In the spring of 2014, I attended the Calgary Comic and Entertainment Expo in Calgary, Alberta, partially because I am an enormous nerd, and partially because there is no sunscreen known to man or science that will let me spend Spring Break at a beach destination without accidentally discovering a new kind of melanoma. Frankly, someone of my constitution and complexion has no business entering anything but a windowless underground doomsday shelter without a thick layer of SPF-60.

Form an orderly line, boys, and remember to take out your retainers.

Since I was nearly twenty-two years old and the passage of linear time had already robbed me of the chance to sit at the ‘cool’ table in high school, I decided to go ahead and attend the comic convention in full costume. There were rumors that the big celebrity guests that year were going to be Star Wars actors, and that seemed like as good a place as any to look for cosplay inspiration. My heart said ‘Princess Leia’, my body said ‘Jabba the Hutt’, and both my costuming skills and budget said ‘neither of those things’. Fortunately, the Star Wars universe offered something of a compromise.

Coatee-cha tu yub nub, bitches.

And so my quest to transform myself into the world’s most Canadian Ewok began.

After spending twenty minutes explaining to a sweet but very confused elderly FabricLand employee that I wanted to dress up as a four-foot-tall homicidal space bear, I walked away with a sheet of fake fur and a roll of the finest burnt-orange polyester that the bargain bin had to offer.

I hadn’t actually sewn anything since I’d been forced to hand-stitch an apron against my will in my seventh grade home economics class, and transforming myself into a buck-toothed, crossbow-wielding teddy bear proved to be well beyond my capabilities. Luckily, my grandmother happened to be visiting, and she knew her way around a sewing machine. After receiving a truly excessive lecture on Star Wars lore, she put on a brave face and set to work sewing my costume, knowing full well that this was the closest she would ever get to sewing me a wedding dress.

Honestly, it’s for the best.

My grandmother helped put together a surprisingly competent Ewok costume for a woman who thinks the main character of Star Wars is Gandalf, and with my three-day Expo pass purchased and my novelty Yoda backpack at the ready, I thought I was prepared for anything the Calgary Comic Con could throw at me.

I was not.

It cost $60 and holds almost nothing. Worth it.

The first day of the convention was uneventful. This was not my first time being crammed into a convention center with 50,000 similarly non-athletic people, and my friends and I spent our time admiring costumes, eating fried food, and browsing through the greatest collection of copyright-infringing pornography that any of us had ever seen. My costume attracted some attention, but not too much attention – Ewoks were not a particularly popular costume choice at the convention, and most of the photo requests I got on that first day were fellow Star Wars cosplayers who were delighted to have found an authentically round Ewok to complete their group photos.

By the second day of the convention, we had already purchased so many novelty graphic t-shirts and run so dangerously low on money that all of us were in danger of having to pay our rent with lapdances, so we decided to check out the schedule of events going on at the convention. As luck would have it, Star Wars actor Anthony Daniels, who portrayed C-3PO in every single one of the Star Wars movies, was having a showcase in a tent outside and we had just enough time to get decent seats if we hurried.

We packed into a thousand-seat canvas tent that smelled like nerds in heat and took seats next to the aisle, right in the middle of the audience. After a few minutes, Anthony Daniels came out and began his showcase, telling stories about his time on set while making it abundantly clear that he is genuinely just a living version of C-3PO that speaks fewer languages. He was halfway through boasting about being the only actor to appear in every Star Wars movie, as R2-D2 actor Kenny Baker was replaced by a remote-controlled garbage can in the prequels, when he suddenly stopped and squinted into the audience.

“Is that an Ewok I see?” he asked.

It was.

It turned out that my terrible, terrible friends had been intentionally waving and pointing at me in the hopes that Daniels might find my costume interesting enough to embarrass me in public, and Daniels did not disappoint. He peered through the stage lights so he could see me better, and pointed a finger at me.

“Bring me the Ewok,” he demanded.

Honestly, it might have been the only time someone was actually happy to see an Ewok.

At the tender age of twenty-one I was still afraid of things like “interacting with famous people” and “being generally visible to other human beings”, so I immediately tried to hide underneath my chair like a frightened child in a thunderstorm. Daniels, however, was having none of it, and he came striding into the audience toward me.

“Come, Ewok,” he commanded, taking me by the wrist.

Daniels dragged me up onto the stage, where he fussed with my hood for several minutes until he was satisfied that I was exactly the correct amount of scruffy. And when that was complete, he presented me before a gleeful audience who already knew where he was going with this.

“Ewok,” he said, not even bothering to disguise the glee in his voice, “do you remember what the Ewoks did when they met C-3P0?”

They swiped right on him so hard.

I had not psychologically or emotionally prepared myself to face an audience of a thousand people in a $4 bargain-bin FabricLand space bear costume, and in that moment I could not entirely remember if Star Wars was the franchise about galaxy-hopping incest twins or a plucky boy wizard who goes to magic school. Daniels looked at me expectantly, and after a moment my geek knowledge returned to me.

“They… they worshipped him like a God.”

At that point, something deep inside me snapped, and I achieved a temporary state of “not giving a shit” nirvana. With my giggling friends looking on from the audience, I dropped to the stage floor and did what Ewoks do – I worshiped an aging Star Wars actor like a God.

Yub motherfucking nub.

I don’t entirely remember the rest of my time on stage, because I was rapidly spiraling into a fugue state of adrenaline and heat stroke, but I do know for a fact that at one point, I began leading the audience in a mass chant of Ewok noises as a lead actor of one of the most culturally important movie franchises in Western history egged me on. Photographs suggest that he then gave me a very sweaty side-hug, and I somehow returned to my seat to watch the rest of the show.

For the rest of the convention, I was mobbed. If you attended the 2014 Calgary Comic Expo, there’s a good to fair chance that you have a selfie with a dazed version of me, blinking up into your camera like a newly-freed hostage from an underground end-times cult. People asked for photos everywhere I went – on the convention floor, while I was midway through stuffing a lukewarm chicken tender into my mouth, and even while I was waiting in line for the bathroom and wondering how exactly I was going to strip out of an enormous fur costume to pee without inconveniencing the four-dozen people behind me. People who write crudely-illustrated humor blogs rarely achieve “household name status”, so this was the closest that I will ever come to being famous.

Even if mediocre cartoonists did become famous, no one would ever recognize me in public because I have a neck in real life.

It wasn’t until I was on the Greyhound bus back to Edmonton, seated behind a man in assless pajama pants who appeared to be conversing with his own arm hair, that I had a chance to reflect on the events of the weekend. The encounter with Anthony Daniels had not been particularly traumatic, but I had always wanted to have a rich and powerful nemesis that I hated for flimsy reasons, and this seemed like the only time I would ever be personally wronged by a celebrity.

And so my incredibly one-sided blood feud began.

Pictured: a completely healthy way to spend your time.

Six years later, and I have kept it going. Anthony Daniels is currently a 74-year-old Englishman made entirely from bird skeletons and I am a robust, corn-fed 27-year-old Canadian built for harsh winters, but I will show him no mercy. I will start a rumor that he is actually a large emu wearing a human suit. I will periodically announce on Twitter that he has died. I will tell everyone I ever speak to that he is a professionally-trained mime, which is a very real fact about him and not something that I could even invent as a joke on my very best writing days. If all else fails, I will just try really, really hard to outlive him.

But sooner or later, I will have my revenge.

Pictures provided for posterity, and to prove that this was not a hallucination brought on by eating bad French fries.

 

 

To read more about the times I’ve publicly humiliated myself in my twenties, be sure to read up about the time I caused thousands of dollars in damages to a college dorm in a single night. 

To see more jokes and doodles, or to figure out where I live so you can hunt me for sport, check out my Facebook page, my Twitter, my Instagram or my incredibly funny true crime podcast.