IDICon and 4-Play Con: An Interview with Kandy Fong and Marnie S.

Interviews by Fans
Title:	IDICon and 4-Play Con: An Interview with Kandy Fong and Marnie S.
Interviewer:	Legacy
Interviewee:	Kandy Fong and Marnie S.
Date(s):	2007
Medium:	print, CD
Fandom(s):	Star Trek: TOS
External Links:
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IDICon and 4-Play Con: An Interview with Kandy Fong and Marnie S. was published in Legacy #2.

Note: "Kathy" is the interviewer, Kathy Resch.

Part of a Series Called "The Legacy of K/S in Conventions"

• Convention Memories by Robin Hood
• IDICon and 4-Play Con: An Interview with Kandy F. and Marnie S.
• Convention Memories: Nancy Kippax: K/S Con
• Convention Memories: Cons I Have Known and Loved by Shelley Butler
• Convention Memories: Shore Leave by Linda B.
• Are You Out of Your Mind? Putting on a K/S Convention by Dovya Blacque, Liz W., Rosemary W., and Jenna Sinclair

Excerpts

So we decided we’ve got to do something in Phoenix. We’ve got to do something from us for them [at IDICon] to tell them how much we appreciate it. None of us were very good singers, and heaven forbid, we couldn’t dance, so we sat around drinking this bottle of really bad wine, and I said, why don’t we reduce it to the basic elements, just two penises, right? So I sat down and edited some songs together on my little tape recorder and I went to a sofa factory place and told them I wanted to make mushroom costumes, so I needed big pieces of foam. Carol D. was a genius with a sewing machine. So we did various things.... For Kirk, of course, he was pink, and we had these fuzzy yellow pipe cleaners. Spock, of course, was mint green, and he had fuzzy black pipe cleaners. This was big enough for a woman to wear. The cone part fits on her head. I hollowed out a little hole, and she has to hang onto it under the costume. They couldn’t see out. They could see down to the ground, they could see to walk off the stage, but they couldn’t see what was there. So we fly in to Houston and it’s very late at night and there were no taxis except for one guy who looked really scuzzy. And we had shipped these things inside a big refrigerator box on the plane to get them there. The [main parts, the shafts] could deflate, but the heads couldn’t deflate; they were big. And he said, I can’t get that in my cab, lady. And I said, okay, fine, so we’re taking these out and putting them into the trunk of the car. So we get to the hotel and it’s late night...okay, fine, I sling them over my shoulder and I march up to the front desk and I get my room, with this big penis costume hanging over my shoulder. So we go onstage and thank goodness Dixie had a camera, and she actually taped it. It starts off with Spock just lying crumpled in the center of the stage and the music is, “I am a rock, I am an island.” And he’s crumpled in on himself. And all of a sudden you hear “Macho Man.” And out comes Kirk, bouncing out onto the stage, and Spock does this “huuuuhhh?” and “looks” over at Kirk, and there’s the “I want to want you, I want you to want me” kind of thing, and they’re kind of rubbing up against each other. And then they get fully erect, both of them and we started doing the “1812 Overture,” and they’re banging against each other and at the end they do the big cannon thing and I grab a double handful of clear candy which I throw up in the air, and then they collapse upon each other. Marnie: And nobody stopped screaming for five minutes; everyone was laughing so hard they were crying. Kandy: PJ was in one costume and Donna was in the other. They ended up doing it again at the last one [IDICon] because everyone had heard about it so we ended up re-acting it again, so to speak.... I took Dixie’s two tapes and edited them together—a video version of it. We showed the edited tape at Revelcon. We told people there was something adult at the end, so of course everyone had to stay and see it. We told them something unusual was coming.

[regarding the napkin rings shaped like various Vulcan genitalia: Kathy: How did you come up with the idea? I know a bottle of wine was a big part of it.

Kandy: Actually, Marnie started it with piñatas.

Marnie: ...For IDICon, the first one I did the napkin rings, the many versions of Spock, from all the different universes, the Kraith, the tendrils, the spike, the pagodas, the whole nine yards]]. And after that convention I thought, they can handle it.... The piñatas were auctioned off.... I had already done the one for Gayle F. for her birthday. My husband was absolutely hysterical because she sent me this thank you note, and in it she says she has them sitting on her coffee table. My husband nearly split a gut right then and there. Of course I could only work on them at night after the kids were in bed.

Marnie: The first IDICon was in 1982.

Kathy: That was the first public slash con.

Kandy: Yes, up until then it had all been covert.

Marnie: What happened was it came after we went to Shore Leave. And we had problems, because Shore Leave was growing by leaps and bounds. It was a real amalgam; they had all these young kids with phasers running around. They had to have all this masking in the art show, to try to sequester and cover the naughty bits….

Kathy: I remember when they created that little room out of bedsheets in the art show….vYou had to go inside this bedsheet room to see the adult artwork.

Marnie: And then Pam, Lezlie — not everyone, but several of them went to (a) Tulsa (Star Trek convention) and they had brought some of Pam and Lezlie’s zines. And that was of course Tulsa. If you think Houston was repressed, imagine how Tulsa was at that time. They had to go and hide everything and quick, stuff them under the table because here comes Security walking through the Dealer’s Room. When they came back, they were all fired up.

Marnie: It was all zine fandom. It was the pon zine. When you opened that dealer room, it was like—stand out of the way or you will be trampled to death! Because a lot of people weren’t sure how many to bring and they would be asking me. And we would tell them we are so starved for zines here, because there wasn’t much in the way of conventions. Remember all the problems with mail and people would be so worried that they would be very hesitant to even send off (for them). So the prospect of having several dozen zines there—fresh meat to read!

Kathy: I broke a suitcase coming back from IDICon one year. I had orders from several other people from the Bay Area to pick up all the latest, so I was getting five or six copies of each zine. My suitcase died at San Francisco International.

Marnie: I had people writing me, calling me, begging me to set zines aside for them. I said I can’t do it! Not even the club can do it—nobody here can do it. No! I’d be dead! And then there were the editors of (genzines) who you tried to discourage from sending six cases of zines, because you knew they weren’t going to sell. By the third year I was saying, just don’t bother. And then one year we had people sending from Australia and that one shipment went astray. We never found out what happened to it, no one got any notes, it just never arrived. It was a fledgling K/S zine from Australia.