A Memorial for a Great Piece of Fan Memorabilia

There used to exist, in our house, a pair of Buddy’s Bar glasses, products from the NBC show Friday Night Lights.

During the very frantic week of Tax Day, Passover and Easter, Squirt broke one.*

*(On a personal note, I think that this more than makes up for ME breaking the purple Fiestaware mug that Squirt insisted that we use to outfit our kitchen when we moved into our house.  She demanded Fiestaware even though I am one of the biggest klutzes in the world and have been known to break breakable objects in record time and spectacular fashion.  I broke the mug two years ago, pulling it out of the dishwasher, if you must know the whole story. She was able to get another purple Fiestaware mug BUT we cannot get another Buddy glass because NBC Universal no longer sells it.  So I think that we are now even, if not me being ahead. Now back to the post.)

We loved Friday Night Lights.  Squirt watched it first, in real time, on NBC and then On Demand.  As usual, I was behind the curve, so I watched it much later on DVD.  Squirt’s favorite complaint on the show was that it was marketed wrong.  For a casual football viewer, I initially thought the show wasn't for me.  I now know that that was/is wrong.  The show, which is about high school football, is not about football.  It IS about the life and times of the residents of Dillon, Texas and even sometimes, about the town itself.  

Also we LOVED the finale of the show, which did what few shows manage to accomplish.  It gave us time to say goodbye to the characters that we had gotten to know and love and care about.  It wasn’t too concerned about wrapping up "the story" (which it kind of did anyway) but it really let us, the viewers, leave the town of Dillon with a smile.  

But, this is not a post about Friday Night Lights.  This is a post about products for fans.

These glasses were nearly perfect as fan products because…

They represent a part of the universe of the show.  Not the show itself.  Nowhere on the glass were the words “Friday Night Lights”.  These glasses were simply Buddy’s bar glasses.  Almost as though we could have traveled to Dillon Texas, perhaps on a road-trip, had lunch at Buddy’s bar and bought the glasses home as a souvenir.  Almost as though, we could have lived, for a brief moment, in the world/town that we loved.  

But you’d have to have watched the show to know that these were fan products.  To everyone else, they were just bar glasses. Which are also useful, don’t get me wrong.

We also have shirts that tout East Dillon Lions, “Clear Eyes, Full Hearts, Can’t Lose” and the Dillon Panthers, which we wear probably more often that you would imagine.  

We do NOT have any shirts that just say “Friday Night Lights”.  

I hate fan products that are just the name of the show.  

I find it lazy.  

Too many fan products simply put the name of the show or the movie in an interesting font and slap it on everything, regardless of whether the item relates to the show at all. It also assumes fans want to shout their fandom to every passing stranger, instead of getting the thrill of the secret smile or the head nod when another fan recognizes the reference.

Because NBC no longer sells the Buddy’s bar glasses, we have moved our remaining glass to a more revered place (read: higher shelf).  

But this glass is way more to me than a piece of fan memorabilia.  To me, it is a piece of the Dillon Texas that I spent 5 seasons getting to know and love; not just a product from a show.

- Sis

Adventures in AwesomeCon 2014

As most of you know I am Fan; sometimes a fangirl, but rarely a fanatic.  In my Fandom, I decided to bite the bullet and attend AwesomeCon 2014 in DC.  I have never been really that interested in meeting the actors of the works that I love because, let’s get real, they did not CREATE them.  And I do understand that they are not their characters.  So as much as I would like to meet Zoe Washburne cuz she kicks @$$; if I get the chance to meet Gina Torres, I might pass.  Don’t get me wrong, I think think she is an amazing and talented actress and I have seen and loved her in everything she does but she is no Zoe Washburne.  

Thus, while I was excited to go to AwesomeCon, my expectations were extremely managed. I was very pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed myself and how much fun the whole experience was. 

I attended this event with two of my oldest guy friends.  You can understand that the things they were excited about varied slightly from the things I was excited about.  Because we are “adults”, and we have been friends for a long time, we compromised.  I agreed to go to the Zombie Survival and Star Wars panels with them and they reluctantly agreed to go to the “Representation is Important” panel with me.  

This "Representation is Important" panel was a discussion about how comics have a reputation for being for white guys of a certain age. And what comics creators are doing to help the increase the representation of diversity in the world of comics.  The session was moderated by Alex Simmons (@blackjackAD), who was fantastic in his own right and who I would like to just sit down and talk to for hours.  The panel consisted of the sharp witted Amy Chu (@AmyChu), soft spoken Alitha Martinez, spunky Laura Lee Gulledge (@WhoIsLauraLee) and Jeremy Whitley (@jrome58), the enlightened white male. I loved hearing the stories and experiences of people trying to bring diversity into comics. I was delighted to discover all of these wonderful new, books, authors and illustrators that I will be following for years to come. 

Later that night, over some beers before we went to go see ‘Captain America - The Winter Soldier’, the boys could not stop talking about the Representation panel.  We all had a very lively and engaging discussion, about representation and diversity in comic books, movies, TV shows and music.  I learned how they see things; I shared how I saw things.  Ideas and experiences were shared all around. 

The thing is that these are guys I have known FOR YEARS (pre-puberty even!).  They are like brothers to me and of course we share the same interests, hence attending AwesomeCon, but we had never had this discussion before or anything like it.  I got multiple thank yous for making them go to this panel. They said it was best, most engaging and enlightening panel they attended.

I also purchased Page by Paige by Laura Lee Gulledge for Sis, the introvert. She now has a graphic novel with a protagonist like her. She is really excited.  YAY! A convert! 

Squirt

Pop Culture Mementos

I was going through the bookshelf the other day and I pulled out my old tattered copy of “A Little Princess”. This was one of my favorites as a early reader and a pre-teen. I didn't even have to open the book, just viewing the fraying and torn green cover reminded me both of the story which I LOVED and my memories of reading it. I could remember how old I was was, where I read it and what the weather was like. I remembered how I cried every time, which was sometimes embarrassing if I was reading it in public. I remembered how the first time I read it, I cried so hard that my mother thought that something was very wrong, and how we laughed about it later.

Just gazing at that old book in my hands, I realized, of course, that I could read it again. And learn something new, both about the book and myself. And that is amazing! This piece of pop culture, well-entwined with my memories and my childhood, can still be accessed and consumed and it will be new and different.

And I think it is both the power to contain complex memories that are kind of meta but also to keep creating more complex memories that give pop culture mementos their power. Unlike a piece of sea glass that you pick up to remember a good day at the beach with your family or a rose pressed into a book to remind you of your first Valentine, I can go back to “A Little Princess” and have a very different interaction with the story. I might see things now from a perspective that I could not have envisioned when I read it at 12 years old. I might even fall out of love with it (unlikely), but it always offers another experience, merely with the simple opening of a book or turning of a page.

But I'll never be able to go back to that beach or back to the time before my first kiss. And that piece of sea glass will never give me any more insight on what would happen after that day on that beach. And the rose will crumble into dust, both leaving only memories. But pop culture mementos are portals to both the past and a completely different present. 

- Sis