by Felicia Day
In the lowest days of my career, I thought about taking him up on it.
But then The Guild took off, and it finally seemed to prove that I’d chosen the right path. The problem was that the internet world was so new, it was hard to make my family understand, “We’re on YouTube and Xbox now! It’s a gaming console. Yes, it’s for games but they also have video . . .” meant I was guaranteed to not move into their spare bedroom anytime soon.
I was in Austin, Texas, visiting my dad around season three of The Guild, and we ended up going to Bed Bath & Beyond together, probably for a new griddle because he’s a real “cook the sausage until they turn into meteorites” kind of guy. I could tell he wanted to talk to me about something serious. He’s always trying to get me to save money for some reason, so I thought, Ugh, another time where I have to pretend to understand what he’s talking about with 401(k)s.
As we wandered the aisles, of course I shoved things into the cart I wanted for myself so he’d pay for them. (I don’t care how old you are, that’s a daughter privilege.) He cleared his throat, and I knew he was going to launch into it.
“Honey, I want you to know you can always come home. Uh, you know. If things aren’t working out.”
I stopped the cart and rolled my eyes. I definitely would have rather talked with him about a 401(k) thingie. “Things are working out, Dad. I’m fine!”
“You haven’t been on TV as much lately.”
“Well, I’ve been working on all my internet stuff.”
“That sounds fun, but are you making a living at it?”
“I . . . kinda.” Technically I was still paying most of my bills with commercial acting, but unless I was phoning home for a check, he didn’t need to know that.
“I’m just saying, UT Law School is one of the best in the country. You always liked that Ally McBeal show . . .”
“Dad! I’m doing great! Honest . . .”
“Hey! Are you . . . Codex?”
We had stopped to have our earnest Lifetime moment in the linens section, and a guy in his early twenties wearing a polo shirt peered out at us from behind a stack of flamingo beach towels.
I smiled. “Uh, yeah! That’s me.”
“Wow, this is so cool!”
He walked over, and my dad looked at the guy skeptically. I had a feeling he thought the guy was a plant.
“I love your show! I’m working, so it’s not technically allowed, but think I could get a picture with you?”
“Sure!”
As we posed in front of a stack of “As Seen on TV” items, my dad took the photo, then handed the phone back to the kid.
Dad had a weird look on his face. “You’ve really seen her web show?”
“Yeah! Me and my roommate love it. We’re gamers. Bought the DVDs!”
“That’s awesome, thanks for supporting!” I smiled and high-fived him. For many reasons, I’d never loved a stranger more than in that moment.
The guy waved and started to leave. “Nice to meet you! The roommate is never gonna believe this!”
As he walked away, my dad looked at me, and there was something different in his eyes. Surprise. Shock. And more than a little bit of admiration.
“That was pretty cool.”
“Yeah.”
“Ahem.”
There was an awkward beat between us. Was he gonna bring up the law school thing again? Ask me more about my show? Talk to me about my pension benefits?
“Let’s go get some pancakes.” He put his arm around me, and we pushed the cart toward the checkout. A few aisles later I had to pretend to look at ShamWows to wipe away a few tears.
Yeah, that moment near the flamingo beach towels was my sweetest Guild victory of all.
- 9 -
Convention Fevah
I have a cabinet filled with dolls of myself in my office. But I didn’t MAKE any of them, so that makes it less creepy, right?
In the summer of 2008, I walked onstage with the cast and creators of Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, a musical web series released on the internet just weeks before, and was greeted by the screams of more than five thousand people. We were at San Diego Comic-Con, in Ballroom 20, the second largest hall at the biggest nerd event in the world. With me were Nathan Fillion and Simon Helberg and Neil Patrick Harris, my Horrible costars, and Joss Whedon and his siblings, Zack, Jed, and Jed’s wife, Maurissa, the writers. Joss Whedon was also the director. You may be familiar with him from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly, and The Avengers. (Whew, that was a lot of name-dropping.) As I smiled and waved to the audience, gazing out on the huge room filled with thousands of faces, I suddenly knew what it felt to be a rock star.
And my inner dik-dik didn’t want any terrifying part of it.
Nathan and Neil and Joss were extremely witty onstage during the panel, bantering with one another like the superstars they are, and the only thing I could do was stare down at the iPhone 3G in my lap, frozen in fear. After the initial semi-thrill of walking onstage, five thousand people staring at you comes with an intimidating amount of eyeball reflection. At a certain point, a question got thrown to me, but there was an awkward beat of silence on stage because I wasn’t paying attention. I was busy staring at my lap. Nathan leaned forward to cover for me as I looked up and blurted out, “Oh! I’m sorry, what was the question? I was . . . Twittering under here.”
This was 2008. Not a lot of nontech people were on Twitter at that point. So it sounded . . . suggestive.
Yup, people thought exactly what you’d think “twittering” was if you didn’t know about social media: they thought I was masturbating under the table. And so did Nathan.
“It’s hot in here,” I said, flustered by the roar of laughter from the crowd.
“And wet,” said Neil. Which made me turn as pink as my borrowed designer sweater.
After that, a lot of fans joined Twitter.
Once I recovered from hyperventilating in shame, we finished the panel and went to sign posters. Hundreds of fans shuffled through our line, jostling one another and the table, with security guards struggling to hold the crowd in check. When my hand started to cramp from signing and I developed a crazy tic over my right eye from smiling too hard, I wondered, How did THIS become part of my life?
[ Fan by Fan ]
I attended my first fan convention during college. It was the South Texas Amphibian and Lizard Show, held in the run-down ballroom of an Austin Hilton. No, I wasn’t a toad collector at any point (although that wouldn’t surprise you, would it?). I was there on a first date. I’d planned the whole thing myself and thought it was a creative way for two people to get to know each other. Afterward, we went to a staging of Antigone performed in ancient Greek, and for dinner I found an Ethiopian restaurant where, per cultural tradition, we ate a feast only with our fingers.
Dude didn’t ask me out again.
But I remember walking into the lizard convention, enchanted by how many people in Austin loved lizards. And amphibians. And spiders. And a lot of other things I didn’t have any temptation to bring home with me. (When I was twelve, I had a pet boa constrictor, Stella, whom I loved until I realized it needed to eat LIVE ANIMALS to survive. My mom had to feed Stella just-born “pinkie” mice while I sobbed outside in the hallway. Thank God, she died of a mouth infection before she got big enough to eat animals with actual hair. SORRY, STELLA, IT WAS ME NOT YOU!)
My favorite part of the lizard event was standing near a group of guys at a meet-up in the hotel coffee shop, all with ginormous iguanas perched on their shoulders. They were discussing the best type of feed, what to do when your “friend” was molting, and breeding techniques. (I grabbed my Frappuccino and walked away at that point. Quickly.)
Even though it was hella strange, I loved the vibe of the event. There were so many people meeting to celebrate something they loved. I wanted to be a part of that. Without the iguana sex tips. I had no idea that years later, fan conventions of the GEEK kind would build my career more than anything e
lse.
Despite most of the media attention centering around big Hollywood-driven events like San Diego Comic-Con, there are hundreds of smaller fan conventions taking place around the world every weekend, celebrating sci-fi, anime, Abraham Lincoln impersonators (yup): you name it, there’s a fan convention for it. I’ve attended hundreds of these events as a guest, starting as an actor on the cult favorite Buffy the Vampire Slayer. When I started my web show The Guild, I continued attending. Even though people didn’t know that it existed.
I called up Kim right after we launched.
“Hey! There’s a World of Warcraft convention happening next week in Anaheim. I’m gonna make The Guild bookmarks and hand them out down there so gamers will watch the show.”
“Bookmarks? What about postcards?” said Kim.
“They’re twenty-three percent more expensive.”
“Bookmarks sound great!”
I ordered two thousand of them and drove down to Anaheim. I didn’t have a ticket to the convention—they’d sold out months in advance—so I stood in front and handed out my DIY bookmarks to everyone who went inside. The experience had to be like a college student working the sidewalk for Amnesty International: smiles greeted with hostility all the way!
“Hi! Would you like a bookmark? No? Okay.”
“Hey, I’d love to talk to you about my . . . no, it’s not a church thing . . .”
“. . . it’s a web series about gamers who play a game like WoW? No, I’m not a booth girl. Yes, I play the game. No, you can’t test me . . .”
Ninety percent of my handouts got thrown in the trash. Most people did it right in front of me. But 10 percent seemed mildly interested in the show, and in the face of so much rejection, mild interest felt like a huge win! After dark, I collected all the discarded bookmarks that didn’t have gum stuck on them and drove home, vowing to canvass more events in the future. (I got rid of the extras by placing stacks of them on the doors of public toilets. Captive audience, yo!)
During the first few seasons of the show, I lived the life of an old-timey traveling salesman. I’d tweet, “Be in Seattle this weekend! Come on down! Buy more, get more discount! SALE SALE SALE!” and fans would let me crash their convention booths, dragging boxes of my Guild DVDs and comics as my “wares” (along with my face for selfies).
We even got ambitious for a few years and tried to run our own Guild booth at Comic-Con, sharing with my friend Jamie, a game designer. The experience did not go well. Our friendly indie fans generally got crowded out by mainstream fans lining up to get free life-size Harry Potter bags at the bigger movie studio booths.
“Hey, are you Emily Blunt?!”
“Definitely not. I’m here with my web show. Can I sell you a DVD?”
“Not unless you’re Emily Blunt.”
The last straw was when we decided one year to sell T-shirts and bought tons of Ikea shelving. Which I tried to assemble. By myself.
“Why are there so many pieces?! And there are no words to explain the pictures? Is it a secret IQ test?”
“No one knows,” Jamie said.
I put a whole shelving unit together backward, and when I discovered I had to undo two hours of work, I started hyperventilating.
“Kim! I’m having flashbacks to DVD stuffing. No T-shirts! Never again!”
Eventually, our show got more popular, and the cast and I started to get invited to conventions legitimately as guests, all expenses paid, no Ikea shelving required. I guess coordinators saw the lines of fans waiting to meet me and thought, That web series chick doesn’t have a sales tax permit. Better give her an official spot before she gets arrested by the feds.
By the 2010 San Diego Comic-Con, the most influential fan convention in the world, The Guild had grown in popularity enough to fill a three-thousand-seat panel room. More than some network TV shows. Not bad for a show that was shot in our garages, huh? (Yes, I’ve mentioned the garage thing too many times, but listen: we did all that stuff out of our garages.) At the same time I was doing my own show, I was also acting on other sci-fi friendly shows. Eureka. Supernatural. And those projects, along with Dr. Horrible and my other web projects, bumped me pretty high up the “situational recognition” ladder at fan conventions not only in the US, but around the world.
It’s a very strange experience to go back and forth between real life, where almost no one recognizes me except baristas, to events where 99 percent of people see me and think, I know that chick! She’s pale like the underbelly of a fish in person! It’s a shock to the ego.
They think I’m awesome!
Actually, I’m crap.
Correction! Awesome again!
Shut up, nobody.
As a self-conscious, I’m-sure-I-have-a-booger-in-my-nose kind of person, it was hard to get used to the scrutiny. When I first started doing speeches and panels, I’d constantly get flashbacks to the only high school event I ever attended.
It was a Valentine’s dance and I was sixteen. An assistant instructor at my karate school, Juan, asked me to be his date. I was nervous because I’d never been INSIDE a public school before, but I said to myself, He’s a karate instructor, so if the jocks attack us, I should be safe.
I asked, “What should I wear?” and he said, “It’s Valentine’s. The fanciest dress you have.” No need to say it twice! I got the most beautiful green crushed-velvet dress, floor length, no back, jewels galore, mile-high heels; I even bought my own corsage. (I didn’t know at the time those were supposed to be gifted to you by the guy. Oh well. I’m liberated.)
We entered the San Antonio High School gym dressed like we were meeting the Queen of England, and as I descended the steps, I gazed around the room. Everyone turned to stare at us. More than a hundred people. Not one dress in sight. Everyone was dressed in plain jeans and T-shirts. One person was wearing pajamas.
The kids pointed and whispered at us as we worked our way through the crowd. A few snickered. I had never been around this many kids my own age before. At that moment I understood exactly how Carrie must have felt at her prom.
I’ve gotten used to public speaking in front of thousands and spending an extra hour in the mirror every morning trying to decide if I’m overdressed or not now, but sometimes when I enter a convention floor and walk through the crowds, I have a traumatic flash of Green velvet, green velvet! zip through my brain.
It gets weirder when I meet celebrities whom I admire. Then my sense of identity really starts to cartwheel. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sat backstage feeling like an interloper who somehow made the convention invite list by accident. When someone I adore, like Gillian Anderson or William Shatner, enters the greenroom, I generally try to keep quiet and stand near the hummus, waiting for someone to say, “Oops. Someone invited the wrong ‘Felicia.’ Kick out that girl who’s hogging all the pita chips.”
I met Patrick Stewart one time, and when he started directing words toward my head, I became so light-headed I almost fainted. I kept repeating, “Would you like my chair? Would you like my chair?” until a volunteer came to extract him. Another time I got up two hours early, walked to a special donut shop four miles away from my hotel, and brought dozens of donuts to the convention for the EXPRESS purpose of carrying a box over to Matt Smith (Doctor Who #11) and asking, “Do you want one?” Because I couldn’t figure out how to introduce myself like a real human being. (He did NOT want a donut. And he ended up thinking I was a volunteer, not a guest. For obvious reasons.)
The most mortifying incident was when I met Nichelle Nichols at a convention in Salt Lake City. She was wearing the most dazzling gold jacket I’d ever seen, sitting in a golf cart, glam as all get-out. I mean, Lieutenant Uhura, in the flesh! As I skirted around her golf cart in the hallway, I wanted to stare, willed myself not to, then compromised with a creepy side-eye look as I passed and then . . . she called out to me.
“Hi! Felicia! I wanted to meet you!” She waved.
I froze. She knew my name? No way. No WAY.
&
nbsp; “Uh, you wanted to meet ME?! But . . . but . . . but . . .” Mind melting . . . say something human being-ish. “Hi?”
“Hello!”
Form words, Felicia . . . “Uh, your jacket is so pretty!”
“Thank you, dear.”
“Your jacket is sparkly. So pretty.” Doh! I said that already. But it came out of my mouth again for some reason. Flashbacks to Patrick Stewart situation. I wanted to die.
“Yes. You already said that.”
Crap, she noticed. “I love your work.”
“Thank you!”
My body started moving of its own volition, shifting weight back and forth, a move taken from a Motown group, while my mind seized up. Say something smart, something more about how you love her work, except less general . . . “Uh . . . you’re in a golf cart!” NOT THAT! SHE MIGHT HAVE A HIP PROBLEM! WHY BRING THAT UP?!
“Yes, it’s easier to get around the crowds this way.”
I babbled. “I still can’t believe you know my . . . why did you want to . . . I’m a big fan of your work!” COMPLETE A SENTENCE, GOD!
“Thank you!”
Mention your favorite episode of hers! No, for some reason, your mind isn’t working. I am your mind, and I’m not working. I’m warning you, if you say something right now, you might accidentally say “Star Wars” instead of “Star Trek” and then you’ll have to commit hari-kari, right here, right now in this hallway, so just compliment her jacket again . . . NO! WRONG CHOICE! NO-WIN CONDITION! AAAAAAAAAAAAH!
“I have to pee. Nicetomeetyoubye!”
And I ran away. Like, full-tilt running down the hallway. If you haven’t guessed already, it’s a habit of mine. I never found out why she wanted to meet me, either. I felt so ridiculous that I sat on the toilet for fifteen minutes until I was able to rewrite the scene in my head into a more functional account of what happened so I could live with myself. (It included a conversation about her sister, who was once an actor in The Guild. Why couldn’t I have remembered that during the panic attack? I’m the WORST!)