JapanFest Madness
Christy and I woke up early Friday morning, loaded up the car with kimono, and drove up to Atlanta. We had to be at the Gwinnett Civic Center by ten- thirty, so we were out the door by eight-thirty. The drive up was wet and filled with traffic.
We arrived at the Gwinnett Civic Center at about ten-forty, and we would’ve arrived on time had we not picked the slowest gas pump at the most ill-run gas station in Georgia and hit the I-75/85 bottleneck through the middle of Atlanta. It became a non-issue when we walked into the building and met Paul.
We met Paul MacLarty last year at JapanFest. He’s published a book on kimono history and is very knowledgeable about pattern and fabric, dates and styles, and value. Paul and Christy started talking and eventually hit it off. We assisted him a little bit in his booth last year, just watching things for him while he ran his kimono panel. We offered to help him in his booth when JapanFest rolled around this year. He has that college professor type of personality; his apparent disorganization belies a keen mind and frenetic business acumen. Paul reminds me a little of John Ritter.
Paul had pulled his rented panel truck into the middle of the aisle. It was completely loaded down with boxes, framework, and pounds of kimono. We began unloading the truck and getting the booth organized the way we wanted it. We had two vendor spaces, but as we kept pulling box after box out of the truck, I began to wonder if we’d be able to squeeze everything into that space. The work went quickly, though, because the event planners had put Santana’s album Supernatural on repeat. We spent the better part of two hours unloading, putting up the metal framework and shelves, and unpacking kimono. At about 1:30, we all decided to take a break for lunch.
Christy and I decided to go over to Discover Mills mall to get some cheap mall Chinese. We ate in the food court, right under the carousel. We enjoyed a leisurely lunch, amusing ourselves with interesting conversation. We managed to polish off most of the food we’d ordered, and wandered over to the Lego store full and happy.
The Lego store was not busy that Friday afternoon. Christy and I browsed through the sets and talked about potential next purchases. I decided to fill a cup from the Pick-a-Brick wall, and Christy wandered around the store.
While I was scooping out handfuls of elements, Christy had discovered a little display where you could create your own Lego men and buy three of them for ten dollars. Each man came with a tool and a hat. Christy busied herself with removing all of the little pieces that had fallen into the wrong bin and putting them in the right bin, or moving all of the little arms and hands that had popped off into a pile on the side of the display.
At one point, a piece fell under the display, so she bumped it a little with her hip to see if it would move, and it did. What she found was a dusty pile of abandoned Lego. So Christy began scooting the display over and sweeping all of those pieces into a pile.
By this time I was at the register with my purchase, the manager and I watching a clerk assist her with the cleanup. The clerk didn’t want to sweep them up and get dirty. He brought her a cup and the pieces she’d collected off the floor nearly filled up an entire cup. The manager said something like, oh I hate cleaning all those little pieces. I said, well, I’ll take all of those pieces off you for the cost of the cup. She said, the owner would kill me if he knew I was doing this, but I’m the manager. I said, I won’t tell.
On the way out of the store, Christy and I remarked on the sheer number and quality of the pieces she’d picked up off the floor. Most of the pieces were Lego men parts! If you pay ten dollars for three Lego men, and each man is 5 total parts, each part would be about sixty-four cents apiece, then…we got excited doing the math. There must be fifty dollars worth of Lego men in there. Awesome!
After lunch we drove back to the Civic Center in high spirits. Christy’s Virgo tendencies for the win! We got back to the booth around 2:45. The truck was gone, but there were boxes everywhere, spreading out from the booth all the way to the middle of the aisle. We spend the better part of the afternoon pulling trinkets out of boxes, putting kimono on hangers, making shelf space, cutting, taping, folding, and rearranging. Christy dressed her mannequin in some of Paul’s incredible vintage kimono. At about the eighth play-through of Supernatural, we were finished. Christy, Paul, and I looked up from the maelstrom of packing peanuts and brown packing paper to see it was 7:30. Where had the entire afternoon gone? It was as if the hours from three to six just vanished.
Aside from pricing items, we were done for the night. We agreed to meet Paul back at the booth in the morning at 9:30. Christy and I left the Civic Center to meet Kiana at her apartment. Unbeknownst to me, she’d moved since I’d last seen her, so I drove to her old apartment first. With that annoying detour out of the way, we finally made it to her new place at about 8:45.
Kiana has this amazing knack for finding incredible apartment spaces in Atlanta. Since we’ve known her, we’ve been to no fewer than four sumptuous living spaces, each more impressive than the last. Kiana claims she simply cannot live outside of the Perimeter. This most recent apartment is in a gated community right off Peachtree, a mere three blocks from Phipps and Lenox Malls. Hardwood floors, patio, gigantic bathroom, spacious kitchen, built-in cabinets and shelving. I really don’t know how she does it. She has the best apartment-fu of anyone I’ve ever known.
We dropped off our bags, Christy changed her shirt, and we all made off to Tin Lizzy’s for dinner. I can’t remember if I wrote about the restaurant last time I came up to visit Kiana (she took me there the weekend I recorded my demo), but I pumped it up to Christy as having great food and the chips and queso dip evar. Tin Lizzy’s is aTex-Mex fusion restaurant with this impossibly loud and schizophrenic college party/sports/dating bar.
Naturally, Tin Lizzy’s was packed on a Friday night. The scene was packed with people dressed up for a night on the town, and Kiana commented on the meat market feel of the place that night. We managed to get a high-top table that was three feet from the bar so people kept nonchalantly setting their drinks down on it. We conceded one quarter of the table in the unspoken agreement that we’d have the rest of the space for our dinners.
All of us were starving by the time our queso dip came. We ate with gusto, even requesting another bowl of cheese. My tacos were delicious, and the girls shared a pitcher something called a ‘sangriarita’. We shouted to each other the entire meal, watching the men posture and the women flirt and fret. Fortunately, right about the time Kiana and Christy had to get militant about not wanting to get hit on, it was time to go.
We drove back to Kiana’s apartment talking about that one guy in the bar. This guy was wearing an ironic t-shirt that read, ‘I was born cool’ that I get the impression wasn’t supposed to be so ironic. This guy was an alpha-dog in the bar all night, flirting and posturing and generally being a cocky jerk. He kept staring at Kiana’s ass, apparently. In the car Kiana dubbed him a ‘bouche’. What ‘s a ‘bouche’, I asked. You know, she said, douchebag. He’s a ‘bouchedag’.
We got back to her apartment around 11:30 and spent the rest of the night cleaning Lego pieces. Since they were drunk and in charge, Christy and Kiana did most of the management of the project. The final tally for the Lego pieces from the floor of the store came to:
• 105 Lego heads
• 24 pairs of legs
• 60 tools (including brooms, hatchets, hacksaws, and shovels)
• 23 torsos
• 37 regular hats
• 6 fire chief hats
• 16 hair pieces
• 23 motorcycle helmets w/ visors
So, per Christy’s calculations, based on the display price, with three Lego men costing ten dollars, that came to $196.98 worth of pieces. Alternately, based on the prices per piece on the Lego website, it seems that the actual amount is somewhere in the vicinity of $70.00. Either way. I made out like a bandit. Christy and Kiana stayed up for a few more hours talking while I decompressed on the fold out and played my DS.
Saturday morning, Christy and I got up and began to dress. We both dressed in our very best kimono and got out the door only seven minutes late. We fought the rain all the way back to the Gwinnett Civic Center, stopped at Chick-fil-A to grab some breakfast, and pulled into the parking lot. Already at 9:45 there was a long line on the bridge to the front door. We vacillated about waiting in line, but found a small group of vendors to follow into one the lower entrances. We were in just in time. Paul was already there, but he’d gotten in just a few minutes before we did.
We caught our breath just in time to get ready for the first trickle of guests to come wandering down our aisle. Christy and I polished off our chicken biscuits and got to work. The first half of the day became something of a blur. Working a booth at a convention or a event like this is some of the best people-watching in the world, but unlike people-watching at the park or an airport, some of the folks you are watching come over, look through your things, and occasionally offer you money for it.
As a vendor, you have to develop a kind of shell around yourself. Your goal is to sell everything, so when someone declines to buy something, you just have to let it go. Customers will wander in and out of the booth and browse, and more often than not you just leave them to it. If they find something they want, or if they have a question about price, then you become a helpful salesperson. It’s all very zen. Paul had it down to an art. More often than not we had plenty of time to talk, quote prices, and root around under our table for a boxed version of the display item. It was still work, though. The feeling of being ‘on’ lasted all day long.
After a three hour crush of people at the booth, Christy and I finally got the chance to break for lunch at about 2:30. We walked around to the large food vendor area only to find that three of the five food vendors were completely sold out of food. The remaining food vendors had lines that were at least a hundred feet long snaking through the tables and chairs set up in the middle of the hall. Christy got herself a beer, and we waited in line for food. After about 20 minutes, I gave Christy some money, bought a few oolong teas and went back to the booth. Christy didn’t get back until 3:30 with a styrofoam container of sushi and a few beers. We wolfed down our sushi in the booth with people browsing around us. With food in our bellies, we were able to work through the rest of the day without any problems. Paul ventured out and brought us back some sake, which made the rest of the late afternoon pass by much faster.
As things wound down at the end of the day we had time to take stock. The booth looked like a big messy tornado had blown through it. We returned kimono to hangers, filled gaps in the sea of merchandise with handles of stock from the boxes under the tables, and re-priced items based on demand. Paul gave us insight into why he carried so much stuff. All I want to sell are the kimono, he said, but with these smaller events, you have to sell the smaller stuff to make any kind of profit, or just break even. Christy and I agreed, as we made our way out to the car, that we didn’t think we could be convention-travelling vendors for a living.
Christy wanted to get across town to AWA to see an internet friend about a kimono. This girl was a vendor at this anime convention across town, and she had an obi Christy wanted. We drove through the speeding traffic and filthy spray of rainwater until we reached the north I-285/I-75 exit. I missed our turn, because I didn’t realize that you had to exit onto I-75 to reach Cobb Creek Parkway, so we went down to Paces Ferry Rd. and drove up the back way to the Galleria. We arrived at around 8:15 and found parking in a relatively close parking garage.
AWA looked and smelled exactly like Fanime. There were people and props of all shapes sizes; pink hair, schoolgirl outfits, big swords, space pirates, etc. The crowd was considerably more youthful than the people who’d attended JapanFest earlier in the day. No, these were the youngsters who embraced the anime and manga of Japan in all its’ kitschy glory. Standing in the lobby of this giant convention center with these people around us in cat ears and costumes, Christy and I felt practically austere in our formal kimono.
Her friend came down, actually well-dressed in formal kimono, but wrapped as though she were dead, and she had bloody ropes around her neck and wrists. We made small talk while she and Christy discussed the obi. She invited Christy to come up the stairs into the con for a little while. Since there was only one ticket available, I began calling Kiana, Parichard, and Paul to coordinate dinner plans. Kiana suggested this Korean barbeque place out on Buford Highway. She said that because of the repairs to her car, she didn’t weant to drop the money on dinner. I tried to convince her to come on out anyway and we’d pick up the tab, but she remained firm. I called Paul, texted Parichard. Paul was all for it, Parichard didn’t respond. Eventually Christy came back downstairs and we left. The smell of hormones and ozone wafted out in to the damp night air as we walked back to the car.
I got us back onto I-285 and drove back the way we came. Buford Highway was only about ten minutes away, and the restaurant was easy to find. Hung Il Kwan was right off of the exit, underneath a large red neon sign in the shape of a pagoda.
Christy and I knew we were hungry as soon as we stepped out of the car and smelled the meat cooking. It was heavenly. We walked in and were taken to a private room in the back that had tables with the grill in the middle. We did get a couple of odd looks from the regulars- I mean, how odd must it have looked to see white people dressed in Japanese clothing in a Korean restaurant?
Paul located Hung Il Kwan and made it inside just as we were starting out second round of beers. We ordered fried and boiled pot stickers to start, and a huge platter designed for 3 people. I spoke with Parichard, who decided it was too late to come out to eat. She had to be up at four in the morning.
A gentleman brought in a round tray filled with water and a metal bucket filled with hot coals. In not time the grill was blazing hot. Our server came in and prepared all of the meat for us; we talked as she grilled steak, pork, chicken, shrimp, and various vegetables. There were three different types of kimchi on the table, including crab kimchi. There were various sauces, all delicious, and huge long leaves of lettuce to wrap the meat in. Paul talked about how he came to sell kimono and how he wound up in Washington, D.C while we feasted.
We did the best we could. We put a big damn dent into the food brought to us, but we all eventually slowed, and then just stared at the destruction on the table. I think we were all amazed we could manage. The bill was sizeable but still in proportion to the meal. Christy and I said goodnight to Paul and drove back down Buford Highway to Kiana’s apartment in high spirits and a belly full of Korean barbeque.
When we got back to Kiana’s apartment, she was still up. We took turns chatting with her while Christy and I took our respective showers. We said goodnight and turned in early.
Sunday came at 6:00 in the morning. Christy and I got up, got dressed, and quietly gathered up all our crap and got out of Kiana’s apartment. We drove back over to the Civic Center as the sky started to lighten. We parked in the back near the loading docks and brought in all the stuff Christy would need for the fashion show. Hall C was completely empty except for two maintenance men on a lift fixing a leak in the ceiling. Even though these were the only people there, Japanese rock music was blaring out of the intercom system. Christy grabbed the leftover chicken biscuit from Saturday and I the away the leftover sushi. Christy and I walked across the complex to the theater and put her stuff in the dressing room. I left and went back to the booth. I listened to blaring rock music while I rearranged the mess under our tables and relabeled some of the merchandise. By 9:30, most of the vendors had arrived and had set up for the day. Paul arrived and milled around the booth making adjustments and changes until he was satisfied. At ten, the crowd filed in, and it was steady business for most of the morning.
Christy called me at about 10:30 and said, can you be in the fashion show? Hurry, bring your jeans and sneakers and get over here! So I let Paul know I was going to participate in the fashion show. I walked out to the car in the rain to get my stuff, and walked over to the theater. Christy had me put on my jeans, styled my yukata to look like it was hitched up, and I was ready for the runway. Christy was obviously stressed out. Apparently, the woman in charge of the fashion show had four or five models just not show. One model was in a car accident, but one called her and said she woke up late and wouldn’t make it.
Fortunately, Kiana called and we convinced her to take part in the fashion show. We were going to dress her in kimono anyway, so it wasn’t really anything new for her. I met her at the ninja booth and walked her over to the theater. I went back across the complex to the booth to help Paul out until it was time to go back to the theater for rehearsals. At noon, I went back to the theater to get ready for the show.
When I arrived, the room was filled with models, but there was also this little two-year -old boy wailing at the top of his lungs for his mother. One of the models had him on her lap, and he was squirming and crying, screaming mama at the top of his lungs for a few minutes, then he’d calm down for a minute or two, hitch a couple of times, and start all over again. Everyone in the room looked fashionable and miserable. It turned out this little boy belonged to the woman running the fashion show. When we lined up for rehearsal, the model holding the boy let him go, and he followed his mother around like a duckling, crying, hitching, and holding on to her leg. He even pulled one of the make-up table drawers out onto his own foot, which elicited a fresh wave of screams.
I think everyone was happy to move out of the hot, damp dressing room and into the cool blackness of the backstage area. All 24 models, including, Christy, Kiana, and I lined up and the fashion show was underway. The theme of the show was as if the audience was on a flight over kimono land. The first wave of models wore traditional styles. The second portion of the show was as if the flight was caught in a turbulent storm. The styles presented were more fashion-forward, and we were all in this group. I went out and modeled and I think I did a pretty good job.
After the fashion show I went back to the booth. Paul was pretty happy to see me as there’d been a steady crowd of people. The strange thing about the Sunday crowd is that they are more discerning and less willing to accept price at face value. The magic has worn off and they’ve gotten shrewd, haggling for and little markdown because they know that we don’t want to pack up all this crap and put it back in the truck. It only one in twenty people who want to haggle, but when you’ve got five people lined up to buy something, it’s hard to make time for that.
Kiana and Christy came back to the booth at about 1:30, Kiana in normal clothes and Christy in the kimono Kiana was supposed to be in. Kiana agreed to go grab food for us from the mall. Pau, Christy, and I ran the booth, putting people into kimono, bagging up stuffed animals, and generally just having a good time.
Kiana returned at about 3:30 with burger King. We were starving. Christy, Kiana and I walked over to the open seating area and Kiana watched us wolf down our food like it was trying to get away. We talked a little, and then I decided to go back to Discover Mills Mall to get a train set from the Lego store since I now had some disposable income. They were sold out. I was crestfallen, since I’d seen the set on Friday. I returned to JapanFest to finish out the day. The remainder of the late afternoon had us selling right up until the doors closed at 5:00.
JapanFest was over! Now the fun part: breaking down the booth. We actually got started striking the booth at 5:30 and it only took us two and a half hours to put everything back into boxes, tear it all down, and load it into the truck. Paul paid us handsomely for our time in the booth, and he even took a couple of things off of Christy’s hands that she was trying to sell.
We left the Gwinnett Civic Center at exactly 8:00. We drove home, stopping in Lawrenceville for gas and food, and talking about Christy’s incredible business plans involving kimono the whole way home. We made it back to the house at 10:30, dragged all out crap in the house and went to bed.
We arrived at the Gwinnett Civic Center at about ten-forty, and we would’ve arrived on time had we not picked the slowest gas pump at the most ill-run gas station in Georgia and hit the I-75/85 bottleneck through the middle of Atlanta. It became a non-issue when we walked into the building and met Paul.
We met Paul MacLarty last year at JapanFest. He’s published a book on kimono history and is very knowledgeable about pattern and fabric, dates and styles, and value. Paul and Christy started talking and eventually hit it off. We assisted him a little bit in his booth last year, just watching things for him while he ran his kimono panel. We offered to help him in his booth when JapanFest rolled around this year. He has that college professor type of personality; his apparent disorganization belies a keen mind and frenetic business acumen. Paul reminds me a little of John Ritter.
Paul had pulled his rented panel truck into the middle of the aisle. It was completely loaded down with boxes, framework, and pounds of kimono. We began unloading the truck and getting the booth organized the way we wanted it. We had two vendor spaces, but as we kept pulling box after box out of the truck, I began to wonder if we’d be able to squeeze everything into that space. The work went quickly, though, because the event planners had put Santana’s album Supernatural on repeat. We spent the better part of two hours unloading, putting up the metal framework and shelves, and unpacking kimono. At about 1:30, we all decided to take a break for lunch.
Christy and I decided to go over to Discover Mills mall to get some cheap mall Chinese. We ate in the food court, right under the carousel. We enjoyed a leisurely lunch, amusing ourselves with interesting conversation. We managed to polish off most of the food we’d ordered, and wandered over to the Lego store full and happy.
The Lego store was not busy that Friday afternoon. Christy and I browsed through the sets and talked about potential next purchases. I decided to fill a cup from the Pick-a-Brick wall, and Christy wandered around the store.
While I was scooping out handfuls of elements, Christy had discovered a little display where you could create your own Lego men and buy three of them for ten dollars. Each man came with a tool and a hat. Christy busied herself with removing all of the little pieces that had fallen into the wrong bin and putting them in the right bin, or moving all of the little arms and hands that had popped off into a pile on the side of the display.
At one point, a piece fell under the display, so she bumped it a little with her hip to see if it would move, and it did. What she found was a dusty pile of abandoned Lego. So Christy began scooting the display over and sweeping all of those pieces into a pile.
By this time I was at the register with my purchase, the manager and I watching a clerk assist her with the cleanup. The clerk didn’t want to sweep them up and get dirty. He brought her a cup and the pieces she’d collected off the floor nearly filled up an entire cup. The manager said something like, oh I hate cleaning all those little pieces. I said, well, I’ll take all of those pieces off you for the cost of the cup. She said, the owner would kill me if he knew I was doing this, but I’m the manager. I said, I won’t tell.
On the way out of the store, Christy and I remarked on the sheer number and quality of the pieces she’d picked up off the floor. Most of the pieces were Lego men parts! If you pay ten dollars for three Lego men, and each man is 5 total parts, each part would be about sixty-four cents apiece, then…we got excited doing the math. There must be fifty dollars worth of Lego men in there. Awesome!
After lunch we drove back to the Civic Center in high spirits. Christy’s Virgo tendencies for the win! We got back to the booth around 2:45. The truck was gone, but there were boxes everywhere, spreading out from the booth all the way to the middle of the aisle. We spend the better part of the afternoon pulling trinkets out of boxes, putting kimono on hangers, making shelf space, cutting, taping, folding, and rearranging. Christy dressed her mannequin in some of Paul’s incredible vintage kimono. At about the eighth play-through of Supernatural, we were finished. Christy, Paul, and I looked up from the maelstrom of packing peanuts and brown packing paper to see it was 7:30. Where had the entire afternoon gone? It was as if the hours from three to six just vanished.
Aside from pricing items, we were done for the night. We agreed to meet Paul back at the booth in the morning at 9:30. Christy and I left the Civic Center to meet Kiana at her apartment. Unbeknownst to me, she’d moved since I’d last seen her, so I drove to her old apartment first. With that annoying detour out of the way, we finally made it to her new place at about 8:45.
Kiana has this amazing knack for finding incredible apartment spaces in Atlanta. Since we’ve known her, we’ve been to no fewer than four sumptuous living spaces, each more impressive than the last. Kiana claims she simply cannot live outside of the Perimeter. This most recent apartment is in a gated community right off Peachtree, a mere three blocks from Phipps and Lenox Malls. Hardwood floors, patio, gigantic bathroom, spacious kitchen, built-in cabinets and shelving. I really don’t know how she does it. She has the best apartment-fu of anyone I’ve ever known.
We dropped off our bags, Christy changed her shirt, and we all made off to Tin Lizzy’s for dinner. I can’t remember if I wrote about the restaurant last time I came up to visit Kiana (she took me there the weekend I recorded my demo), but I pumped it up to Christy as having great food and the chips and queso dip evar. Tin Lizzy’s is aTex-Mex fusion restaurant with this impossibly loud and schizophrenic college party/sports/dating bar.
Naturally, Tin Lizzy’s was packed on a Friday night. The scene was packed with people dressed up for a night on the town, and Kiana commented on the meat market feel of the place that night. We managed to get a high-top table that was three feet from the bar so people kept nonchalantly setting their drinks down on it. We conceded one quarter of the table in the unspoken agreement that we’d have the rest of the space for our dinners.
All of us were starving by the time our queso dip came. We ate with gusto, even requesting another bowl of cheese. My tacos were delicious, and the girls shared a pitcher something called a ‘sangriarita’. We shouted to each other the entire meal, watching the men posture and the women flirt and fret. Fortunately, right about the time Kiana and Christy had to get militant about not wanting to get hit on, it was time to go.
We drove back to Kiana’s apartment talking about that one guy in the bar. This guy was wearing an ironic t-shirt that read, ‘I was born cool’ that I get the impression wasn’t supposed to be so ironic. This guy was an alpha-dog in the bar all night, flirting and posturing and generally being a cocky jerk. He kept staring at Kiana’s ass, apparently. In the car Kiana dubbed him a ‘bouche’. What ‘s a ‘bouche’, I asked. You know, she said, douchebag. He’s a ‘bouchedag’.
We got back to her apartment around 11:30 and spent the rest of the night cleaning Lego pieces. Since they were drunk and in charge, Christy and Kiana did most of the management of the project. The final tally for the Lego pieces from the floor of the store came to:
• 105 Lego heads
• 24 pairs of legs
• 60 tools (including brooms, hatchets, hacksaws, and shovels)
• 23 torsos
• 37 regular hats
• 6 fire chief hats
• 16 hair pieces
• 23 motorcycle helmets w/ visors
So, per Christy’s calculations, based on the display price, with three Lego men costing ten dollars, that came to $196.98 worth of pieces. Alternately, based on the prices per piece on the Lego website, it seems that the actual amount is somewhere in the vicinity of $70.00. Either way. I made out like a bandit. Christy and Kiana stayed up for a few more hours talking while I decompressed on the fold out and played my DS.
Saturday morning, Christy and I got up and began to dress. We both dressed in our very best kimono and got out the door only seven minutes late. We fought the rain all the way back to the Gwinnett Civic Center, stopped at Chick-fil-A to grab some breakfast, and pulled into the parking lot. Already at 9:45 there was a long line on the bridge to the front door. We vacillated about waiting in line, but found a small group of vendors to follow into one the lower entrances. We were in just in time. Paul was already there, but he’d gotten in just a few minutes before we did.
We caught our breath just in time to get ready for the first trickle of guests to come wandering down our aisle. Christy and I polished off our chicken biscuits and got to work. The first half of the day became something of a blur. Working a booth at a convention or a event like this is some of the best people-watching in the world, but unlike people-watching at the park or an airport, some of the folks you are watching come over, look through your things, and occasionally offer you money for it.
As a vendor, you have to develop a kind of shell around yourself. Your goal is to sell everything, so when someone declines to buy something, you just have to let it go. Customers will wander in and out of the booth and browse, and more often than not you just leave them to it. If they find something they want, or if they have a question about price, then you become a helpful salesperson. It’s all very zen. Paul had it down to an art. More often than not we had plenty of time to talk, quote prices, and root around under our table for a boxed version of the display item. It was still work, though. The feeling of being ‘on’ lasted all day long.
After a three hour crush of people at the booth, Christy and I finally got the chance to break for lunch at about 2:30. We walked around to the large food vendor area only to find that three of the five food vendors were completely sold out of food. The remaining food vendors had lines that were at least a hundred feet long snaking through the tables and chairs set up in the middle of the hall. Christy got herself a beer, and we waited in line for food. After about 20 minutes, I gave Christy some money, bought a few oolong teas and went back to the booth. Christy didn’t get back until 3:30 with a styrofoam container of sushi and a few beers. We wolfed down our sushi in the booth with people browsing around us. With food in our bellies, we were able to work through the rest of the day without any problems. Paul ventured out and brought us back some sake, which made the rest of the late afternoon pass by much faster.
As things wound down at the end of the day we had time to take stock. The booth looked like a big messy tornado had blown through it. We returned kimono to hangers, filled gaps in the sea of merchandise with handles of stock from the boxes under the tables, and re-priced items based on demand. Paul gave us insight into why he carried so much stuff. All I want to sell are the kimono, he said, but with these smaller events, you have to sell the smaller stuff to make any kind of profit, or just break even. Christy and I agreed, as we made our way out to the car, that we didn’t think we could be convention-travelling vendors for a living.
Christy wanted to get across town to AWA to see an internet friend about a kimono. This girl was a vendor at this anime convention across town, and she had an obi Christy wanted. We drove through the speeding traffic and filthy spray of rainwater until we reached the north I-285/I-75 exit. I missed our turn, because I didn’t realize that you had to exit onto I-75 to reach Cobb Creek Parkway, so we went down to Paces Ferry Rd. and drove up the back way to the Galleria. We arrived at around 8:15 and found parking in a relatively close parking garage.
AWA looked and smelled exactly like Fanime. There were people and props of all shapes sizes; pink hair, schoolgirl outfits, big swords, space pirates, etc. The crowd was considerably more youthful than the people who’d attended JapanFest earlier in the day. No, these were the youngsters who embraced the anime and manga of Japan in all its’ kitschy glory. Standing in the lobby of this giant convention center with these people around us in cat ears and costumes, Christy and I felt practically austere in our formal kimono.
Her friend came down, actually well-dressed in formal kimono, but wrapped as though she were dead, and she had bloody ropes around her neck and wrists. We made small talk while she and Christy discussed the obi. She invited Christy to come up the stairs into the con for a little while. Since there was only one ticket available, I began calling Kiana, Parichard, and Paul to coordinate dinner plans. Kiana suggested this Korean barbeque place out on Buford Highway. She said that because of the repairs to her car, she didn’t weant to drop the money on dinner. I tried to convince her to come on out anyway and we’d pick up the tab, but she remained firm. I called Paul, texted Parichard. Paul was all for it, Parichard didn’t respond. Eventually Christy came back downstairs and we left. The smell of hormones and ozone wafted out in to the damp night air as we walked back to the car.
I got us back onto I-285 and drove back the way we came. Buford Highway was only about ten minutes away, and the restaurant was easy to find. Hung Il Kwan was right off of the exit, underneath a large red neon sign in the shape of a pagoda.
Christy and I knew we were hungry as soon as we stepped out of the car and smelled the meat cooking. It was heavenly. We walked in and were taken to a private room in the back that had tables with the grill in the middle. We did get a couple of odd looks from the regulars- I mean, how odd must it have looked to see white people dressed in Japanese clothing in a Korean restaurant?
Paul located Hung Il Kwan and made it inside just as we were starting out second round of beers. We ordered fried and boiled pot stickers to start, and a huge platter designed for 3 people. I spoke with Parichard, who decided it was too late to come out to eat. She had to be up at four in the morning.
A gentleman brought in a round tray filled with water and a metal bucket filled with hot coals. In not time the grill was blazing hot. Our server came in and prepared all of the meat for us; we talked as she grilled steak, pork, chicken, shrimp, and various vegetables. There were three different types of kimchi on the table, including crab kimchi. There were various sauces, all delicious, and huge long leaves of lettuce to wrap the meat in. Paul talked about how he came to sell kimono and how he wound up in Washington, D.C while we feasted.
We did the best we could. We put a big damn dent into the food brought to us, but we all eventually slowed, and then just stared at the destruction on the table. I think we were all amazed we could manage. The bill was sizeable but still in proportion to the meal. Christy and I said goodnight to Paul and drove back down Buford Highway to Kiana’s apartment in high spirits and a belly full of Korean barbeque.
When we got back to Kiana’s apartment, she was still up. We took turns chatting with her while Christy and I took our respective showers. We said goodnight and turned in early.
Sunday came at 6:00 in the morning. Christy and I got up, got dressed, and quietly gathered up all our crap and got out of Kiana’s apartment. We drove back over to the Civic Center as the sky started to lighten. We parked in the back near the loading docks and brought in all the stuff Christy would need for the fashion show. Hall C was completely empty except for two maintenance men on a lift fixing a leak in the ceiling. Even though these were the only people there, Japanese rock music was blaring out of the intercom system. Christy grabbed the leftover chicken biscuit from Saturday and I the away the leftover sushi. Christy and I walked across the complex to the theater and put her stuff in the dressing room. I left and went back to the booth. I listened to blaring rock music while I rearranged the mess under our tables and relabeled some of the merchandise. By 9:30, most of the vendors had arrived and had set up for the day. Paul arrived and milled around the booth making adjustments and changes until he was satisfied. At ten, the crowd filed in, and it was steady business for most of the morning.
Christy called me at about 10:30 and said, can you be in the fashion show? Hurry, bring your jeans and sneakers and get over here! So I let Paul know I was going to participate in the fashion show. I walked out to the car in the rain to get my stuff, and walked over to the theater. Christy had me put on my jeans, styled my yukata to look like it was hitched up, and I was ready for the runway. Christy was obviously stressed out. Apparently, the woman in charge of the fashion show had four or five models just not show. One model was in a car accident, but one called her and said she woke up late and wouldn’t make it.
Fortunately, Kiana called and we convinced her to take part in the fashion show. We were going to dress her in kimono anyway, so it wasn’t really anything new for her. I met her at the ninja booth and walked her over to the theater. I went back across the complex to the booth to help Paul out until it was time to go back to the theater for rehearsals. At noon, I went back to the theater to get ready for the show.
When I arrived, the room was filled with models, but there was also this little two-year -old boy wailing at the top of his lungs for his mother. One of the models had him on her lap, and he was squirming and crying, screaming mama at the top of his lungs for a few minutes, then he’d calm down for a minute or two, hitch a couple of times, and start all over again. Everyone in the room looked fashionable and miserable. It turned out this little boy belonged to the woman running the fashion show. When we lined up for rehearsal, the model holding the boy let him go, and he followed his mother around like a duckling, crying, hitching, and holding on to her leg. He even pulled one of the make-up table drawers out onto his own foot, which elicited a fresh wave of screams.
I think everyone was happy to move out of the hot, damp dressing room and into the cool blackness of the backstage area. All 24 models, including, Christy, Kiana, and I lined up and the fashion show was underway. The theme of the show was as if the audience was on a flight over kimono land. The first wave of models wore traditional styles. The second portion of the show was as if the flight was caught in a turbulent storm. The styles presented were more fashion-forward, and we were all in this group. I went out and modeled and I think I did a pretty good job.
After the fashion show I went back to the booth. Paul was pretty happy to see me as there’d been a steady crowd of people. The strange thing about the Sunday crowd is that they are more discerning and less willing to accept price at face value. The magic has worn off and they’ve gotten shrewd, haggling for and little markdown because they know that we don’t want to pack up all this crap and put it back in the truck. It only one in twenty people who want to haggle, but when you’ve got five people lined up to buy something, it’s hard to make time for that.
Kiana and Christy came back to the booth at about 1:30, Kiana in normal clothes and Christy in the kimono Kiana was supposed to be in. Kiana agreed to go grab food for us from the mall. Pau, Christy, and I ran the booth, putting people into kimono, bagging up stuffed animals, and generally just having a good time.
Kiana returned at about 3:30 with burger King. We were starving. Christy, Kiana and I walked over to the open seating area and Kiana watched us wolf down our food like it was trying to get away. We talked a little, and then I decided to go back to Discover Mills Mall to get a train set from the Lego store since I now had some disposable income. They were sold out. I was crestfallen, since I’d seen the set on Friday. I returned to JapanFest to finish out the day. The remainder of the late afternoon had us selling right up until the doors closed at 5:00.
JapanFest was over! Now the fun part: breaking down the booth. We actually got started striking the booth at 5:30 and it only took us two and a half hours to put everything back into boxes, tear it all down, and load it into the truck. Paul paid us handsomely for our time in the booth, and he even took a couple of things off of Christy’s hands that she was trying to sell.
We left the Gwinnett Civic Center at exactly 8:00. We drove home, stopping in Lawrenceville for gas and food, and talking about Christy’s incredible business plans involving kimono the whole way home. We made it back to the house at 10:30, dragged all out crap in the house and went to bed.