Back in 2003, I was standing on the lawn of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, chatting with pals Bill Shunn and Bob Howe at that year’s I-Con, when we spotted a camera crew in the distance. As usual, the spotlight was on the most colorful attendees, the folks dressed up as stormtroopers or wearing chain mail.

Understand that I’ve got nothing against cosplayers—I’ve worn the occasional costume myself.

See?

It’s just that reporters always seem to focus on the outrageously dressed, and not to celebrate or explore (which would be a nice change once in a while), but in order to give their stories a “hey, look at these weirdos” slant. So as the three of us chatted, we tsk-tsked this mindset and bemoaned the fact that cameras never got pointed at those less flamboyantly garbed.

We turned away and got back to catching up in the sunshine, when about 15 minutes later, we found that the crew had moved along and was now pointing its cameras … at us!

We answered the interviewer’s questions (actually, we mostly kibitzed), signed a few releases, and thought nothing of it, until we discovered ourselves on an episode of Parking Lot, a reality series which ran on Trio. Parking Lot was inspired by the movie Heavy Metal Parking Lot, a documentary about a Judas Priest concert filmed entirely outside the arena, focusing on what was happening in the … well … parking lot. The TV series did the same, going to various events and ignoring the official reason for the gathering, instead interviewing the fans outside.

If you’d like to see Bill and Bob and me try to sound intelligent—and Dave Kyle do more than merely try—check out this clip from the final third of one of Parking Lot‘s half-hour episodes, which I’d thought lost when Trio went under, but which I just discovered online.

As you can see, the past nine years haven’t been kind to me and Bill and Bob. So how come Dave Kyle looks younger now than he did then?