'Scuse Me, I'm Looking For The Cigar Tent?

Quiet morning. Nothing doing contestant-wise until Opening Ceremonies rehersal at 5:30 this evening. (Tomorrow, however, will be a riotously busy day, with my interview in the morning, photo shoot at Noon, and then the Dreaded Pecs And Personality tomorrow evening. (Written on my hand: Audrey Hepburn, Wolverine, Werewolves, Orange, in the middle of a vacant lot in downtown Milwaukee, meatloaf and scalloped potatoes.)

Spent the morning strolling through the vendor mart, and now I'm about to embark on a quest to find all the places I'll have to be during the weekend. The hotel is vast, and as most of the ballrooms and meeting rooms are underground, I'm constantly disoriented. The lobby seems to me to be ill-designed in that it's all traffic flow and no areas to congregate. Quite the departure from the Washington Plaza Hotel, sight of MAL for lo, these many years. I understand that MAL has moved, and I haven't been to the event at the new hotel, but I will miss the Plaza. The lobby was forever crowded, so making your way through the lobby meant eye contact, and physical contact, again and again and again.

But most of all, there was the cigar tent.

Billows of cigar smoke got to be a problem at the Plaza, so they set up this tent, heated, and with a bartender, just outside the lobby out by the pool. Perfect for my purposes! It served to collect in one location all the men from the event that I would want to meet. Plus, whereas "Meet me in the lobby!" would result in you circling and circling for forty-five minutes before you connected, "Meet me in the cigar tent" worked perfectly every time.

Setting off again to roam through the hotel, this time to locate the places where I have to be. And, hopefully, I'll stumble across people milling about, although I don't have my hopes up there.