David D. LevineScience Fiction Author

Just back from the annual gay square dance convention in Atlanta, which was held in the same “H.R. Giger” Marriott as the 1986 Worldcon.

Mindful that we’d had elevator problems at that Worldcon, and that at a previous square dance convention in a hotel with an internal atrium and glass elevators some friends of mine had gotten stuck in one for hours on the 4th of July, I was careful not to board an overloaded elevator and kind of pushy about not letting people get on when I thought the elevator was full. We had no elevator problems until the last day of the con, when at the convention’s brunch banquet the food ran out before everyone was served — the elevator with the food had gotten stuck on the way up from the kitchen. Okay, it was a service elevator rather than one of the glass ones, but I was amused. I suspect I would not have found it so amusing if I were one of the ones who waited in line for breakfast for half an hour or more.

Apart from that the convention went very smoothly and I came away happy and footsore. In addition to lots of dancing, socializing, flirting, and eating (we had some fine meals), we did a couple of days of touristing around Atlanta. Highlights included the Center for Puppetry Arts, Martin Luther King’s old neighborhood with several different facilities with exhibits about Dr. King and the civil rights struggle, and the Fernbank Museum of Natural History with the Biggest! Dinosaur! EVER!

Note to convention planners: if you are going to hold a convention on a holiday weekend, it behooves you to contact the local restaurants and include information in the restaurant guide about which ones are open on the holiday. Not that the restaurants make this easy — we actually made reservations at a restaurant for dinner on the 4th (through their web page) only to find when we arrived that it was closed.

We got home to find that summer has finally arrived in Portland, with gorgeous sunny weather and a blessed lack of humidity. We celebrated by setting up the grill for a delightful dinner of corn on the cob and grilled tofu.

That’s July so far. The rest of the month promises to be equally interesting:

• July 8: Clarion West party, Seattle.
• July 11: Jury duty.
• July 14-15: Alpha Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Workshop for Young Writers, Greensburg, Pennsylvania. Instructor.
• July 17: Ephemerata Speculata, Portland, Oregon. Reading “Charlie the Purple Giraffe.”
• July 21-24: Cascade Writers Workshop, Moclips, WA. Workshop group leader, along with Ken Scholes and Beth Meacham.

I need to go unpack now, so I can pack…