Moonbase ConFusion - pictures from the weekend

I spent last weekend running the hospitality suite for a science fiction convention. I meant to take pictures of the crazy amount of supplies we bought for it, but I totally forgot. I'll post my shopping list later - it's pretty amazing. To give you a preview, on our first trip to Costco, we had 5 flat bed carts and 5 or 6 large shoppping carts.

For now, here's a couple of pictures:
This is our main food service area, just before we opened the doors on Friday. Our theme for this year's convention was Moonbase ConFusion. Thus the tablecloths made of mylar blankets for a space age/futuristic feel. They actually made the best tablecloths, because they didn't show stains and spills just slid right off. The video monitors on the right (there were 3 of them) showed a series of over 300 stills, a mix of moon exploration pictures and artists renderings of moons and moon bases. The windows are blacked out with Kraft paper so people could use chalk to draw their own moonscape - what you'd see looking out the window of the moon base. Unfortunately, we only got one window started, and the others just got used as an opportunity for graffiti - but people had fun with that, so it's okay.

Friday night we hosted a Mardi Gras party. We handed out over 200 strings of beads, played Zydeco music and served cornbread and jambalaya. We were also supposed to serve the fabulous Mardi Gras astronaut cake pictured above (thanks Sue!), but I totally forgot about him until Saturday. When he was slightly less in-theme, but still very tasty and appreciated.

This was my second year doing this, and I had a total blast. I'm still recovering from the lack of sleep, though!

How to throw a room party

Just in time for this year's Worldcon, Making Light's Teresa Nielsen Hayden has posted a wonderful treatise on hosting large room parties at SF conventions. I've hosted a few room parties in my time, and her recommendations are spot on.

I especially like her inclusion of "very small, shallow, insecure paper plates" on the Universal Party Essentials list. Seems like an odd thing to include, but she explains it perfectly:

Very small insecure paper plates will enable your guests to load up a handful of cookies or veggie bits and carry them off to wherever they're conversing, but won't encourage malfeasants to carry off a half-pound of chocolates when they leave.

Another amusing bit:

When you're dealing with non-fans, the purpose of fancy exotic fruits is to decorate fruit-and-cheese platters so people can feel swankier while eating the same seedless green grapes they always eat. If you lay on the same spread for fans, the exotic stuff will get eaten. And discussed.

On the issue of closing the party and cleaning up, she has this to say:

It's fairly effective to make a cheerful announcement that anyone who's still around after the cutoff time is volunteering for the cleanup crew. If they go, that's good. If they stay, that's even better.

I must add to that one addendum, which is that if your party goes late enough, I have found saying "We can't go to breakfast until the room is clean" to be an excellent motivator to get those lingering diehards to pitch in. Finding somewhere to eat breakfast at 7 am on a Sunday morning in downtown Philadelphia turned out to be the harder problem, in fact.

Do click through and check out the rest of her post, if you haven't already. The comment section on Making Light is always lively and informative, and this post is no exception!