When twentysomethings ask me if science fiction and horror conventions were better back when I was their age or today, I practically shriek “TODAY!” As a vendor, online promotion of events beats attempting to mail envelopes from a mailing list via First Class USPS, and don’t get me going about Eighties-era credit card processing machines. The biggest innovation to the live show scene, one that even out-there futurists like John Shirley and Ernest Hogan wouldn’t and couldn’t have predicted thirty years ago? Food trucks and GrubHub. These kids don’t remember the days when the only options for food within walking distance (or, with some shows in Austin, driving distance) were a horrible and horribly overpriced hotel restaurant, an even more horrible concession stand within the hall stocked with surplus rations from the Whiskey Rebellion, or a lone fast-food pit whose food quality would have been improved by setting the place afire with the owner in it. I remember shows where the meal options were so poor that running across a major highway during rush hour was a viable option, and the restaurants on the other side taunted those of us without easy access to transport. As a vendor, this still applies, especially when considering “Do I give up this this great parking spot and risk not finding anything in an hour, or do I settle for grazing in the hotel front yard?”
This show, Horror For the Holidays didn’t have any food trucks because of the vendors setting up booths outside, but it has something every year unseen at other shows: a Bloody Mary bar. I can’t drink, so the alcohol content has to stay below “virgin,” but consider the situation. You’ve spent the last two hours hauling heavy tubs full of glassware and plants across a parking lot, across a back stage, and to the booth location. You get finished just as the first customers come barreling in, and the crowds don’t slow down for the next six hours. Eating anything of significance just isn’t an option, especially if that anything of significance requires two hands. A nice big glass of tomato juice and celery salt, with a handful of blue cheese-filled olives, gots a long way toward replacing the seven kilos of salt you burned through during setup, and a second glass takes away a lot of the deep muscle pain inflicted during breakdown. No matter where Horror For the Holidays goes in the future, the Bloody Mary bar has to continue, because we vendors depend upon it.
