May 31 2009
Leaky Con 2009 Convention Report
One of my friends (and a fellow con-goer) recently attended Leaky Con 2009, a Boston Harry Potter convention that I wrote about back in April. When she told me what a great time she had, and I saw her pictures, I asked her if she’d be willing to write up a formal convention report for all of you, dear readers. Leaky Con sounds like it is off to a really great start as a new convention! As always, if you attended Leaky Con 2009, feel free to add your comments at the end! Did you enjoy it? Does it need improvement? We want to know what you think!
Leaky Con 2009 Convention Report
written exclusively for Convention Fans by Sara Cook
I spent May 21-24th in Boston, Massachusetts at Leaky Con. This was my first all Harry Potter convention and the first convention thrown by the amazing folks from the Harry Potter fansite, http://the-leaky-cauldron.org/. The festivities took place at the historic Boston Park Plaza hotel in downtown Boston. One of the amazing things about having the convention at the Park Plaza was the Castle, which is located across the street and where all the night time festivities took place. The Castle was pretty amazing, when you walked inside there were banners draped on both sized of the huge exhibition hall representing the four Hogwarts houses.
While this was my first Harry Potter convention this was not my first convention as I’ve been a Dragon*Con regular since 2005. While the experiences at each were in many ways similar, they were also worlds apart. Leaky Con had a huge focus on wizard rock, which is an amazing music culture focused on writing songs about anything having to do with Harry Potter. (For more information on wizard rock check out the wizrocklopedia (http://wizrocklopedia.com/). Thursday night, Friday night, and Saturday afternoon revolved around amazing four hour wizard rock shows. I’m a huge wizard rock fan and there is nothing quite like getting a huge group of wizard rock fans together with all their favorite wizard rock bands. For myself, the wizard rock shows were the biggest pull to attend. Another highlight of the convention was the Charity Ball on Saturday night, which was basically a four hour dance party of awesome. Wizard rock people really do know how to party.
For their first attempt at putting a convention together the Leaky Cauldron staff did an amazing job. Most of the weekend was absolutely amazing and magical and gave me memories I’ll carry with me forever. There were however a few things that I felt could have been better. The programming that wasn’t wizard rock seemed to be lacking to me. Granted I didn’t go to much of it, but one of the reasons for that was I didn’t really feel compelled to do any of the panels that didn’t involve some sort of wizard rock discussion or performance. This may be a personal bias, because the few non-wizard rock panels I did attend were full of other con goers, so perhaps I’m only in this for the wizard rock. Which in my opinion is completely worth the price of admission.
One of the other things about the convention that could have been better included the hotel. The Park Plaza had some scary elevators. One of them would violently shake and sawdust of some sort would fall on our heads in the elevator. Another thing that really annoyed us was the requirement of inserting a key to make the elevators go, which would have been fine but they never worked on the first try, so you’d have a huge group of people in an elevator that wouldn’t move until someone got their key card to work. The rooms were incredibly tiny for the price also. Part of the reason for the smallness of the rooms of course was related to the age of the hotel, but still, cons are all about cramming people into rooms and these were very small.
Overall, Leaky Con was an amazing experience and I’ll always be incredibly grateful I got the chance to attend. The Harry Potter fandom is so amazing. The four days of the convention were like a giant love-in. Everyone was talking to everyone else, you could absolutely be yourself and if you were less knowledgeable about anything Harry Potter or wizard rock related no one looked down on you, all we wanted to do was share the love. The wizard rockers were amazing and I got to meet and see so many of my favorite bands perform for the first time. If you are a Harry Potter fan I expect to see you at Leaky Con in 2011. I promise it’s an experience you’ll enjoy.
