I immediately realized that it was Lucy. Finally I figured out that what she was doing was signing things that were spread out on the table. And then I realized that the short person in the white blouse next to her was Renee-I had forgotten that she no longer was blond and hadn't recognized her with her darker hair. Now Renee barely had to bend over at all to be able to reach the stuff on the table that she was signing-the table height came up to her upper thighs. Unlike Luce who had to go a long ways down to sign and so was doing those dipping motions that had me so bemused. Perhaps Lucy's bottom is weighted like the bird's so that she also can easily bob back up? Now there's a question for a future interview with her. Or Rob. After continuing to bob around and sign stuff for a while, they finally were called onstage to start their appearance. I honestly don't remember if they came out together or if Renee came out first and Lucy followed as they did last year. For some strange reason, I have almost no notes on Lucy's appearance. Go figure. But I've noticed while writing up the con so far, that when I first left the con, my mind was like "full" and it had to be rewound or something before I could access all the memories. But now when I look over my notes and think of the folks on stage, things do come back and it's like a little movie plays in my head and I remember much MORE than I ever wrote about at the time. Luckily, we already know there is going to be a tape of Lucy and Renee's appearance and due to this AND to my ignoble failure last year at accurately recounting what happened at the Lucy and Renee show, I refuse to feel guilty about being in too much of a Lucy haze to manage to write anything down. Worse than the lack of notes was that when I got home from vacation, I watched the Coffee Talk 2 video before writing this. And now I'm not totally sure which was the con stuff and which was the Coffee Talk stuff. *Sigh* Lucy looked great in a pair of black leather looking pants and boots and a purplish filmy top. She IS thin (Danielle should let Lucy win a few of those food fights)--but she's put her body through a lot in the last few years, between making the show (which Rob once estimated featured Lucy on screen over 90% of the time), making babies, and breast-feeding them. (In real life, I only know one woman who didn't lose weight when breastfeeding her baby. Everyone else just zipped the pounds off when nursing.) Renee was wearing a white blouse and jeans, looked very comfortable and relaxed. My bud whom I'd found giddily into her cups outside the hotel the night before WORSHIPS Renee. She came bubbling up to me after the show and tugged on my arm and yelled excitedly in my face, "I LOVE that look on a woman! It's like my FAVORITE HOT LOOK! White blouse and jeans-GODS, it's just how I always imagine her in ubers! I was like to DIE when I saw her come out looking like that." This is the same woman who sat about three rows behind me at the first Lucy and Renee show at Pasadena in 2001. When Renee came out I glanced back at my bud and her face was just about purple and tears were streaming down her cheeks as she stared up at Renee. When I talked to her later, she was surprised to hear this-she didn't realize she'd been so swept away. Then she took me to task for not taking a picture of her so she "could relive the moment forever". She's such a hoot. When Lucy and Renee first sat down and clipped their mikes onto their blouses, the sound wasn't working right. (So classic a problem at cons that it's even part of the con movie, "Galaxy Quest".) Now some of the fans began to scream that they couldn't hear. So even when the techs tried to fix the sound, we still couldn't hear because people kept screaming out that they couldn't hear. Eventually L&R abandoned the clip-on mikes and went to hand held ones. One woman behind me kept yelling that she still couldn't hear anything, even after hand mikes had been brought out. I looked back and I swear to the gods, she was like 90 years old. Of COURSE she couldn't hear anything. But boy, could she scream. It was announced that they would allow picture taking for the first ten minutes. When that time was up and the Creation security people began to ask people to stop taking pictures, Lucy said, "Aw, let them keep their cameras. Share the love." So when the tape comes out and there's all these annoying flashes on it, we can all blame Lucy. First Lucy and Renee thanked us for our continued commitment to the show on behalf of themselves and everybody who had worked on it. Then Lucy introduced Rob and the audience cheered him when he came out on stage. People yelled for him to give us a movie and he answered that nobody wanted to make a Xena movie more than the three of them did. Then he joked around about how it probably would star Jennifer Anniston. (One wonders what kinds of hell the suits are coming up with under the guise of "inspired madness" for the proposed Xena movie.) They had decided to show clips and comment on them, ala the Coffee Talk tapes that come in the fan kits. I was a little disappointed, since I thought they had been going to do a performance. I had REALLY been hoping that Lucy would be singing, since she just finished her tour with Dave Dobbyn and was now an experienced "Rocker chick". (Watching Lucy on ET the other night, I'm even MORE hoping that someday she'll sing some rock and roll for us somewhere. Soon.) The videos they were watching were shown on the screen behind them. It was hard to see the clips they were watching because they had also asked for the house lights to be raised so they could see us and these washed out the screen some. Alongside this, neither of them was very adept at running the VCR and they both fumbled with and fought over the remote. Lucy called Renee "Techno Whiz" a couple of times and sometimes handed the remote over to her but sometimes bogarted it back. So due to the mysteries of remote controls, sometimes we'd see the clips they were watching and sometimes we didn't. And sometimes they'd get all wrapped up in watching them and not make any comments at all. (Though they did still look good doing and saying nothing. Heh.) They really got absorbed in some scenes-and you could tell sometimes by the look on Lucy's face when she was watching a scene whether she was caught up purely by the craft of filmed storytelling or whether she was watching it and remembering making it personally. They watched the clip from the Debt when Gabrielle slapped Xena across the face. And Xena's response was to go all stoic. But a tear coursed out of her eye when she pulled her head away from Gabrielle's hand. And Lucy said, "Oh look-it's coming from the right eye!" Apparently one of the set guys mentioned to her that she always drops just one tear and it always comes from the left eye. So she was all excited to see it dropping from the right eye. Lucy kept praising the Debt, talking about some of the great scenes in it. They asked the fans if they liked the Debt and the audience cheered for it, agreeing that it was a great ep. They watched the scene from the Deliverer where Dahok implants his child into Gabrielle's womb. Renee talked about how she couldn't hold her feet up in the air for the amount of time required to shoot the scene. And so they had to tie her feet up to keep up the illusion. I imagine they must have tied her skirt up too. It always amazed me how Gabrielle was always able to keep her skirt on. It just always stayed in place for her-in this scene, while being dragged feet first in Bitter Suite, while tumbling into the pit in Sacrifice. It was like her skirt was this modest, animated little prude. As they watched Xena rush to rescue Gabrielle from Dahok while the fires blazed and the chanting reached a screeching crescendo, Lucy yelled out, "Hey, I'm Catholic-I can handle this!" Lucy had jumped out of her chair and was on her knees at one point trying to work the VCR directly. Someone shouted out something and she looked up and shouted back, "I'm doing the best I can!" She finally got it running and it was the scene from Been There Done That where Xena chakrams Joxer. Some of the fans (like BONNIE) cheered happily. Lucy looked up at us and yelled again, "HEY! Don't cheer for that! He's our mate!" It was hilarious. They showed a clip from Blind Faith which had Gabrielle coming out in that awful pneumatic pumped up breast outfit and promptly tripping over her feet and falling face down. Lucy took great delight in rewinding it a number of times, running it back and forth and claiming that the reason Renee kept falling over was because she was top-heavy due to her enormous bosoms. During a Sacrifice clip, I think the one of Gabrielle and Hope falling into the pit, a fan asked Renee to talk about Hope. She said, "Talk about who?" Lucy said something to her and Renee explained that in order to try to understand Hope, she had researched evil by reading about serial killers and cult religions that manipulate innocents. She talked about how Hope kept trying to get the best of Gabrielle, how she was out to beat her. Lucy talked about carrying the stag in Adventures in the Skin Trade. How heavy it was. She said that it was real (so now we know!) and then she rambled on about it being live/sort of stuffed but alive, but absolute putty in her hands, and that it got up and ran away safely into the forest when they were done with it. And that it was still out there, living happily ever after. Later they showed the clip of Gabrielle and the rabid bunny from Sickness. And Lucy claimed again that after being handsomely rewarded for its work in the ep, (presumably by being squashed into Renee's breast) that stuffed bunny also hopped happily into the forest. (Perhaps it's playing with the stag as we speak.) Renee chimed in that it had very sharp teeth. Lucy reminisced about how awful she was feeling about her life while filming Sin Trade. How she had a true descent into madness that lasted for a long time then. She talked about how hard it had been to film Sin Trades on her own-there were so many scenes in it that literally have Lucy acting without anyone to interact with and work off of. She talked about how much heavier the work load is without the co-star and how being on the set together, sharing the experience just makes things seem much easier. And she didn't have that fellow actor support when filming much of the beginning of Sin Trade. They watched the reunion scene between Xena and Gabrielle from A Family Affair. And Lucy said something about how a little thing in the script could be so big when it got filmed, that this seemed to be just a small part of the script. She said that the main focus for the rest of the crew in that scene was her hair-that they were trying to decide if they should showcase a new hair clip for Xena or not. They just kept discussing it. This is so funny-it highlights how everything in a show is planned for, NOTHING is "incidental". The tiniest detail can be downright controversial. And then they filmed the scene (with the daring hair clip) and suddenly all this emotion just came pouring out of Lucy. I think that maybe what happened was that Lucy tapped into her true feelings at the time. That when they filmed Family Affair, it was the first time that season (coming after the end of a few months of season hiatus when they hadn't been working together either) that Lucy and Renee were actually reunited on set. And it was just such a relief for Lucy (as she stated). And so Lucy got to relate to a real event with the real person involved. She didn't have to try to find a feeling or situation "like this one" and use that to act how she had felt then to express the feelings in this scene. She just used the real feeling and let her heart go. She got to absolutely play out the emotion behind friendship, expressing how that feels and how important friends are to each other. She got to take off the stoic mask of the adult and show what was in her heart. No wonder it struck such a chord with so many fans. It truly was two buds getting together again and sharing the work they are so passionate about, returning to what binds these two people together. As I get older, I find that I express my love for others far more often than I used to. I don't fear rejection more than I fear not letting people know how much they mean to me, how much they have enhanced my life. It's one of my main joys in getting older. Lucy is very young to have realized this, to be able to tap into this. Perhaps it's why she loves being an actor-because she can do this when she's playing a character without embarrassing anybody. And on the opposite emotional side-Kiwis tend to "Just get on with it. Keep a stiff upper lip." But when acting as Xena, Lucy could toss off some awesome tantrums. And not be considered a "prat". They played the scene of the killing of the Destroyer at the end of Family Affair. And bantered back and forth about if the Destroyer was evil. I think it was Renee who asked the audience if they cared about what happened to him, because that was the objective-to make him poignant. (Kind of like King Kong, a tragic figure manipulated and used by someone else for their own agenda, rather than being truly evil himself.) They showed clips from in Sickness and in Hell and Renee brought up the fact that the ep was based upon real events. Lucy looked honestly embarrassed and truly seemed to want to change the subject. Renee said that she had a little itchy spot on her foot and Lucy decided that it was athlete's foot. And Renee kept denying it. That it was just a little dryness. Eventually it had spread all over her whole body. And just about that same time, Lucy wound up getting head lice from Daisy who had picked them up in school. (So we had Lice and Rash instead of Luce and Ren for a little while.) Renee was all horrified and figured she'd be getting them too, but they didn't mention if she did or not. Renee did say that she kept asking the make-up people to be sure to keep Lucy's combs isolated from everybody else's. Lucy said in a very resigned tone that everything that happened to them eventually wound up in an episode. At one point they said something about Ares and Lucy looked up and said, "Kev? What do you think?" They were talking about the Abyss and Lucy mentioned how cold it was in all that water. They argued a little bit over whether the cave scene was colder than the scene with Lucy in the river-Lucy thought the cave scene was colder, Renee thought the river scene was colder. Then Lucy claimed that the woman climbing the wall and dropping off like a hundred feet into the water was actually her. But she said it in that fey, affected voice she gets when pretending to be someone trying to put something over on someone else. "Yes, that was ME..." When they showed the clip of Gabrielle being prepared for the spit, Lucy reached out and covered Renee's eyes with her hands. She said that this was Renee's darkest moment in the series. And Renee talked about how for the first time in her life she felt truly violated. That it started when she was first getting ready for the scene. When she had to just sit quietly while everybody was patting mud onto her body. And then they tied her ankles and wrists and it just made her feel like some kind of animal. And THEN they opened her mouth and stuck a funnel in it. And it was too much for her to overcome. She said that she felt so abused that she was actually afraid to act. That she felt that if she played Gabrielle struggling at all, she wouldn't be able to stop and would lose control and fight and struggle in real life. She just couldn't lose herself and become Gabrielle in this fantasy situation -she was Renee and felt that she herself was the victim. And so she just totally withdrew into herself and didn't do anything, didn't act, didn't fight, just sat still and endured, deep inside herself. Another clip was from Ides of March, showing Callisto slicing Xena's spine with her chakram. (Lucy had to ask Renee for the name of the ep. Grin.) They both really liked Ides. They thought it was a great story and that everyone acted really well in it. Renee talked about her surprise when watching the show later and seeing Lucy fall so hard, slamming her cheek into the dirt. That it was very disturbing to watch Xena crash helplessly to the ground. Lucy said that during the crucifixion scene in Ides, Xena and Gabrielle are supposed to be in agony (and I figure, also trying to die without giving in to the enemy by showing fear, regret or horror through focusing on being attentive and lovingly "present" for each other as they die). So Lucy said that there she was shivering away and she looked over at Renee. And Renee is just lying there like she's sunbathing or something. Just stretched out, totally calm, grooving on lying out there on the cross. (Shoulda been wearing shades...) And there's Lucy, shivering her butt off and trying to act like someone who was in extremis. And of course, the shivering response is a life-preserving mechanism, an involuntary reaction to the body getting too cold. Shivering makes your muscles work and creates heat. Once you're so cold that shivering stops, it generally means that hypothermia has set in. So there's Renee in the throes of initial hypothermia, feeling like everything's all just perfectly copasetic, feeling good, murmuring spacily, "Everything's just fine. There's absolutely nothing to worry about. Just greaaaat." Lucy explained that that's how Renee deals with things-she genuinely convinces herself that there's no problem here, nope, no worries mate! Lucy has mentioned this trait of Renee's before, in the Coffee Talk video. When she was commiserating with Renee over having to retake the fight scenes with the Samurai in FIN, being drenched with cold water in the dark, frigid night while being pregnant. And Renee denied that it caused her any grief. Lucy says with some teasing frustration in her voice, "And here I was, wasting my sympathy on you" She also mentioned then how Renee had also retreated deep inside herself during the Haunting of Amphipolis-how she kept acting as if there was nothing odd about running around being slathered in slimy, decaying, stinking vegetative matter that gagged everyone she crossed paths with. Ms. denial R us. Renee mentioned how much she loved Season Four, even though "You guys didn't". She really liked the struggle over being a pacifist and trying to truly follow Eli's way. While they were watching the cell scene from Ides, when Xena said, "I wish I had read your scrolls", Lucy said that she'd always wanted to play Xena as only bluffing about being able to read-that she couldn't really read or write but wasn't about to let other people know that. But that the producers didn't want Xena to seem stupid. I suspect Lucy just wanted a chance to play a sly, conniving poser. Renee said that Xena could read but couldn't write. But that's not true--we've seen Xena leave goodbye notes with big smoochy lipstick stains on them on her pillow. They showed the final scene of Many Happy Returns, when Xena watches Gabrielle dribble on herself from the dribble cup and says, "NOW we're even!" Renee said, "That is just SO Lucy". They ended by thanking us yet again for our loyalty to them and to the show even though it's over. They thanked us for our charitable work, our generosity and our kindness to each other and to other people. Lucy also thanked us for supporting the Kevin Smith Trust Fund. And commented, as did Danielle on how we appreciated him far more than anyone else ever did. As they walked off stage, it struck me that Lucy and Renee could have a future doing handywomen shows on PBS. So long as they don't have to run a VCR... KT ========================================================= This has been a message to the chakram-refugees list. To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@smoe.org with "unsubscribe chakram-refugees" in the message body. Contact meth@smoe.org with any questions or problems. ========================================================= ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 28 Mar 2003 19:15:56 -0600 From: "Maria T. Vivoni" Subject: Re: [chakram-refugees] Con 03 Lucy and Renee KT, Wow! Thanks for the very detailed and long con review. This has been the best and most complete one I have read. I really enjoyed reading it. Thanks for sharing, Maria (who wishes she could have been there) _________________________________________________________________ Help STOP SPAM with the new MSN 8 and get 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail ========================================================= This has been a message to the chakram-refugees list. To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@smoe.org with "unsubscribe chakram-refugees" in the message body. Contact meth@smoe.org with any questions or problems. ========================================================= ------------------------------ End of chakram-refugees-digest V3 #86 *************************************