Doctors, lawyers and Steve the copier guy get their geek on this month at Archon
By Daniel Durchholz
Photograph courtesy of Linda Zang
Nearly everyone has been to a place that could be mocked as “something out of the Star Wars cantina scene”—but there’s one local event where that would actually register as a compliment.
At Archon, an annual St. Louis–area science-fiction/fantasy convention, you’ll see Aqualishes, Ithorians and Rodians (oh my!) mingling with characters from Star Trek, the world of anime and just about anything else from the SF/fantasy omniverse. The masquerade—just one facet of the four-day extravaganza, which will be held October 5–8 at the Gateway Center in Collinsville, Ill., this year—has grown significantly more elaborate over the years.
“One year we had two guys dressed up as an AT-AT, the giant mechanical walker from the second Star Wars movie,” says Archon chairwoman Michelle Zellich. “They called it ‘your basic horse costume’—one guy in the front, one in the back. If you can make a costume of it, someone will get up onstage with it.”
Archon, celebrating its 30th anniversary this year, has grown from about 250 participants in its inaugural year to this year’s expected crowd of 2,400, which begs the question: Who are these people?
“Just about anyone,” Zellich says. “It might be the guy sitting at the desk next to you and you would never know. We find it’s mostly people in their 20s or people in their 50s. There’s a hole in the middle where people seem to think they’re too sophisticated to come.”
Zellich says that the SF/fantasy interests of most Archon attendees are normal, not the unhealthy obsessions often portrayed in the media, but, she allows, “There are some who take everything to the extreme, and, of course, they’re the ones who catch everyone’s attention.”
Also on the bill this year: a participatory screening of Pirates of the Caribbean in which attendees are invited to don costumes and yell comments at the screen. “Sort of a cross between Mystery Science Theater 3000 and Rocky Horror,” Zellich says.
And don’t forget the filking sessions.
The what?
It may sound like an activity that involves getting a little Wookiee, but filking is actually a nickname—arrived at by way of a typo and a contraction—for SF–themed folksinging.
“A long time ago someone was typing up a program for a convention, and, instead of ‘folk songs,’ they typed ‘filk songs,’ Zellich says. “For some reason, it caught on.”
