Where it all started! Fremont Oktoberfest, sorta, and NorWesCon 2010.

I am not certain what compelled me to participate in an active manner in a con/festival. I had always enjoyed simply attending cons like PAX, RustyCon, NorWesCon, Emerald City ComiCon, etc. But I had always eyed the guys and gals in the custom T-Shirts and spiffy looking credentials on a lanyard with an eye of wonder!

I had decided to dip my feet into this volunteer business slowly and try to help with the Fremont Oktoberfest 2008 celebration. The web site said they needed people to staff the ticket booth, pour beer, sell drink tickets, etc. Well I can certainly pour a beer! In return I would get to keep the nifty custom T-Shirt and get free beer. Who can resist an offer like that?

Well I went over to the volunteer meeting and they went over the various expectations. They told us to go over to the web site Shiftboard.com and place our shift selections there. Come the time for the event I go over to Fremont and discover there was a snafu and all my shifts had been given away. They didn’t need me, but they gave me drink tokens. So I just drank a heap of free beer and partied with a table of complete strangers. I think they only liked me for the free beer, but it was fun nevertheless :-)

So my first official time doing anything like this would be when a gal I am friendly with whom I know via The Church of the Subgenius, Praise “Bob”!, needed people for her Subgenius panel at NorWesCon 2010.

My moniker in the church is Rev. Sysyphus. As such I take confessions, but my strict rule is that it be an interesting one. None of this lame coveting of the neighbor’s wife shite. If you shagged the neighbor’s wife, then we are talking!

Lil, my friend, did the intro spiel that I wrote and when my fellow Subgenii Marcus took a breath from his rant, I asked if there was anyone out there who felt the need to confess, but keep to it interesting.

Now I don’t know if it’s my face that is friendly or something about my manner, but people have confessed some pretty heavy stuff to me over the years while in character. But this one took the cake! This gentleman in front told us how back in the ’60s he masterminded a Ponzi scheme that bilked thousands out of a few hundred thousand dollars. Confessions of infidelity and cheating were the norm, but this one blew me away! He was 100% genuine and I could see in his eyes he had been holding this guilt for the better part of 4 decades. Trying to not break character I mulled this over in my head, polled my fellow Subgenii and determined that it was the greatest confession ever and led a standing ovation from the crowd as he wiped back tears.

That one still shakes me to the core to this day! Puts all the confessions of stolen money, infidelity & cheating at college mid-terms to shame.

So this is what I expect when the good Rev. asks for a confession! So confess people!

There was no free T-Shirt with this one, but I did get a nifty badge and Superior Mutant tag for it!