Captain's blog: 2003/09

Posted Tuesday, September 16, 2003 at 9/16/2003 04:31:27 PM

Tara just posted my Allison Mack fan encounter at Girl Friday! ( fan encounters -> Robert’s Fan Encounter or click my photo under the "breaking news") as well as much more Allison photos/clips by Ali who also went last Sunday - see the gallery on Allison-Mack.com.

Again, my many thanks to Tara for posting the news on Allison-Mack.com, which was how I found out about this charity event in the first place!

Posted Saturday, September 13, 2003 at 9/13/2003 07:18:06 PM

Woohoo! the photos from last Sunday’s Celebrity Charity Challenge event!. (for my earlier write-up on what happened click here)

Note: most photos didnt turn out so well (blurry)

It’s Allison Mack!



In the Ontario room with talented young actress Allison Mack. (plays the role of Chloe, aspiring journalist/ editor of the Torch / the-other-important-girl of Clark’s life in Smallville)



A bad blurry photo of the stage, but you can still see Allison Mack sitting on the steps, wearing her red shirt, front row center. Orlando Brown walking off beside her. The various pillow "hearts" which were used as team scoreboards, hung on the black backdrop behind the celebs.


After the show:



Another blurry photo...this is of all the stage volunteers. Hilary Duff came over after the show to personally thank us and pose with us for this photo - she’s in the very center, one arm barely over Adrian =)




After the show, the outside still being quite busy with people. You can faintly see the "Ontario Room" sign.




Group photo taken of staffers and volunteers that were still there at ~10pm after the show.




My fav pic - group photo this time with me in it, front row center.


In case you missed my earlier note, you can read a more detailed "what happened" account of it all, right below in my previous post.

Posted Tuesday, September 09, 2003 at 9/9/2003 01:53:52 AM

Hilary Duff’s (16th) Birthday Benefit for Children "Celebrity Charity Challenge" last night was a lot of fun. As one of the dressed-all-in-black team of 8-10 stage volunteers, I was part of that dashing onto the central open floor area to equip the celebrity teams w/ their various props and toys for the games, got to watch them play with our wonderfully close, unblocked view, then dashing back again bringing all the equipment/props off and out of sight.

Celebrity list: in addition to the celebs already mentioned on the earlier list in the national post, here are a few more names so you get an idea who was there:

• Orlando Brown(That’s So Raven)
  
• Lauren Collins (Degrassi: The Next Generation)
  
• Johnathan Fairchild (Recording Artist)
  
• Shane Kippel (Degrassi: The Next Generation),
  
• Shadia Simmons (Strange Days at Blake Holsey High),
  
• Holly Stell (Recording Artist)
  

SO... how did everything go? and did I manage to get any pics w/ celebs (of course!)

Showing up & passing gift bags
I showed up late around 4:30pm, but managed to find where I was sort of needed - helping distribute the club monaco gift bags to little boys and girls ( and adults who claimed they were representing their boys and girls ) as the crowd exited an earlier event that just finished (probably the High Tea with Hilary event).

Setup work
Then I spent the next bit in the Canadian room (the huge 1200 seat or so room where the actual event is taking place in the evening) . I flattened out some bubbles in the duct taped team location signs on the wooden floor open area - this central squarish area like a gym or dance room floor, was where the celebrity teams would compete in the games, and it was in front of the raised platform where Hilary would sit and judge the action. Flanking the stage and its backdrop, on both sides were massive projection screens. The seating basically was on the left and to the right of this open area/wood floor, if you are facing straight at the stage.

Anyway, I then helped Alex (another volunteer) with the ladder and putting up a "Happy Birthday Hilary" ~15 - 20foot banner while two other volunteers Nina and Rachael, mostly Nina, went around the whole room fixing the candlesticks that weren’t supposed to be falling off from the underside of the chairs (one of the games involved the audience searching under their chair for candlesticks ). Someone went through all the trouble of duct taping all these candlesticks to the underside of the seats and they still fell off! More tape was used and it seemed to work.

The happy birthday banner wasn’t so successful. Multiple people who seemed to be in charge, would give us advice without staying around to see if it worked, then the next person would come and give us totally different advice so that by the end after several such people, the banner was so badly abused from trying all these different ideas it just got taken down. *Sigh*. Next time, we would just immediately pin it directly to the backdrop cloth, no fancy fishline hanging from the lamp posts.

Thus, when you watch the event on cable (they said it was going to be rebroadcast only on cable) you will not see any happy birthday hilary banner on top of the row of huge felt-cushion hearts in the backdrop.

When that was done I think I went over to help a bit with hauling crate after crate of confetti-style Wonderbread into the adjacent Toronto room (Wonderbread was one of the donors)

Enlisted
Then Jennifer (stage coordinator perhaps?) picked out volunteers wearing all black and gathered us (I had black dress pants and shoes, and my black thinkquest t-shirt, the logo hidden neatly by the pink volunteer badge). She told us a lil bit about what we needed to do and we did a rehearsal, figured out and marked on the center where we needed to arrange the binds (she called that "scoring the floor" in their stage lingo), and basically we then stayed in the room w/ the props/toys while jennifer went off w/ other things. I think it was the "Ontario" room, and we were in one corner which opens out to the huge stage in the candian room. The rest of the Ontario room was in fact nice tables and candles and food set out for the celebrities to gather before and after the event! How convenient.

Then everything happened quite fast so i’m probably not listing things in the order they happened but oh well here goes:

Wonderful Wonderbread
I got hungry so I took 2 bags from the Toronto room and brouoght it over to munch on. ( I forgot to bring some dinner). One of the event people remarked "bread and water - like prison!") The other volunteers either ate a little bit before, or would rather go hungry than eat the strange confetti-patterned bread (Kristin) ! And then there was Adrian who was said he was well sustained by just a single meal and a pepsi for the entire day.

Ushering
We wandered around a while between the props area and the big Canadian room where the screens were playing one of the Hilary Duff music videos. The audience was coming in, getting seated. Noticed Kristin directing the crowd of people seeminlgy by herself so I went over to help a bit (but she wasn’t actually alone , Dorna was there too). So I helped people find their seat, whether it was left BB 23 or right A 3 or whatever the ticket said. Very good thing that Dorna gave all volunteers the rough seating map.

Allison Mack photo op!
The moment came when the celebs were led into the Ontario room to eat a bit , and were just hanging out. Adrian (another volunteer) got his one wish tonight (only one?) which was a big hug with Hilary Duff. As for me, I finally brought a camera this time! So I casually made my way over to Allison Mack and successfully asked for a photo w/ her . She was instantly ready and composed for the pict, like reflex action! And im so very glad she was that fast, because before my co-volunteer could take a second pict the booming voice of Hilary Duff’s huge intimidating "acting coach" intervened and pretty much made it clear he wanted us volunteers to shoo, go away so we quickly retreated to our dank little volunteer corner w/ its props and bins near the doors =(

Annoyed an angry god..
I think he was near losing it the second time when some of us slowly started resuming our chat with the celebs from our little corner/behind the food table ..

I can understand the guy tho, he had a real job to get done that evening and didnt know us ( I dont think anyone even told him to expect volunteers in the same room so that surprise probably annoyed him already) , he didnt want there to any chance anything we did would lead to delays/get in the way, really didnt want to have to deal with any potential problems.

But we were a nice, generally quiet, and well-behaved bunch of volunteers.. really! So I still feel he should have been nicer about it. oh well. Not everyone can remain consistently pleasant, polite and exhibit calm and grace under pressure, so its all the more amazing if you come across someone who does - I’d say Jennifer and Dorna (volunteer coordinator) are good examples. Really admire and respect them for that.

Wandering, cheerleaders, starting..
I also wandered around and came to where the 8 cheerleaders were in the open area (also volunteers, but they wore the white Kids With A Cause shirt and had ribbons for cheerleading the crowds, and took part in the games). They stood on the central wood floor area in front of the stage, standing where each of the 8 teams would gather. I got the evening program off of Jesse, helped her check on the whereabouts of another volunteer (Chris) who took her cell phone, ran some errands before Dorna ushered me off the area cuz the first part event was actually starting and being filmed right behind me - ack!

Posted at 9/9/2003 01:52:24 AM

(Continued)

So knowing the event was starting and that I was getting filmed if I didnt get out of the way I quickly got off and retreated to the area beside the door where our props (and celebs) would come out of.

Celebrity procession
At some point after some intro announcements, celebrities started their procession out of the ontario room and onto the open area in front of the stage. There would be an intro that ended on the name of the celeb, which would probably be the cue for the celeb to emerge at that instant, then the celeb walked toward the stage, then this repeated with the next celeb’s intro..etc . Allison Mack to my surprise was among the first few (the second one, I think) to step out so by the time I scrambled my camera out, I would have only gotten her back so i didnt manage to snap a photo there.

The ones that emerged with the most impact (like Aaron Carter) were the ones who didnt rush, took their time smiling and waving confidently while walking slowly enough for the audience to have enough time for a decently long enough cheer. On the other hand a few walked too soon and too fast, so that when the intro was done they were also done walking, the next intro was going to be read so the audience never had a chance to cheer. Well a lot of them were really really young so I guess the ones that did do a great walk-up like Aaron, Nick Carter and Orlando Brown were experienced.

Let the games begin...
So with the celeb teams formed and the games started, we got quite busy (except for when they skipped 2 of the planned games and the 1-2 games that didnt require pre-setup). Back in the Ontario room, all the games were organized in bins or in some way grouped neatly apart and labelled "game 1, game 2, game 3, etc so it was quite straightforward to setup 1, cleanup 1, setup 2, cleanup 2 etc. We didnt have many crazy problems, except maybe that once where we turned over everything in the ontario room because we needed 1 more bag of balloons and the game that required the balloon bags was starting.. ultimately I think we worried about nothing - we had 8 all along just wasnt counting properly or something. The only way to avoid something like this wud be to always prepare extra..

Down on all fours
Then there was the "Find the Keys to Hilary’s heart" where the game involved 8 bins of styrofoam packing (for each of the 8 celeb teams) with 6 keys in each bin that the celeb teams had to find as fast as they could, attatch it to the supplied keychain and race over to give that to Hilary. So you can imagine the mess as eveyone dug in and just flung styrofoam everywhere. Tip: should have placed large large clear sheet spread next time. because it was a nightmare for us stage ninjas to clean up, no broom available until much much later, so in the meantime we went up all on our hands and knees and paper plates scooping up the mess as fast as we could, while Sugar from YTV who was the MC, tried distracting the audience as long as possible. It was never cleaned up this way , we just brought as much as we could and then later when the brooms came , 2 volunteers went up during some other game(that didnt involve the centre-most area), to clean up.

Big furry ball of teddy bears
The teddy bear one was also quite a hilarious challenge.. I wasnt sure I remember what the teams did to compete, but all I recall is being told to help handle lots of teddy bears, then having later to scram onstage to each grab as large a heap of it as possible and get them all back using just our bare arms... afterwards i had quite a few strands of the teddy bear hair on me.

Relay
But most of the time it was amazing and funny the way we organized ourselves to get things done, even if it wasnt entirely neat - like at the end of the game involving soccer balls, a few gathered the balls on the open area and passed it to volunteers at the door, who relayed it in turn to volunteers further in the door, who then placed it back in the room but when we really needed to speed things up they just flew in all directions into the ontario room, over our heads, to our sides, whatever worked to get these off the game arena and into the room.

And on it went..
And we really enjoyed our spectacular unobstructed view where we stood watching celebrities do these funny things (competing to see who could wrap themselves completely in toilet paper, for instance) all to accumulate points, represented by hearts that got posted onto these 8 big felt heart-shaped pillows which reprseented the scoreboard of each of the 8 teams.. thus the concepts of filling her heart, winning hilary’s heart, etc =)

I dont remember who finally won, but in the end there was the uniquely written birthday song to Hilary, which I only remember the funny line "..you’re so beautiful, (slight pause) AND SO HOT! " sung by a guy celeb who stood on the stage beside her . Then celebs grouped on stage for a big group photo. Allison Mack was conveniently front row centre of the group, so I happily took some photos.

Clearing the way
Jennifer then gathered us into the Ontario room, and with her touch of people-savvy skills she praised us and thanked us as heartfully and sincerely as she could (well, she was going to do that anyway) , putting us in a good cooperative mood, and then asked us to do the final clean up, which wasnt that bad - just had to gather beach balls in the bins, soccer balls littered everywhere rounded up, prop bins piled up and neat and teddy bears in the cardboard boxes pushed aside.

Hilary Duff group pic
With everything neat and tidy there was now a clear corridor for the celebs to walk in, which they did. Then Hilary Duff came over to thank us personally, and as part of that thank-you, posed for a group picture with us so that was great. Then the celebs left to perhaps their hotel rooms or something, and we volunteers wandered a bit (we did maybe some minor moving stuff into the Toronto room) but mostly just mingled out into the reception area where the audience was coming out.

Post-show
I think i snapped a picture of the crowd, then the chandalier in the reception, the empty stage, (actually if I werent so busy w/ setup and if I had a tripod, I could have done a "before", "during", and "after" 360 degree series of photos so I could stitch them into a Quicktime VR, would have been fun way to document the event)

And then when there were less people and the staff were less busy, I managed to get remaining volunteers/staffers from Lenz Entertainment like Yoko (the cheerful voice behind the phone line for this event) , and other people involved for a last big group picture . (they weren’t in the Hilary Duff group pic cuz that was only for the 10 stage volunteers). So that was great.

Goodbye, farewell..
I got ppl’s emails so I could send them photos later, got 2 bags of wonderbread (to eat on the subway as I was getting hungry again), got warm parting handshakes and hand slaps w/ various volunteers, and a few hugs from Dorna before I finally headed home around 10:30pm.

So thats it.. had a wondeful amazing weekend , had lots of fun and contributed towards a good cause. Hope it raised tons of money for the Kids With A Cause, Hospital For Sick Children and Park Lane School. Looking forward to picking up the event photos on friday.

Posted Saturday, September 06, 2003 at 9/6/2003 11:54:59 PM

Amazing day. I actually got to go to the Pearson airport today to help Dorna (our fearless leader / volunteer coordinator) with picking up the talented young actress Allison Mack (one of the main characters from SMALLVILLE, she plays Chloe Sullivan, the aspiring journalist/editor of the Torch). She’s here to do the Kids With A Cause "Celebrity Charity Challenge" at the Royal York Hotel tomorrow w/ Hilary Duff and numerous other youthful actors/actresses/celebrities to help raise money for the Hospital for Sick Children and Park Lane School.

note : I should probably write up a nice "proper" fan encounter article and send it over to allison-mack.com or any of those wonderful fan sites so devoted to her ... I’m not really one of those long-time fans of her , just a recently converted fan of Smallville.

So imagine how unexpected (and funny) this is for me... I find out only yesterday (on allison-mack.com ) that she’s coming to Toronto for this charity event, I called to find out if they need help w/ this event, told them this morning how I found out about this event as part of doing research trying to start my own Smallville fan site and then ... got offered to do this airport run! Didn’t expect to see her until tomorrow so you can imagine how I was totally unprepared - I had no camera, and struggling on the spot to figure out how to best make use of this sudden opportunity.

Originally I thought I could do some kind of interview and write an article to go towards my non-existent fan site, but then I realized I actually don’t really know that much background info on Allison so I might end up asking really basic redundant fact-fact-fact questions she might have answered a zillion times already. And I had trouble thinking up meaningful or unique questions that would interest fans, questions that might not have been asked already (well that was another thing, I havent really looked at other interviews she’s had) so I ended up with taking the low-key approach, no interview, just casual chat and write it up later as a fan encoutner.

Plus some of the coordinators apparently were concerned about not doing anything that would possibly annoy the celebrities on arrival (asking for an interview when they just got off the plane maybe?..or the scenario where a fanatic fan and volunteer overzealously greets the celebrity making a bad impression. But Im not a fanatic fan so it doesn’t really apply to me.."hi I’m Robert...um...welcome to Toronto" was about all I said)

So we all chatted a bit on the ride back, Dorna updated her on some of what was happening and I asked her little questions and chatted a bit about her charity involvement. She seems like a mature, confident-knows-what-she’s-doing (like her character on Smallville), hi-energy person. Fast talker - but never overwhelming and always clear. Although she modestly says she doesnt have a huge fan base she does appreciate the various fan groups eg cult-of-chloe, fans who donate money in her name for her Make-A-Wish Foundation, or petitions on her behalf to the producers of the show about changes/improvements =) And she really is the person taking the disposa-kodak-cam photos for her online WB-hosted allison-blog- she had some cameras in her bag. She was involved with charity work early, for instance with the Make-A-Wish Foundation since 14 or so and has been able to keep helping because most of it isn’t very personally demanding- donations of autographed paraphanelia, occassional small-scale parties for kids. However the Kids With A Cause is more about personal charity - celebrities doing hands-on charitable projects, which she regrets she hasn’t been able to take part in more because of of it being so hands-on that she couldn’t always be available for their many projects. but the hands-on participatory nature of the work is also why she likes this charity, so this is one of the events she’s been able to take part in. Apparently this is also the Canadian branch of the Kids With A Cause charity that is also being launched or at least announced at this event. We’ll see how that goes.

Today was definitely one of those amazing days I look back and say "arrg. wish I could have done more by doing such and such..." but then I realize.. hey, its all good, its a learning experience, and I had fun. Did what I could and will just do better next time.

Speaking of which... i’ve packed my dad’s old 35mm camera so that in the event I really still can’t find a digital cam from someone (so I can instantly post pictures online) then I will at least have SOME pictures later.

Posted Monday, September 01, 2003 at 9/1/2003 11:49:02 AM

Yesterday was the last day of volunteering for me at Torcon3. Went to a human-computer interface discussion panel in the morning before heading out to lunch in the little simcoe park right across the street. There was a car parked from New York parked there since yesterday (a lot of conference attendees seem to come from NY) with a few funny bumper stickers - "yes, as a matter of fact I am a ROCKET SCIENTIST" and my favourite bumper sticker:



There weren’t any discussion panel/workshops on the schedule that interested me so I decided to walk/explore the waterfront, so I went as far as the Toronto Music Garden and the harbourfront comm. centre. First time I’ve been there so I explored all the circular/spiral paths and I think I must be covered with plenty of pollen through brushing against so many flowers. In the meanwhile, jet planes and stunt planes were roaring overhead since the air show was taking place. I sat down for some quiet reading on a wooden bench in the garden, (along with 3-4 bees who didnt seem to mind my presence and were happily chewing away at the wood with their mandibles). Then a cyclist parked her bicycle on the bench to my right and then, started doing Yoga for an entire hour before she too, sat down to read a book. I suppose this is just a typical day at the Toronto Music Garden.

Headed back to eat and volunteer as an usher for the evening Masquerade event. The contestants and maybe a third of the audience was dressed up, as seen in the pic on the right. There were costumes like this based on well known sci-fi/fantasy but also a lot of original works.

Gord Rose was the funny MC, who announced the entry info, and then the contestant appeared on the stage with pre-recorded audio and a little performance (some entrants were very.. not fun.. simply walked across the stage and exited!). The format was 17 entires followed by a canadian sci-fi/fantasy fashion show(basically showing past canadian winners of any similar contests) , then followed by 17 more entries so there were a total 34 entries. Each entry ranged from one person to a whole group, age ranging from the little 8 year old or so dressed as the DC comic character Flash running arouind the stage, to the master category folks with very elaborate (and maybe expensive?) ornate dress, and some with bit of special FX/pyrotechnics - There was one involving this dragon vs. this tiny knight which was a puppet (perhaps as a contrast and to emphasis the dragon’s size) . The dragon spew out this colored smoke to simulate fire which got rid of the knight’s flimsy sword. So then the knight takes out marshmellows for the dragon to roast, and then they both exit- with the narrator announcing: "And the moral of the story is: ALWAYS bring a snack" =p So there were a couple short funny ones like that.

There were a couple tech glitches or entries needing more set-up time by the stage ninjas so they would put up a tech difficulties slide on the massive projection screen, but with the word "technical" crossed out with the word "MC" instead, so it would say MC difficulties, and the MC who would then fill the time with jokes about the entrants, tech difficulties, or just canadian jokes (do you know how to tell who the canadians are in a room like this? stomp on their everyone’s foot until someone says "oh im sorry!") , so overall it was quite entertaining.

Aside from a large puddle near the water tank that had to be blocked off with chairs and mopped up, and a damsel-in-distress who couldn’t see her way (something wrong with her contacts perhaps) so I helped lead her to the ladies’ room ( strangely, tho it was only a brief moment and 8-9 footsteps to the washroom, it felt like it was one of the highlights of the evening, like I accomplished some great heroic feat... maybe I’ve got a dormant hero complex or something...anyway..), the event logistically speaking went pretty well.


photo thanks to Larry, who has more photos including pics from the HUGOS on saturday.