Star power weekend!

Friday and Saturday were interesting days for me!

I attended the photoshelter town hall meeting in Costa Mesa on Friday, it was an eye opener to the business of photography in magazines and print media, turns out, nobody's getting paid! One of the sponsors of the meeting was Samys camera's, a Southern California (and online) camera store I highly recommend, they were having kind of an expo thing in the building next door. They had several vendor booths, lots of neat hands on demos (how about a 600mm lens on a Canon 5d?) and a small speaker area in the back that seated MAYBE 50 people.

I sat in on a couple of interesting talks but nothing terribly interesting until the last talk of the day. Sponsored by Canon, the three part talk was by far worth the trip! The first part of the talk was general marketing info with a slide show elaborating on the finer details of Canons current line of of Camera gear and printers. It was informative and interesting. The second part was a presentation by New York Times Pulitzer Prize winner, Vincent Laforet, an AMAZING photographer. He went through a handfull of his pictures and explained the stories and techniques behind them, this was all very intimate, only about 20 people in the talk and I was literally front row and right in front of him. The last part of the presentation was Vincent printing one of his works on a Canon iPF6100, if I find myself with 3k to spend on a printer, it's the one I'll get. :)

Up to this point, the weekend was pretty normal, nothing that couldn't happen to anybody. As night fell, things changed gears...

While we were at the shop, one of the ladies that runs the theater across the alley from us came over to tell us that they were having some fund raiser and that Fred Willard was going to be there! I LOVE FRED WILLARD. After spending some time explaining to everybody else who he was, we all got excited about seeing him. Around this time, ANOTHER woman from the theater came over and told us Fred was going to be there and to, "keep an eye out for weird people." Of course it was a shitty way of telling us that we should not fuck with Fred. A little later, Lei points excitedly and says, "holy shit, it's the guy from anchorman!" Sure enough, theres Fred walking around the parking lot! Pappy and I walked over and said hello to him, told him we were fans, he thanked us and told us to watch his new show on Fox, "Back to You (Wednesdays at 8)," with Kelsey Grammer. We thought it was great that he plugged his show to us! Turns out, Fred Willard is a genuinely nice guy who comes off in person with the same kind of nice guy feeling as many of his characters.

Fred Willard meeting over, we got to drinking in earnest, as things often do with us, they turned to fire. Pappy and I had a difference of opinion: when put under hot propane flame, would a beer bottle melt or crack? Pappy was right, it melts... Check out the video too! Turns out a jet of flaming propane melting a bottle attracts a lot of attention, as we were walking to taco bell past Fred, he called out to me, "Hey! Did you guys melt that bottle?" I told him we did and we looked at pictures for a couple of minutes. I told him to come over later and we'd melt some more shit. After his show was finished, he DID come over! He drank a beer and chatted with us for few minutes, it was pretty cool.

During the period in between Willard interactions, queeg got REALLY drunk, check out a video of his woman attracting skills. He also decided to throw up everywhere.

All in all, a really fun night. All of the pictures are here:
http://23b.org/gallery/fleas_drinking_with_fred_willard_9-30-7