Here’s another snippet from the 2000 Nebulas Awards ceremony during which I played the role of Toastmaster.

Prepare yourself for what follows my introduction of Joe Haldeman. I’m sure you’ll get choked up, as did I, when you see the late Octavia Butler take the stage to accept her trophy. You’ll easily be able to tell how much she was loved—the announcement of her win produced the most enthusiastic applause of the evening.

As for my joke about Paul Levinson and singing at Nebulas, that refers back to a clip from the evening which I haven’t yet shared here … but which I’ll upload soon if you all behave.

Yesterday, Irene and I visited Marie Severin and whisked her away to Blackstone Steakhouse to celebrate her 80th birthday. As I’ve told you before, we both love Marie. She’s the nicest person we ever met in comics, one of the most talented, and easily the funniest. When Irene and I realized during our last visit that such a momentous milestone was moving toward her (uh-oh—one evening with Marie and I’m alliterating like Stan again), we decided that attention must be paid.

So we told Marie that unless one of her friends had already made plans, we wanted to take her out to dinner. Heck, if a friend had already made plans, we’d take the friend, too! But luckily for us, Marie was free last night, and so we had her to ourselves for a long and hilarious evening. Here we all are after having demolished an amazing meal:

Before heading to the restaurant, we spent an hour or so at her apartment, and one of the things we did was show her printouts I’d made yesterday morning of sites which had wished her a happy birthday. She was astounded by the outpouring of love, and astonished by some of them, particularly the lengthy write-up at fanboy.com of her career. When I read her part of it aloud, such as the sentences— (more…)

Tonight, Irene and I will be having dinner with the friend pictured below to celebrate—

Well … that’s for us to know and for you to figure out.

Can you guess who it is?

UPDATE: That is, of course, Marie Severin, who was celebrating her 80th birthday on that day.

Is it possible to overdose on ham? Today’s the day we find out, because this restaurant is serving up another helping of me from the 2000 Nebula Awards weekend. The latest clip shows me introducing John Kessel, who then announces the winner in the Best Novella category.

If you bother to watch this all the way through, you’ll learn who won that year, but you won’t see anyone take the stage to claim the trophy, because a) the winner wasn’t present (and SFWA long ago abandoned the “you must be present to win” rule), plus b) even without the acceptor reading the e-mailed speech, the clip was already at 9:50, and if included would have put it way over YouTube’s 10-minute limit.

Even if you don’t want to watch this because I bore you to tears, watch it for John—he’s hilarious!

I published a poem by Gene van Troyer 25 years ago in Last Wave, but I never got to know him as well as I would have liked. That’s primarily because he moved to Japan (sometime in the mid-’70s, I think), and so our paths never crossed on the con circuit.

The one time we got to sit and talk at length was at the Worldcon in Yokohama, at which we spent an undisturbed hour in the SFWA suite catching up on each other’s lives and promising to spend more time together during some future trip to Japan. Sadly, that won’t be happening, as he died July 17, 2009 of cancer. Here we are back in 2007.

Here’s what SFWA had to say about him. He seemed like a nice guy, and I wish I’d gotten to know him better. I plan on pulling down some of his poetry today and spending some time remembering him.

Here’s one of his poems so you can do the same.

Here’s another.

For those of you who weren’t put off by my first serving of shtick from the 2000 Nebula Awards banquet and have stomach for more, here am I razzing Terry Bisson as he takes the stage to present the award for Best Short Story. To preserve the suspense, I won’t tell you who else gets to take the stage once he opens the envelope, even though since this was almost a decade ago, I realize it’s a false sense of suspense.

You’ll note that both my name and his are misspelled in the subtitles, but that shouldn’t matter, since you know who we are. And we know who you are …

Happy birthday, John!

If I am remembered for nothing else from my relatively few years working in comics, it will likely be for having scripted your debut story. The six-page tale, “Chaos at the Coffee Bean,” appeared as a back-up in 1977’s Amazing Spider-Man Annual #11.

Here’s the splash page (click to view at a larger size):

Amazingly, up until the future star received this assignment, he was being discriminated against. No one would give him a shot because his Dad was Marvel Art Director and Spider-Man artist supreme John Romita (who had no need yet to be identified by a Sr. after his name). No one wanted to be seen as rewarding John, Jr. on the basis of his family connection alone.

I thought that was a stupid idea. Talent should out, and as I said at the time, the only thing worse than nepotism is anti-nepotism—not giving a shot to some who would otherwise have deserved it. (more…)

It’s been almost 10 years since Paul Levinson, then president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, approached me at the 1999 Philcon and asked if I would act as Toastmaster for the following year’s Nebula Awards ceremony in New York.

Ham that I am, I immediately accepted. Click below to see how I repaid Paul for that honor.

The event was recorded by a group called the Rochester Fantasy Fans, something which I’d completely forgotten. At the Montreal Worldcon last weekend, they presented me with a DVD containing a complete video of that evening, which contains speeches by Daniel Keyes and Brian Aldiss, plus stage appearances by Octavia Butler, Nancy Kress, John Kessel, and others.

Maybe you’ll get to see them in the future. But for now, here’s a brief taste of my shtick. If you behave, I may inflict more of it on you.

While digging through boxes of papers earlier this month in search of Clarion workshop manuscripts from 1979 which had been scrawled on by my instructors—needed for my Worldcon PowerPoint presentation “How to Respond to a Critique of Your Writing”—I came across a box containing photocopies of several pieces of artwork I hadn’t even remembered owning.

I’ll probably end up posting them all here eventually, but since I shared a a never-before seen drawing of the Scarecrow on John Byrne’s birthday last month, I thought—why not start off with a never-before-seen drawing of The Scarecrow by Don Perlin, an artist best known for Werewolf by Night, a title which had impressed me way back when.

According to the one page of script which was packed away with the photocopy, this was meant to be the splash page for Scarecrow #2, with room left at the top for one of Marvel’s introductory text paragraphs and at the bottom for the indicia.

(And forgive me if the top and bottom halves of the illustration don’t entirely line up—I don’t own a scanner large enough to fit the entire piece, and so scanned each half separately and put it all back together again with Photoshop.)

But (you may ask) whatever happened to Scarecrow #1? (more…)

During a break in the action at the Montreal Worldcon last Saturday, I snuck away from the convention center with power couple F. Brett Cox and Jeanne Beckwith. After lunch at Rôtisserie St-Hubert, we paused at a strip club, wandered a church, and toured the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal.

As we moved through the museum, I was very conscious of the passage of time. The Locus gang was going to be hosting a wake for Charles N. Brown in Gary K. Wolfe’s room at 5:00 p.m., and I wanted to be there to help remember. Little did I know that there was something the universe very much wanted me to remember.

I learned this while examining one of the the massive photos hung for a special exhibition of the work of Robert Polidori. Mixed in with pictures taken in Chernobyl, Beirut, and Jordan was the following image, which was labeled, “La Guarida, Restaurant Entrance, Havana.”

Why was that meaningful? (more…)