Milady enjoys hot chocolate and her companion for the day.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: sometimes we celebrate holidays! Sometimes we leave the house! Sometimes we celebrate holidays by leaving the house!

With Valentine’s Day on a Saturday this year and our schedules cleared, my wife Anne and I made plans to grab an early breakfast before the rest of the world woke up and packed every restaurant in central Indiana for the next eighteen hours. We put our heads together, looked up places that we hadn’t been to before, and loved where we wound up. We didn’t cross-index our search results for sightseeing options in the vicinity, but were pleasantly surprised to wander into some. We ended up taking many more pics than we’d expected that day.

A mural welcomes us, a prologue to our forthcoming art walk.

The two of us are lifelong Indianapolis west-siders and don’t hang out in Carmel too often, that most prominent among the the well-to-do cities and suburbs up on the northeast side. At times the relationship between Indy and Carmel bears more than a passing resemblance to the Pawnee-vs.-Eagleton rivalry (as it’s always seemed to this class-underdog, anyway), but the fact remains their non-chain culinary creators outnumber the west side’s by roughly 10,000-to-1. We made reservations, made the half-hour drive, and made ourselves at home at Goodness Gracious Kitchen & Cupboard, a breakfast-and-lunch spot that celebrated ten years of coziness last year.

Note the winter and valentine flourishes harmonizing in their windows, including an entire Valentine’s Day tree in one corner.

For Anne, the lemon ricotta pancakes, dusted with powdered sugar,

For me, the Chick(Hen) and Waffles — with touches of hot honey and topped with an entire buttermilk-fried Cornish hen.

We figured that’d be the end of our expedition and we’d be heading straight home to binge some King of the Hill or whatever. Au contraire: Goodness Gracious is in the heart of the Carmel Arts & Design District, which overflows with each and every item in its name. Temperatures had risen into the 40s and the two-week-old suffocating snowstorm blanket had mostly melted away throughout the week. This happy couple took advantage and took ourselves a nice stroll to walk off those breakfast carbs.

Among our missed opportunities: down the street was the Museum of Miniature Houses and Other Collections, which wouldn’t open for a couple more hours.

Free sights in their windows included Kwanzaa figures.

Miniature average Carmel house.

The museum’s tiny library, probably with different books than their gift shop sells (assuming they have one).

Last time we were in this specific neighborhood was some 15-20 years ago when we visited Bub’s Burgers & Ice Cream for my birthday and I had my very first elk burger. Bub’s is still rockin’ on, but Main Street Carmel has built up a lot around them since then. Their stretch was revamped into the Carmel Arts & Design District, with public art on just about every block and the Monon Greenway trail blazed north-south through one end for pedestrians and bikers to enjoy to their hearts’ content.

The art assortment includes 23 statues by a single artist: J. Seward Johnson II, grandson of one of the founders of Johnson & Johnson (whose “no more tears” shampoo was a childhood household staple I endured under protest), whose son J. Seward III was one of BuzzFeed’s co-founders. Under the aegis of their previous mayor, the city purchased the statues between 2005 and 2023, the last one installed after Johnson himself passed away in 2020. These entries from his “Man-on-the-Street” series, dispersed across multiple localities, illustrate a sort of throwback community mostly conforming to a “Forever Small-Town 1950s” motif. Carmel hasn’t been a small town in decades, and definitely didn’t spend like a small town to acquire these. The Indianapolis Star compiled a complete list of locations, dates, and price tags.

If we’d known we would be in the middle of all this, I might’ve done the legwork so we could track down all 23. On our own without any online guidance, we approached 16 of them in all, in the following order:

There, Now You Can Grow. (The kid’s got work to do.)

Sidewalk Concert. (That’s fake money in his violin case, not real.)

Who’s in Charge, the nearest statue to Goodness Gracious.

Things To Do, plus a bonus Indiana-flag-themed deck chair.

Unconditional Surrender, based on the amazing true story of that one famous WWII photo.

Strolling Professor, whose textbook is turned to a chapter about chemical motion, illustrated with parabolic graphs.

Captured, the most recently installed Johnson statue as of 2023.

Holding Out, demonstrating how folks in the good ol’ days used to go buy their groceries themselves in person from fellow live humans.

Confirming Predictions, demonstrating how there used to be companies that printed entire news sites on paper and delivered them to your house every morning. The best part was that angry troll replies sometimes took days to show up.

Waiting to Cross, attached to a real stop sign.

The 2005 inaugural Johnson statue First Ride, with a father encouraging his daughter.

Shaping Up, appropriately along the Monon Greenway.

Wine, Food, and Thou. Fortunately for her there’s no Yogi Bear statue nearby.

Oh, It’s You, Welcome! Gee, Officer Krupke, you shouldn’t have!

One Man’s Search, featuring wardrobe by the Carmel High School bookstore.

Ambassador of the Streets and its pet human.

A selection of works by the outnumbered other artists:

Sail by Owens & Crawley, near the southern entrance to the District along the Greenway. I understand it lights up at night.

Brickhead Human by James Tyler.

Gavin – Aspiration by Jason Myers. The latest in his worldwide series, the 30-foot Gavin – Divergence, has been causing quite the fuss among Broad Ripple residents.

Swing Me Higher, Mama by Dominic Benhura.

Eternal Spring by Jerry Joslin.

We couldn’t resist one last stop along Main Street before returning to the car: a round of snacks from Tous les Jours, a chain of French-Asian bakeries that originated in South Korea and have apparently been around since 2004. We’d never heard of them till last year, when we had breakfast at one in Huntsville, Alabama, on our 2025 road trip. (Someday I’ll post those pics too. Someday! Lord willing!) Until this very Saturday we didn’t know they have at least three Indiana locations. We had no idea because of course none of them are on the west side. This Valentine’s Day was just full of learning experiences for us.

Sample luscious cakes.

Sample macarons, including double-stuffed options, because Indiana.

Our haul: one chocolate creme donut, one matcha creme donut, a strawberry croissant snack sandwich, a hazelnut-filled chocolate muffin, and a loaf of mascarpone cream bread.

…and then we returned to our malnourished side of town, ran errands, went home, exchanged gifts, and enjoyed the rest of our weekend except for the part where we didn’t stumble across any more surprise gourmet delicacies.

6:30 p.m. Sunday night, total darkness thanks to Daylight Savings ending that very day.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: in October my wife Anne and I traveled from Indianapolis to Cincinnati for a live Q&A with TV’s Admiral Picard himself, Sir Patrick Stewart. The 83-year-old Shakespearean thespian and erstwhile starship captain had a new book to sell and thousands of fans to enthrall.

Speaking of American stage appearances by octogenarian Englishmen who costarred in a few landmark TV shows and some notable films, whose tours forbid the taking of photos or video, who’ve been married a few times and whose current wives are over thirty years younger than they are…now for something completely different!

Dateline: Sunday, November 5, 2023 – We didn’t have to leave town to attend “An Evening with the Late John Cleese”, held at the Murat Theatre at the Old National Centre — the same venue where I’d previously caught performances by Bob Newhart, Henry Rollins, “Weird Al” Yankovic, and the Whose Line Is It, Anyway? tour. The celebrated member of the Monty Python’s Flying Circus troupe, the star of the brilliantly awkward sitcom Fawlty Towers, the Academy Award-nominated screenwriter (and costar) of A Fish Called Wanda, and the most pompous Hpgwarts ghost from the Harry Potter movies has made no secret that with three ex-wives to his credit, he is officially not wealthy to this day and remains available for paying gigs such as this very occasion.

We arrived at 6:30 just as the doors were about to open. While we waited, a representative came down the line and offered $20 upgrades to VIP status, which would provide slightly better seats and access to a “VIP lounge” where we could presumably mingle with strangers and sit in slightly different chairs for a few minutes before resigning ourselves to the cramped, old-fashioned seats in their theater. We were surprised the VIP passes hadn’t sold out, but declined the offer. Inside, the merchandise stand sold only two items: $35 T-shirts with Cleese’s grayed silhouette on one side, and $100 autographed event posters. We declined these as well, because there are some instances in which we’re only willing to indulge so far. I later overheard the lady sitting next to me claim those two whole items soon sold out.

Attendees were invited to submit questions in the lobby in advance, though few were ultimately used in the show.

We took our seats shortly before 7. The digital tickets stated a 7:30 start time, but a standee in the lobby said 8:00. Either way, we settled in and appreciated our delightfully unobstructed view of the stage across three rows of empty seats in front of us, which could have been ours for a few dollars more. At 7:35, out came the opening act who hadn’t been named on the bill — standup comedian Camilla Cleese, daughter of John, who surely underwent a thorough auditioning process to win this coveted gig over other applicants.

I haven’t kept up with the standup world pretty much since George Carlin’s twilight years (apart from John Mulaney’s oeuvre) and can’t speak to how her material stacks up against current practitioners. Like her father’s works, her barbs skewed dark-humored at times; punchlines were more hit than miss. Subjects included how her height vexes others (she’s 6-foot-1), the post-COVID dating world, and her most recent stepmother, who’s extremely close in age to her older sister/John’s eldest daughter Cynthia. (“We got a new middle child in the family.”) Fun trivia: Cleese’s wife is seven years older than Patrick Stewart’s.

At 7:52 she introduced her father (“You know him as the star of Pink Panther 2!”), who replaced her on stage and had a chair waiting for him, next to a small table with lit candle and glass of clear fluid. He thanked us all for welcoming him to “the outskirts of northern Kentucky”, an amuse-bouche of yuks to come that earned him a round of good-natured booing.

Dressed as comfortably as Patrick Stewart had been (and with similar loafers, in white rather than pink), Cleese held court on what he likes to call “naughty” humor, very much the Monty Python stock-in-trade, and the use of “taboo subjects” as punchlines, which gets tougher to sort as societal sects grow increasingly humorless in decreeing what can or cannot be mocked, based on the inherent assumption that they rule the world and can exert such controls. He tried to distinguish between “affectionate teasing” and “nasty teasing”, but the two moments in which he cited the example of “the extreme woke” as comedy gatekeepers may in turn have gatekept some listeners from that particular semantic path. Another, tinier audience minority may have cheered a little too loudly at the label’s invocation.

To the Extremely Online, who willingly immerse themselves in such environments every day, his “affectionate teasing”/”nasty teasing” dichotomy may feel imperceptible or even bogus. Such environments shouldn’t have to be that way, ruled as they frequently are by domineering frat-boys of all political stripes who think every encounter between two or more humans deserves to be held with all the decorum of a drunken barroom brawl. But here we are and here they rot. As a fat four-eyed cishet white male Christian Hoosier anti-partisan quasi-centrist comics-collecting pretentious introverted bumpkin geek blogger over 50 who grew up poor and basically fatherless and didn’t date till I was 19…I’m familiar with how it feels to be insulted, both as an individual and as an involuntary category member. I can sense the dichotomy a little more firmly now than when I was 13 and a bit more prone to tears. It took a while to develop the tools to cope and/or exit for someplace better. But that’s just me. Then again, I don’t hold sway over crowds.

That said…as Camilla pointed out, he’s of Monty Python. Offense was kind of their thing.

Some of his jokes were met with awkward silences, at which he cackled whenever he’d anticipated that response. The theater held its collective breath when he brought up the subject of “racial jokes”…only to exhale when the next few old-fashioned minutes were devoted to mocking various specific European nations — the Greek, the Swiss, the Scottish, etc. It’s a familiar construct to fellow Gen X-ers who grew up on those sad 1970s “Polack” jokes (a forefather of the 1980s “dumb blonde” jokes). As one might expect from an elder Englishman, the French were of course a prime target. (Why do the French have so many civil wars? So they can win one once in a while. How do you defend Paris from an advancing army? They don’t know, it’s never been tried.) The closest he came to anything “racial” was a pair of hoary Jewish jokes, one of which he said was given to him by his Jewish ex-son-in-law, screenwriter Ed Solomon. (I’d just encountered the same joke the other day on Twitter, minus the “Jewish” part.)

The audience wasn’t 100% white, for what that’s worth, but were overwhelmingly gray-haired, as Camilla noted more than once from the stage. The evening’s loudest heckler protested his slagging of Cleveland, which he called “a dump” and wondered aloud how anyone could live there willingly without armed guards keeping them in.

As a sort of olive branch proffered across the ever-widening generation gap, a surprising number of minutes in the show were devoted to showing clips of fun moments from Cleese’s storied past, which filled time and let him continue resting. Samples included:

• “The Fish Slapping Dance”
• “The Queen Victoria Handicap”
• The Mr. Creosote sketch from Monty Python’s Meaning of Life
• The Black Knight duel from Monty Python and the Holy Grail
• A montage of the Yorkshire terriers that Michael Palin’s bumbling assassin slaughters in A Fish Called Wanda

Cleese paid tribute to Graham Chapman, his longtime castmate and dear friend who died in 1989 at 48, with a clip from the eulogy he delivered at Chapman’s televised service, which of course included moments that pushed back against what the deceased often rejected as “mindless good taste”. Complementing this was a short, bawdy anecdote involving rude misuse of a gin-‘n’-tonic. Still another Chapman story would come later in the night, regarding a complication in the Python cast’s visit to Dachau.

At 8:30, less than an hour in, Cleese announced a 20-minute intermission so he could go rest or whatever. He’s a year older than Patrick Stewart and had dealt with more than his share of health issues, such as pre-cancerous growth removals and so forth. It’s one of the differences no one ever complains about between live theater and today’s double-feature-length movies.

The closest we came to getting a photo of our special guest. We gotta be us.

At 8:50 the Cleeses retook the stage, both seated. Camilla (“my saber-toothed daughter”) held the contents of the audience question-boxes. To their surprise, none of us asked about African or European swallows. Cleese the Elder digressed frequently, ruminating on fans with “Don’t mention the war” tattoos, the upside of cannibalism, this one time in Hong Kong when he was fed poodle, Camilla’s two adorable rescue dogs (he finds it much harder grieving dead pets than dead friends), that time a Danish dentist laughed at A Fish Called Wanda so hard that he died in the theater (and later had a comedy festival named after him), his lifelong love of cheese, the fact that his family’s original name was Cheese, and this other time a UK cab driver mistook him for George Clooney. Nobody had asked about any of this. But he is 84, so.

The two of them also recounted memorable audience questions from past shows, such as “Did the Queen kill Diana?” (clearly an armchair detective barking in the wrong forest) and “If you were an aircraft component part, which would you be?” (a joystick, of course) and “Does Marjorie Taylor Greene weigh more than a duck?” Upon that last one, a few minutes’ mandatory mockery of terrible 2020s Republican politicians ensued. (I’m not sure either of them pronounced “Boebert” correctly. Not that she’s earned the courtesy of accuracy.) Cleese conceded this bit was a fish-in-a-barrel exercise: “It’s very difficult being a comedian these days. They’re doing it for us.”)

Topics actually brought up by the Indianapolis audience:

• How George Harrison personally financed Monty Python’s Life of Brian after reading the screenplay and deciding he really wanted to watch that movie
• “What question do you wish you’d been asked that you’ve never been asked?” (His answer: “What question do you wish you’d been asked that you’ve never been asked?”)
• When asked to recount a prank played on a Python member, he told us about a phone call to Michael Palin — who was in Helsinki filming one of his numerous, straight-faced travel specials — during which he pretended to be a documentarian.

…honestly, I think that was about it. At one point Camilla dropped all the cards on the floor while Dad was talking, but it didn’t seem like rehearsed slapstick.

Our time with the Cleeses concluded at 9:34, but not before entertaining us with one last archival clip to round out the clipfest. The five surviving Pythons appeared at the 1998 Aspen Comedy Festival to be interviewed by fellow comedian Robert Klein. For the sake of making the reunion as complete as possible, the quintet brought along the jarred ashes of the aforementioned, departed Mr. Chapman, who in spirit managed to steal the scene from beyond the grave. It was incontrovertibly our audience’s biggest laugh of the evening. Well, that and the French jokes, which might not have endeared him to Jean-Luc Picard.

Us hanging out with the rather tall Anakin Skywalker. This time he had the high ground.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! This weekend my wife Anne and I attended the tenth edition of the Indiana Comic Convention at the Indiana Convention Center in scenic downtown Indianapolis. They’ve stopped calling themselves “Indiana Comic Con” on paper for tiresome legal reasons that aren’t their fault, but to us they’ll always be Indiana Comic Con. This year the showrunners reserved more than twice as much space as they did for last year’s edition, a noticeable attempt to scale back up to their pre-pandemic size. Geek life had more space to thrive, but we still had no elbow space in the aisles on Saturday…

…which we could’ve dealt with as we normally do, if anything about this weekend had come to pass exactly as we’d hoped or imagined. To be fair, I can’t blame all our travails on the show. Adulting obligations overruled our original plan to attend Friday, which we thought would be a great day to speed through most of our to-do list amid smaller crowds. We were later told by a fellow attendee that Friday was in fact not a desolate cakewalk. The Indiana Convention Center had anticipated 30,000 attendees this year, but apparently a much greater number showed up on Day One than usual.

Our primary objectives centered on special guest Hayden Christensen, an unsurprising choice to longtime MCC followers or anyone who searches this very site and sees how many times “Star Wars” comes up. We ended up moving all our other wants and photo-op appointments to Saturday and Sunday, trying our best to work around his narrow Saturday-only schedule and gritting our teeth a little because we almost never do cons on Sundays. ICC 2024 joined our short list of exceptions. Given how Saturday ultimately flew off the rails, there’s absolutely no way we could’ve done it all in a single day.

Christensen had a packed schedule for his single day at the con, segmented into very specific session times. Anne had jumped on the ticket sales the very hour they were released, but we’re neither hackers nor scalpers. Doing the best she could, she got us into his Photo Op Session 2 at 1:30 p.m. and “Autograph Session D” at 4:30 p.m. Certain kinds of items could be signed only during certain sessions. Session D wasn’t his fourth signing session of the day; it was the fourth session for those who only wanted him to sign one (1) 8-x-10 photo. Fans who wanted anything else signed were grouped into other, presumably more bogged-down sessions.

We did our part to start the day off right. We parked a half-mile down the street at my workplace — blessedly free to me, thus avoiding the NCAA Tournament event-parking prices that had overtaken downtown Indianapolis this very same weekend, some charging as much as $35 or more a day. As a monkey’s-paw compromise, that meant a longer walking distance to and from, which gets no easier as we keep aging. We walked into the Convention Center at 7:40, early per our longstanding comic-con procedures. Registration opened promptly at 9. We picked up our green weekend wristbands (badges were only for VIP and highest-upcharged “Ruby” attendees) and adjourned to the exhibit hall doors on the far east end. The con’s entry schedule deviated from acceptable Midwest norms: dealers and exhibitors weren’t allowed inside till 9; VIP and Ruby badgeholders could run amuck at 10; we General Admission commoners had to contain ourselves till 10:30.

Once unleashed, we and hundreds of stampeding competitors headed directly to the autograph area on the far west end of the hall. VIPs and Ruby’ers had already formed colonies at several booths, including for fellow Saturday-only superstar Charlie Cox, who wasn’t there yet. Among those already in position, Chris Sarandon was one of two masked actors signing merrily away and Supernatural‘s Mark Pellegrino was just kinda chillin’, letting folks discover him in steady numbers. Next door to Pellegrino was our first stop: the John Rhys-Davies. (You know him, right? Cool!) We previously met him at ICC 2016, but I failed to add his signature to my Tolkien-film collection for reasons I’ve since forgotten. I aimed to correct that omission.

After registration entrance, actual wristband pickup, and exhibit-hall entrance, we were already on our fourth line of the day.

His booth happened to be next to the exit lane for Christensen’s large, fully curtained booth that would be used for his photo-ops and autograph sessions all Saturday long. One by one, smiling Star Wars fans would emerge and pass by us with their newly written-upon treasures. So we knew the erstwhile Sith Lord had arrived and started interacting right on time.

The esteemed Mr. Rhys-Davies manned his station at 10:45, in jolly spirits and ready to commiserate with us hoi polloi. We had to vie for his attention with a stream of VIPs and Ruby’ers who were allowed first dibs by dint of their statuses, but that’s part of the game. Once their lot were winnowed down a tad, Gimli’s handler commendably alternated between us and them. At 11:40 came our turn and our encore with him, enjoyably as expected.

Flashback to ICC 2016, when — instead of doing jazz hands — he tickled us as the camera clicked.

By then a lot of lines had gotten massive. We headed straight over to join a line of 15-20 other folks for the next name on our want list: Robert Patrick! You might know him from Terminator 2, Peacemaker, Scorpion, and more. Anne and I had just finished binging all four seasons of The Unit, which was canceled unexpectedly in its time and ended with Patrick’s Colonel Ryan being promoted to general for orchestrating heinous acts in the name of American security. When our turn came at 12:05 we didn’t have a chance to hold him accountable for that jaw-dropping heel turn because he was too darn nice a guy…though things went a bit awry with his handler, who snapped our table photo before asking for money, and may have overcharged Anne for our privileges. It was hard to confirm because his table had no posted pricing list and therefore no evidence as to whether or not he was offering selfie/autograph “combo” pricing.

But when Anne told him we’d just finished The Unit, he came around and gave her a great big hug. So we called it even.

We had a little time to kill before our Christensen op, so we wandered some of the vendor aisles on the west end, then at 12:30 decided to grab lunch. The map listed a “food court” on the same end of the hall, which implied certain promises of mealtime content, if not necessarily nutrition. The “food court” was just Wild Bill’s Root Beer, Chocolate Moonshine fudge, a Dippin Dots stand, a cash bar, and one (1) purveyor of any kind of main dish: a south-side Indy pop-up called PB&J Factory. They sell a variety of sandwiches, most of which are variations on peanut-butter-and-jelly. Anne ordered the Classic, which is exactly that plus honey. Determined to have a meal that didn’t scream “school lunch for kids who forgot their lunch money that day”, I ordered the Peso Pesto, which omitted their trademark ingredients and instead came only with basil pesto and mozzarella on Parmesan-crusted bread. Mine was tasty and surprisingly filling, far from the worst basil sandwich I’ve ever had. Other options in stock included the Chuck Berries (PB&J plus mixed berries and chocolate syrup), the Izza Pizza (i.e., Pepperoni Pizza: The Sandwich), and the Fluffer Nuffer (PB& bananas, marshmallow fluff and chocolate syrup).

Always nice to see local businesses show up here in the Convention Center, which is all too rare.

Admittedly we could’ve left the exhibit hall and availed ourselves of the Convention Center’s other concession stands or left the building and hit other nearby restaurants, which is what we’ve normally done at past cons. I wanted to minimize our steps, which were already adding up and inflaming Anne’s plantar fasciitis, and the aforementioned Facebook group was reporting some issues with the exhibit hall’s sole reentry point. As it was, a 12-minute wait wasn’t that bad for a convention-center eatery booth considering the high volume (for lack of any protein-forward competition in the vicinity), and we had entertainment while we waited, by which I mean we watched their staff searching for patrons whose food was ready for pickup, requiring the nice lady at one point to keep shouting at top volume, “A FLUFFER FOR GREG!” until poor Greg finally got off his duff and fetched his grub.

Behold Saturday lunch. Not pictured: a bag of cheddar Ruffles I finished before our sandwiches came up.

After a much-needed round of sitting down, we figured 1:10 was a good time to head over to the photo-op area and join the line for Christensen’s 1:30 photo op. We proceeded to do so…only to hear a few moments later from Celeb Photo Ops’ stentorian emcee over the mic that all of Christensen’s appointments were now running at least an hour behind. The tracking boards at the photo-op area’s entrance kept listing upcoming times for photos and for the con’s two biggest guests, both from the Star Wars galaxy — Christensen as well as Ahsoka star Rosario Dawson — but his listings were now all seemingly obsolete. Many later sessions were now labeled “DELAYED”. We were confused, considering we demonstrably knew he’d commenced his day without any problems. We’d remain clueless for the next several hours; for the time being, we had little choice but to hold our spot and await further updates.

Well, check that: Anne had little choice. As time kept rolling on, I had another appointment to keep. I temporarily abandoned her for a 2:15 photo op with a star from another universe: Mary McDonnell, a.k.a. President Laura Roslin from Battlestar Galactica. You might know her from Dances with Wolves, Independence Day, The Closer, its spinoff Major Crimes, and more.

I did not tell her I’d already done this with her bitter opponent Gaius Baltar.

I finished that brush with greatness at 2:30 and, along the path, thanked a lady who shouted about my shirt as I darted past, “HAWAIIAN MANDALORIAN! LOVE IT!” I rejoined Anne in Christensen purgatory, where nothing had changed. We remained locked in position for another hour. Eventually movement became a thing again and we lurched forward when it was our lane’s turn. At 3:35 we met the man, the myth, and the legend himself, well over two hours late. As you can tell in our lead photo, he seemed perfectly fine, though he fell into the category of actors who, when asked if we can do jazz hands, politely responded, “Sure, you can do jazz hands!” The photo is nevertheless a nice one, and garnered a shocking surge of approval from Hayden superfans when I Instagrammed it.

For a while we wandered back and forth between the autograph tables and the photo/auto boards, wondering if and when our 4:30 autograph session would truly begin. By 4:25 there’s been no updates and I took a Dippin Dots break with some bonus sit-down time that we both desperately needed. At 5:05 some lines had calmed down ever-so-slightly, so we committed to our next name on Anne’s to-do list: Smallville‘s Jonathan Kent himself, John Schneider! Anne previously met him at Wizard World Chicago 2010, which was a fun moment. Then at Indy’s World of Wheels 2017 we met his Dukes of Hazzard costars Tom Wopat and Catherine Bach, who each cosigned a cast photo. Anne decided she wanted to add his signature to the same photo, complete the set, and get an updated pic.

We’d been eying Schneider’s booth, which had had a long, steady customer flow all day long (as did his former TV son Tom Welling two booths down). At 5:05 we threw caution to the wind and joined it anyway. It moved pretty regularly, but at one point his manager came out from behind the table, rearranged our line to create a little standing space for himself, and joined Schneider’s assembly line as pre-table greeter and cashier, leaving the con volunteer at the table to put away the cash and distribute 8-x-10s. I’m not sure things moved any more quickly, but a little value-added congeniality goes a long way toward helping us forget about some of the weekend’s other, drearier lines.

Schneider was extremely friendly and chatty with each and every guest, especially with the couple in front of us who’d brought pics from him from a 1980s concert. He laughed at the memories of his youngster self and hopped two booths down to show them off to Welling. Fun times.

Flashback to WWC 2010, complete with original hair colors.

Anne and TV’s Bo Duke today.

By 5:50 all of Christensen’s remaining autograph sessions were now permitting lineups while his final photo sessions 7 and 8 were still in progress. Thus we reentered the area, joined our curiously short line, and waited a good while as his appointments were running much more than an hour behind. This would’ve been especially worrisome for any fans who’d also paid extra to attend his joint Star Wars panel with Dawson scheduled at 8:15 p.m. “Premium” panels are a relatively recent invention that we do not encourage, so that part wouldn’t affect us…assuming he got to us by then. Nevertheless, we waited. Anne was among many who sat on the unforgiving concrete floor after so many hours of foot punishment.

I believe it was around this point, with plenty of time on my hands, that I checked the FB group only to have drama explode in my face.

According to reports in varying levels of reliability — none of them directly from the Indiana Comic Convention administration themselves or any verified firsthand witness testimony that I’ve viewed as of this writing — at some point between 11:40 (when we bade farewell to Mr. Rhys-Davies and vacated the vicinity of Christensen’s booth and exit lane) and 1:10 p.m. (when we joined his second photo-op line within on the other side of said vicinity) a fan had allegedly approached Christensen and done something “inappropriate”. It may have been verbal comments; it may have been touching. The latter seems the most common claim. The fan was allegedly asked not to do this. The fan allegedly persisted in “inappropriate” and/or uncooperative behavior. Christensen himself allegedly asked the fan to knock it off. When it was not knocked off, yadda yadda yadda, police forcibly ejected the offender from the premises. The ensuing confrontation was allegedly loud enough that we would’ve heard it if we were nearby.

In what may or may not have been a totally unrelated development, a few hours later a female user who claimed to be with one of the show’s vendors (possibly Amy’s Baking Company) took to the FB group and began posting all-caps complaints about the police and ICC forcibly ejecting her from the premises. One post led off, “PURE HARASSMENT OF BOTH CHRISTIAN AND MELISSA!” followed by the word “HARASSMENT” hundreds of times in a row (no spaces). Virtual screams of “HARASSMENT” continued. A few cries of “Defund the Police” ensued. She swore she’d be seeking a restraining order against them. Attempts by dozens of other group members to seek clarification, offer gentle behavioral disincentive, or post their best memes as a deescalation tactic were rebuffed with further insults, profanity, and her personal acronymous catchphrase “KMMRA”. That one got used a lot. At one point she posted “KMMRA” hundreds of times in a row — still no spaces, like abstract ASCII art.

When the perpetrator’s tantrum reached its peak, she just kept replying “KMMRA” to anyone who dared question or call her out on anything, or asked what the heck that was even supposed to mean. She insisted it wasn’t a typo, wasn’t a misspelling of “karma”, wasn’t anything the rest of us would ever guess, a bit like when a toddler proudly makes up their first nonsense word. She just kept spamming “KMMRA” in reply to every guess until the thread was deleted and she stopped posting. One member took a video of most of the thread before the Mods or Admins zapped it (I snatched a few screen shots from that for personal recordkeeping), but to this day no one has the foggiest clue what KMMRA means in her mind and literally no one else’s. Not Google. Not Urban Dictionary. Not even Robert Stack on Unsolved Mysteries. The group responded in the only appropriate way: instant KMMRA memes.

One of the best of several contenders. Memework by Andy Fowler.

Sure, it’s entirely possible these two extremely memorable events were unrelated. Maybe the police ejected more than one attendee from the premises within an awfully narrow time frame. Correlation isn’t always causality. Coincidences happen, we hear. Nevertheless…it maybe didn’t help her case when someone dug deeply into the group’s archives and found she’d also broken down during last year’s ICC in exactly the same manner. The line between coincidence and pattern is a thin tightrope.

All that internet drama kept me going for a while and distracted me from my aching limbs for a short time. Hurray for small favors. Eventually the KMMRA jokes waned a tad and my exhaustion and muscle aches regained my full attention. At 7:00 came the P.A. announcement that the exhibit hall was closing. Hundreds of fans remained hopeful that something positive would soon come our way. Lines continued slowly creeping into his booth one by one.

After a few more minutes, the photographer’s light stand was moved off to the side and stopped flashing. This was our first real sign that photo op session 8 had finished at long last. Per the original schedule, autograph session D was supposed to be his very next thing after the very last op. Slowly, lines on the other side of us began creeping in, one by one — most likely VIPs and Ruby’ers.

At 7:25 our line inched ahead, and there was much rejoicing. We entered his booth to find him accompanied by no less than seven different assistants, not including the Celeb Photo Ops staff pulling line-management double duty. One took our ticket; one recommended a pen color; one scolded me to put away my phone (I was taking notes for this very paragraph, not calling a friend or shooting video, I do hereby pinky-swear); one was a spare or something; two stood on either side of the star as he signed. As we got a turn, he seemed unflappable and smiled politely as Anne complimented his performance in Shattered Glass, my favorite of his works to date. And with that, the seventh assistant maintained a firm yet gentlemanly decorum as he used congenial words synonymous with “GET OUT.”

We were all too happy to oblige. At 7:40 p.m., three hours over schedule, we exited his booth, the exhibit hall, and the Convention Center in that order and limped the half-mile back to the car as quickly as possible. It was finished.

Well, for us, anyway. As we understand it, he kept signing until it was time for his premium panel with Dawson. Still more lines had to wait in that hall while he left, did the thing, posed for pics with her for ICC’s Facebook page, then returned to the hall and resumed signing. Based on comments I saw, he was there till at least 10:30 p.m., probably longer. By that point some folks had abandoned ship and gotten refunds instead. If anyone stuck it out to his very last marker stroke, I’d be curious to know whether he did indeed make good on that whole “Saturday-only” agreement.

We fiftysomething geeks were beyond trashed. We couldn’t even go directly to bed afterward. We fetched a fast-food drive-thru dinner, then had to deal with a couple hours’ worth of lingering aftershocks from Friday’s aforementioned adulting obligations. Couldn’t be helped. Even setting that aside, the part where we kept doomscrolling the FB group in morbid curiosity also did us no favors.

…

Sunday morning came far too soon. We parked far away for free again, trudged on down, entered the Convention Center at 8:30 a.m., were permitted back into the hall at 10:30 sharp, returned to the autograph area, blew twenty minutes in a line for an actor who hadn’t shown up yet, decided instead to peruse the couple dozen exhibit hall aisles we hadn’t seen, and bought next to nothing. The place was mercifully less crowded than Saturday had been, bordering on deserted. Quite a few actors showed up bright and early and already entertained lines — Welling, McDonnell, Edward James Olmos, Lou Ferrigno, a masked Wil Wheaton, et al. Their Artists Alley, once my favorite part of every comic-con in every city in every state, may have been ICC’s tiniest yet. The participants were largely people I’d already met and hopefuls selling prints, stickers, buttons, and anime merch I don’t recognize yet.

I did buy one new item: frequent Midwest comic-con vendor Drew Blank, who has a knack for creating fan-merch based on some of my favorite shows of this century, has built upon the success of his “Pillo Pascal” pillowcases and expanded his burgeoning geek fabric-product empire into the world of tote bags. I saw one I simply had to have — had seen it the day before, in fact, being carried by a Christensen fan exiting his booth while we were in Rhys-Davies’ line.

The world needs more What We Do in the Shadows in it in general, and more Matt Berry in particular.

Anne models the Pillo Pascal, for those who didn’t see it here the first time or the second.

Vendors who caught our eye included BYO Lightsaber…

…and Coz3D, one of a few businesses selling items created using 3-D printers.

At the 501st Legion’s area, Anne poses as her own figure that comes with battle-inflamed plantar fasciitis action and possibly negative points of articulation.

At 11:45 we’d basically seen all the vendors and declared early lunch. We tried the Convention Center’s own concession-stand fare over on the east end behind the 501st. My prepackaged ham sandwich was exactly what such things tend to be, but Anne wholly approved of her freshly refried, extra-large tenderloin sandwich, the most Hoosier item on their menu.

We had one last photo op at 1:25. We were the second and third folks in its general-admission line at 12:50. We commenced exactly on time and within minutes were privileged to meet Arthur Darvill, whom we’ve seen in such TV shows as Doctor Who, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, and Broadchurch, whose first season tore our hearts out.

Darvill was rather cheery as we entered, then made the perfect Rory Williams face.

I’d been going back and forth on whether or not to get one last autograph. While I tried to clear my head, we walked back to Gem City Books, always one of my favorite comic-con discount booksellers, and picked up a couple of trades I didn’t know existed. Then I decided to go for one last line.

At 2:00 sharp we returned to the booth of comedy legend John Cleese, he of Monty Python fame and countless other works from A Fish Called Wanda to the Harry Potter series and numerous animated features of varying quality, not to mention one of the best episodes of Cheers. We’d seen him perform live here in Indy last November alongside his daughter Camilla, but we missed out on any meet-and-greet options offered at that event, if any. We and lots of other fans were shocked to see him hitting the comic-con circuit in addition to the comedy circuit.

Cleese’s Saturday line kept infinitely regenerating, so I’d passed on him. He wasn’t there upon our first try Sunday morning, for which he had a tricky schedule with an 11:25 photo op and a 1:00 panel. For reasons of exhaustion and logistics we simply never committed to a single panel for any actor all weekend (I mean, we’d just paid to see him on a stage already). So he’d be our grand finale. We’d been told earlier he would return around 2:30.

One last autograph table. One last actor banner.

Thus we waited and waited and waited again, hoping against hope he’d return early. We watched other actors around us with continuous lines. Michael Rooker exchanged a few fun shouts with someone before concluding his weekend and whipping out a big bottle for company. The delightful Steve Burns from Blue’s Clues kept fielding Nickelodeon fans with fond memories from back in the day. By 3:00 George Takei had no one left in line, thus freeing up a few minutes for his husband Brad to come over and chat with our line (“George will sign your autographs!” he offered) till another round of Trek fans dropped by. Wil Wheaton autographed his booth banner before grabbing his backpack and heading out. Somewhere down inside, a budding frisson of anxiety began to blossom and a voice in my head began screaming that we absolutely cannot take one more hours-long line. I kept my breathing steady and looked to my phone for further distractions.

A few minutes after Brad left us, Mr Cleese arrived behind the curtain via golf-cart chauffeur, played a few rounds of peek-a-boo with us, then took his seat and proceeded to be his elderly yet witty self. He signed my Fawlty Towers DVD set and appreciated compliments for the November gig, including for Camilla, whom he insists gets all her best qualities from her mom.

When Anne took this shot, she honestly didn’t notice who else was in it.

…and at 3:35 we were officially done. On the other side of the hall, John Rhys-Davies’ line was still going strong. Hopefully by the time you read this he’s been allowed to go home.

I bought a few snacks to-go from the Asian snack stand conveniently in our path. We exited the place and limped the half-mile back to the car as quickly as possible once more with very little feeling left in our legs. It was finished. Again.

We got home, collapsed, made the mistake of casually checking the FB group from the comfort of our own chairs only to have drama explode in our faces again.

The same perpetrator, whom we’d all assumed had been banned and who still showed no grasp of basic netiquette that some of us have been advocating for well over two decades now, had returned to the group and resumed her complaints, her all-caps rants, and her continuous invocation of the magic word KMMRA, still bereft of any meaning other than what we observers chose to imbue within it, mostly through more memes. She now claimed she never met Christensen, none of that was related to her, cops still suck, ICC still sucks, ad nauseum. Such is the my-way-or-the-highway attitude common to folks who make scenes in large crowds and reap the consequences of their sowing. Eventually that thread was deleted as well, along with our meme-rich Saturday thread in which KMMRA was named our Word of the Day. (R.I.P., my li’l Thundercats joke.)

It’s been ages since Anne or I walked into that sort of meltdown. It wasn’t our first. Between the two of us we’ve survived Usenet trolls, flame wars, Star Wars message boards, fanfic sites, the social media era, and far worse in-person comic-con disasters. We’re the Goldens. This is who we are and what we do.

The End. Thanks for reading! Lord willing, we’ll see you next con…hopefully one that has a weekend cleared all to itself. Then again, that’s what I said last year, entirely in vain.

Exhausted selfie inside the final hall to Hayden Christensen’s booth. Anakin autograph achievement unlocked.

…

…

…

[wizened sage appears from behind a tree, whispering]

…KMMRA…

[disappears into the shadows]

Midlife Crisis Crossover!

2023-11-06 22:10:01

Basil Fawlty Begs No Pardon: A Night in Indianapolis with John Cleese

6:30 p.m. Sunday night, total darkness thanks to Daylight Savings ending that very day.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: in October my wife Anne and I traveled from Indianapolis to Cincinnati for a live Q&A with TV’s Admiral Picard himself, Sir Patrick Stewart. The 83-year-old Shakespearean thespian and erstwhile starship captain had a new book to sell and thousands of fans to enthrall.

Speaking of American stage appearances by octogenarian Englishmen who costarred in a few landmark TV shows and some notable films, whose tours forbid the taking of photos or video, who’ve been married a few times and whose current wives are over thirty years younger than they are…now for something completely different!

Dateline: Sunday, November 5, 2023 – We didn’t have to leave town to attend “An Evening with the Late John Cleese”, held at the Murat Theatre at the Old National Centre — the same venue where I’d previously caught performances by Bob Newhart, Henry Rollins, “Weird Al” Yankovic, and the Whose Line Is It, Anyway? tour. The celebrated member of the Monty Python’s Flying Circus troupe, the star of the brilliantly awkward sitcom Fawlty Towers, the Academy Award-nominated screenwriter (and costar) of A Fish Called Wanda, and the most pompous Hpgwarts ghost from the Harry Potter movies has made no secret that with three ex-wives to his credit, he is officially not wealthy to this day and remains available for paying gigs such as this very occasion.

We arrived at 6:30 just as the doors were about to open. While we waited, a representative came down the line and offered $20 upgrades to VIP status, which would provide slightly better seats and access to a “VIP lounge” where we could presumably mingle with strangers and sit in slightly different chairs for a few minutes before resigning ourselves to the cramped, old-fashioned seats in their theater. We were surprised the VIP passes hadn’t sold out, but declined the offer. Inside, the merchandise stand sold only two items: $35 T-shirts with Cleese’s grayed silhouette on one side, and $100 autographed event posters. We declined these as well, because there are some instances in which we’re only willing to indulge so far. I later overheard the lady sitting next to me claim those two whole items soon sold out.

Attendees were invited to submit questions in the lobby in advance, though few were ultimately used in the show.

We took our seats shortly before 7. The digital tickets stated a 7:30 start time, but a standee in the lobby said 8:00. Either way, we settled in and appreciated our delightfully unobstructed view of the stage across three rows of empty seats in front of us, which could have been ours for a few dollars more. At 7:35, out came the opening act who hadn’t been named on the bill — standup comedian Camilla Cleese, daughter of John, who surely underwent a thorough auditioning process to win this coveted gig over other applicants.

I haven’t kept up with the standup world pretty much since George Carlin’s twilight years (apart from John Mulaney’s oeuvre) and can’t speak to how her material stacks up against current practitioners. Like her father’s works, her barbs skewed dark-humored at times; punchlines were more hit than miss. Subjects included how her height vexes others (she’s 6-foot-1), the post-COVID dating world, and her most recent stepmother, who’s extremely close in age to her older sister/John’s eldest daughter Cynthia. (“We got a new middle child in the family.”) Fun trivia: Cleese’s wife is seven years older than Patrick Stewart’s.

At 7:52 she introduced her father (“You know him as the star of Pink Panther 2!”), who replaced her on stage and had a chair waiting for him, next to a small table with lit candle and glass of clear fluid. He thanked us all for welcoming him to “the outskirts of northern Kentucky”, an amuse-bouche of yuks to come that earned him a round of good-natured booing.

Dressed as comfortably as Patrick Stewart had been (and with similar loafers, in white rather than pink), Cleese held court on what he likes to call “naughty” humor, very much the Monty Python stock-in-trade, and the use of “taboo subjects” as punchlines, which gets tougher to sort as societal sects grow increasingly humorless in decreeing what can or cannot be mocked, based on the inherent assumption that they rule the world and can exert such controls. He tried to distinguish between “affectionate teasing” and “nasty teasing”, but the two moments in which he cited the example of “the extreme woke” as comedy gatekeepers may in turn have gatekept some listeners from that particular semantic path. Another, tinier audience minority may have cheered a little too loudly at the label’s invocation.

To the Extremely Online, who willingly immerse themselves in such environments every day, his “affectionate teasing”/”nasty teasing” dichotomy may feel imperceptible or even bogus. Such environments shouldn’t have to be that way, ruled as they frequently are by domineering frat-boys of all political stripes who think every encounter between two or more humans deserves to be held with all the decorum of a drunken barroom brawl. But here we are and here they rot. As a fat four-eyed cishet white male Christian Hoosier anti-partisan quasi-centrist comics-collecting pretentious introverted bumpkin geek blogger over 50 who grew up poor and basically fatherless and didn’t date till I was 19…I’m familiar with how it feels to be insulted, both as an individual and as an involuntary category member. I can sense the dichotomy a little more firmly now than when I was 13 and a bit more prone to tears. It took a while to develop the tools to cope and/or exit for someplace better. But that’s just me. Then again, I don’t hold sway over crowds.

That said…as Camilla pointed out, he’s of Monty Python. Offense was kind of their thing.

Some of his jokes were met with awkward silences, at which he cackled whenever he’d anticipated that response. The theater held its collective breath when he brought up the subject of “racial jokes”…only to exhale when the next few old-fashioned minutes were devoted to mocking various specific European nations — the Greek, the Swiss, the Scottish, etc. It’s a familiar construct to fellow Gen X-ers who grew up on those sad 1970s “Polack” jokes (a forefather of the 1980s “dumb blonde” jokes). As one might expect from an elder Englishman, the French were of course a prime target. (Why do the French have so many civil wars? So they can win one once in a while. How do you defend Paris from an advancing army? They don’t know, it’s never been tried.) The closest he came to anything “racial” was a pair of hoary Jewish jokes, one of which he said was given to him by his Jewish ex-son-in-law, screenwriter Ed Solomon. (I’d just encountered the same joke the other day on Twitter, minus the “Jewish” part.)

The audience wasn’t 100% white, for what that’s worth, but were overwhelmingly gray-haired, as Camilla noted more than once from the stage. The evening’s loudest heckler protested his slagging of Cleveland, which he called “a dump” and wondered aloud how anyone could live there willingly without armed guards keeping them in.

As a sort of olive branch proffered across the ever-widening generation gap, a surprising number of minutes in the show were devoted to showing clips of fun moments from Cleese’s storied past, which filled time and let him continue resting. Samples included:

• “The Fish Slapping Dance”
• “The Queen Victoria Handicap”
• The Mr. Creosote sketch from Monty Python’s Meaning of Life
• The Black Knight duel from Monty Python and the Holy Grail
• A montage of the Yorkshire terriers that Michael Palin’s bumbling assassin slaughters in A Fish Called Wanda

Cleese paid tribute to Graham Chapman, his longtime castmate and dear friend who died in 1989 at 48, with a clip from the eulogy he delivered at Chapman’s televised service, which of course included moments that pushed back against what the deceased often rejected as “mindless good taste”. Complementing this was a short, bawdy anecdote involving rude misuse of a gin-‘n’-tonic. Still another Chapman story would come later in the night, regarding a complication in the Python cast’s visit to Dachau.

At 8:30, less than an hour in, Cleese announced a 20-minute intermission so he could go rest or whatever. He’s a year older than Patrick Stewart and had dealt with more than his share of health issues, such as pre-cancerous growth removals and so forth. It’s one of the differences no one ever complains about between live theater and today’s double-feature-length movies.

The closest we came to getting a photo of our special guest. We gotta be us.

At 8:50 the Cleeses retook the stage, both seated. Camilla (“my saber-toothed daughter”) held the contents of the audience question-boxes. To their surprise, none of us asked about African or European swallows. Cleese the Elder digressed frequently, ruminating on fans with “Don’t mention the war” tattoos, the upside of cannibalism, this one time in Hong Kong when he was fed poodle, Camilla’s two adorable rescue dogs (he finds it much harder grieving dead pets than dead friends), that time a Danish dentist laughed at A Fish Called Wanda so hard that he died in the theater (and later had a comedy festival named after him), his lifelong love of cheese, the fact that his family’s original name was Cheese, and this other time a UK cab driver mistook him for George Clooney. Nobody had asked about any of this. But he is 84, so.

The two of them also recounted memorable audience questions from past shows, such as “Did the Queen kill Diana?” (clearly an armchair detective barking in the wrong forest) and “If you were an aircraft component part, which would you be?” (a joystick, of course) and “Does Marjorie Taylor Greene weigh more than a duck?” Upon that last one, a few minutes’ mandatory mockery of terrible 2020s Republican politicians ensued. (I’m not sure either of them pronounced “Boebert” correctly. Not that she’s earned the courtesy of accuracy.) Cleese conceded this bit was a fish-in-a-barrel exercise: “It’s very difficult being a comedian these days. They’re doing it for us.”)

Topics actually brought up by the Indianapolis audience:

• How George Harrison personally financed Monty Python’s Life of Brian after reading the screenplay and deciding he really wanted to watch that movie
• “What question do you wish you’d been asked that you’ve never been asked?” (His answer: “What question do you wish you’d been asked that you’ve never been asked?”)
• When asked to recount a prank played on a Python member, he told us about a phone call to Michael Palin — who was in Helsinki filming one of his numerous, straight-faced travel specials — during which he pretended to be a documentarian.

…honestly, I think that was about it. At one point Camilla dropped all the cards on the floor while Dad was talking, but it didn’t seem like rehearsed slapstick.

Our time with the Cleeses concluded at 9:34, but not before entertaining us with one last archival clip to round out the clipfest. The five surviving Pythons appeared at the 1998 Aspen Comedy Festival to be interviewed by fellow comedian Robert Klein. For the sake of making the reunion as complete as possible, the quintet brought along the jarred ashes of the aforementioned, departed Mr. Chapman, who in spirit managed to steal the scene from beyond the grave. It was incontrovertibly our audience’s biggest laugh of the evening. Well, that and the French jokes, which might not have endeared him to Jean-Luc Picard.

Monty Python and The Holy Grail - Black Knight HD

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