Gotta update my Disability Pride Dreamsheep icon...

[soc_puppet]

Back from the con, and I just wanted to share a few quick Accessibility Department victory moment things:

1) Lots of people being totally jazzed about the services we offer, particularly the Accessibility Pass and the ability to take a person of your choice with you to skip lines (though also lots of people only just learning about said pass, which means I need to do a better job of advertising)

2) A "Cosplay For Spoonies" panel! It had some really good advice in general, and some that I am definitely going to steal for future Accessibility Department stuff

3) Okay, tonight, when we were basically all packed up and the pizza had just shown up for our "Thank god the con is over and we survived, yay!" party? One of my fellow staffers told me about a conversation he had with someone else, who was not only delighted by everything that AnimeIowa was doing to be accessible, but was planning on taking the evidence of our con being accessible to a rival con and tearing strips off their concom/convention executives/the people in charge of it for not being nearly as good and I just. For a department of two people, with the person in charge being completely self-trained and often having eir butt kicked by executive dysfunction... Yeah. I definitely did a tiny little victory dance.

I am sooooooo looking forward to making things even better next year ♥

Comments

[gwydion]

Fighting the good fight!

[soc_puppet]

That's right! *shounen action pose*

[alexseanchai]

EXCELLENT

[soc_puppet]

😁

Venting here because I don't want to call out a favorite activist organization on Tumblr

[capri0mni]

Hooray! I'm so proud of you.

Re: that reply I made on Tumblr, about accessibility ombudsmen, wearing colored arm-bands. That was what I learned from my mom, when she was president of The Clearwater, and Pete Seeger wanted to expand the one day, one stage, annual, fundraising concert/picnic into a two-day, 6 stage, multi-acre music festival, with a craft outlet for local artisans, many international food vendors, and also organizing opportunities for Peace and Environmental activists. And naturally, since she had a disabled daughter, she wanted to make it accessible (This was back in 1978, if I recall correctly -- I would have been 14).

Since this was a pro-peace, anti-military, focused affair, no one wanted to hire cops for security, so they arranged to train volunteers in conflict resolution, who would wear special tee-shirts with a "peacemaker" logo. And it was Mom's idea (I think) to have a subset of those people with accessibility training to wear bright yellow armbands on one sleeve, for extra visibility, so people could flag them down in case someone got stuck or needed help with something.

Anyway, I went to the Festival's official homepage, to double-check my memory. And all that history I remember was erased. The history of that big, two-day festival with all the extras was conflated with the first simple picnic/concerts -- and all of it was credited to Pete Seeger "and friends." Even though, back in 1978, Clearwater's board of directors didn't want to take the risk of expanding it, until my mom backed Pete up at the next meeting. All so they could say it was the oldest festival of its kind (aka older than Woodstock, I think).

And I just ...*flails*

You know?

Anyway -- thanks again for making the wide, wide, world that much wider. And congratulations on surviving the con!

I support this choice

[soc_puppet]

Thank you! ♥

Oof, that's. Yikes. Outright erasing your awesome mother's hard work to make the event a better place, and also make the event a thing in the first place? I think my emotional reaction can best be summed up by the sweary-face emoji: 🤬

Also, your mother sounds amazing and badass and I am a fan ♥


I will take a metaphorical crowbar and widen the world by force if I must!

Re: I support this choice

[capri0mni]

Thanks. My mother was pretty badass (She died a while back).

Mostly, my emotional reaction is sad 😢 /frustrated 😤. Because I think I'm only one of a few people left who remember her, but if I'm the one to edit the Wikipedia article about the festival, it would be rejected, because I'm "too close to the subject".

The folding of history and events into a conceptual zip file of "The Great Man", so to speak, is a tendency I've noticed in Leftist adjacent spaces (such as the neo-Pagan movement, for example -- trying to claim an unbroken thread of worship dating back to the Cave Paintings of Lascaux, among other things). I think that tendency got magnified after Pete Seeger died in 2014.

I can't help but wonder if I stayed in New York State, where Clearwater is based, and stayed involved in the organization, or at least stayed on the mailing list, and showed up at one of the sloop club's monthly potlucks now and then, she might be remembered there more publicly. But I moved to Virginia 25 years ago because the landscape and the climate is more wheelchair friendly.

I learned a few years ago that she had a whole branch of her family living in the same town where I lived during the first 6 years of my life, and I never knew they even existed. For whatever reason, it seems that Mother cut herself off from them completely. I have my suspicions as to why, but of course, they can only be guesses.

[izzet_bedtime_yet]

That is awesome! Congrats on what sounds like a very successful con!

[soc_puppet]

Thanks! Yeah, not major problems that I was aware of. The worst I heard about was someone barrelling into the Dealer's Room without a badge, a few people being extra belligerent about wearing masks, and the hotel forgetting to give Cosplay Central some extra privacy draping, so I had to take down the "Please change in Cosplay Central instead of the accessible bathroom stalls!" signs 🙁 We had maybe one or two panel cancellations? But seriously, overall it went really well, as far as I'm aware.

[capri0mni]

the hotel forgetting to give Cosplay Central some extra privacy draping,

Oof!

But seriously, overall it went really well, as far as I'm aware.

Yay!!

Nap time, now?