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Leslie Fish's Filksongs |
ConCertino was a very enjoyable con hosted by MASSFILC during the weekend of June
19-21st. As its name indicates, it was a SMALL filk con with 80 registered members.
ConCertino was the first SF con that the Morgan Motor Inn had ever held, and the
hotel staff was wonderfully friendly: they gave us a 3:00 PM checkout time, went
to great pains to ensure that the cleaning people didn't wake us up at 8:00 in the
morning trying to clean our sleeping rooms, and to top it all off, they even respected
the filkers! I, personally, felt that Concertino was a much more social than performance oriented con. The Tales of the White Hart Dealer's room (there was a dealer's row rather than one room) and, of course, the Con Suite seemed to be the two nuclei of social activity. Sadly, as a result of the dealer's rooms being less accessible than in a traditional dealer's room arrangement, the majority of the dealers had rather poor sales. ConCertino's Con Com did a nearly flawless job. The program book, edited by Gary McGath, was simply OUTSTANDING! The back of the program book also had transcribed music, chords and words to 40 pages of filksongs such as Duane's Horseman, Kathy Mar's Minus Ten and Counting and other filkish favorites. I believe Helva Peters and Gary McGath did the transcription, and they deserve no end of praise for going light years beyond what was reasonably expected in a program book. The Saturday concerts by Guests of Honor T.J. and Mitchell Burnside-Clapp, Special Guest Naomi Pardue, Toastmaster Duane Elms, Interfilk Guest Randy Farran, Jack Carroll, Rennie Levine and lots of other folks whose names I've forgotten were quite enjoyable and reasonably well attended. Lindy Sears, the Listener Guest of Honor, could also be found throughout the con with her endless supply of hugs. One of the more appealing characteristics of Concertino was that it was predominantly attended by Real Filkers Like You And Me (tm) rather than the Designated Deities Of Filkdom (tm): this helped contribute immensely towards its being a small, informal and fun con. On the flip side, ConCertino's absense of "big-name filkers" helped result in it having very few outstanding performers (by my tastes, at least) outside of the official guests. About half of the con members skipped the official filksings; I only attended the Saturday night filksing, which generally consisted of 2-4 filkers who had decided to hog much of the filksing. I saw one filker waiting for nearly three hours to get his turn to sing one song, and Kanef was sitting next to me for about as long trying to get in one of his newer songs. This was, of course, the only weak point of the con. Overall, ConCertino was a great con that I felt was worth every second of the 18-20 hours that I spent in transit that weekend; hopefully we will see its return for many more years to come. |