Little Harajuku

WICHITA, Kan. -- I scanned the crowd at the dimly-lit Best Western Wichita North auditorium. I saw one fat Mario, complete with an "M" hat, two Chun Lis from the Street Fighter series and three Soras from the Kingdom Hearts games. And there were 100 other people in costume, representing animes that I had never of.

I wanted to ask the attendees of the second annual Wichita Anime Festival one question: "What the fuck are you doing here?" But since that wouldn't be terribly tactful, I settled on this: "How did you make your costume?" The responses were the same.

"I've been waiting a long time for this," a 21-year-old man told me. He had on a costume that resembled the Disney representation of Robin Hood. He was actually Link, the hero of the Zelda games. He wore rubber boots covered with layers of white duct tape, a green cape made out of a sheet, held together with political buttons painted yellow.

How long had he been waiting? "Since January, when I got my ticket," he said.

To get to Wichita, he drove four hours with a friend from western Kansas. This event, attended by nearly 2,000 people, is the largest anime festival in the state.

"I've got about 60 hours in this costume," a 19-year-old art student from Kansas City said. She was a character from Kingdom Hearts II, a collaboration between anime video makers and Disney. Her costume was based on a character from Tron, the pioneering computer animation movie from 25 years ago. She used black car foam to make the curved costume, and took four coats of paint to put blue strips across the sides. Her keyblade -- a six-foot key that is used in the game like a sword -- apparently was wood, PVC piping and a lot of time with a saw.

This was her fourth festival, making her a veteran. At the festival people kept interrupting our interview so they could take snapshots. I've loved this line -- also in my story -- most of all:

"Sorry -- I'm popular."

Most of the attendees were in high school, dropped off by their parents and wearing costumes that their parents probably made.

What struck me most about the festival was that it wasn't about Japan at all. Or even about Japanese animation. What really drew these children together was a chance to dress up in crazy costumes and act out for a couple days. High school, I'm sure I don't need to remind anyone, can be a tough time, where being cute, popular and armed with the J. Crew spring collection is mandatory. Here, mostly smart and talented children get to be the ones on display for a change, rather than having to do the bidding of the cool kids.

"Anime conventions are the sci-fi conventions of this millennium," the organizer told me. I have to agree. If the art in display was noh theater or Amazonian rainmakers, I doubt the kids would have come out. But this is a group with fans all around the country, fans that want to meet each other and know they're not alone. I see this at indie concerts I attend. (You like Prefuse 73? No way! I do too!) Anime's the subgroup for this generation.

Lesson learned, I left the Anime Festival before the odor from many rounds of Dance, Dance Revolution and poorly ventilated plastic costumes became too much to bear.

Preggers

WICHITA, Kansas - A quick note: I hate Blogger. I hate Safari even more. I hate it when they team up and crash the computer and delete massively clever blog entries in the process.

War of the Worlds is on the television. It's a really intense movie for a summer blockbuster. It's daring and actually has something to say about terrorism and the post 9/11 world. And might also give me nightmares tonight, and not just because Dakota Fanning is really creepy.

Dakota Fanning is a child, and that's what I wanted to talk about today: children. People here in Kansas seem to have children pretty young. There's a woman at work. She has two children: aged 25 and 20. The 25-year-old has two kids of her own, aged 5 and 2. The younger daughter has a newborn baby. That's three grandchildren, and she's not as old as my mother. My mother will be lucky if she has three grandchildren, period.

The average age of a woman's first childbirth is now about 25 years. Here I've met people who's first kid was born long before that. Children right out of high school isn't uncommon. Some people actually do get married when they are 18. We ran a story in the paper the other day that treated it as a normal thing, not something to hold up as a model for delinquency. Hardly the kind of thing that would run in the New York Times.

I don't think there's anything wrong with teen pregnancy. Some people at age 17 are ready to have a child. Others are not, but they have children anyway. I certainly didn't, but that doesn't mean some people can't choose to do it.

I do hope to make it out of Kansas without fathering any offspring. We'll see.