International Contest: Fantasy

Here is the video from my International contest:

As you can hear from the background audio, the audience really reacted well to it.  When we did it in the mock contest, one of the practice judges can be heard saying “Oh my god” just from the riding crop segment, before the music starts — what can I say, she’s a Rocky Horror fan!  Another of the practice judges knew what we were doing as soon as the music started.  And people at the contest itself (especially the boys) loved Dan playing with the violet wand on himself.

The music got played at a louder level than when we practiced on stage the day before, which makes some of the dialogue hard to hear, even in the cut-down form used for the fantasy.  As well, my voice was somewhat strained by all the lead-up to the contest — it was even noticeable the week before at the mock contest, and I cracked a bit the night before in my speech — so we used the “Juice!” to give me some actual liquid on stage.  We also got a little behind our musical cues, with is odd because we had been too far ahead earlier.

Our monster was the fantastic Ms. San Francisco Leather, Ms.  Bethie Bee, who was one of my co-judges at the Alameda County Leather contest in June.  (And thus the hard-to-hear line near the end: “This is the Beth.  Monster.  Ever!”)  The monster was originally scheduled to be Ruin (original line: “My monster is Ruin!  Ruin, I tell you!”), when we were told to try to include the entire team in the fantasy.  Then we understood her speech would be right after the fantasy, so she wouldn’t have time to change, so we go a substitute.  Then we found that her speech would be as much as 30 minutes before us, with another 30 minutes after us before the announcement of the winners, so we could have put her back in, but she was nervous about the timing and we stayed with Bethie.

As ever with the regional theme of Edgeplay, defining the meaning of the theme is difficult.  The easy targets are Guns, Knives, and Rape, but those don’t get me off in the least, and projecting that through the fantasy would be difficult.  So instead, we went for Corpses, Electricity, and Gender Play, although having fun in the fantasy can hide some of the edge.  (Apparently regional themes have been dropped for next year.  Wish they had been dropped this year.)

Did the judges like the fantasy?  I won’t know until I see the scores.  There are several things they judge it on, including Entertainment, Sir/Boy Interaction, Theme, and I’m not sure what else at the moment.  (Condition of Boots is probably in there, like throughout the contest.  Mine were wonderful, and the yellow stitching echoed the yellow lightning bolts, although I wouldn’t expect that to be noticed.)  If a judge didn’t trigger on the Edgeplay notes we went for, they might have scored low on that, or they could have felt we appropriated another region’s theme, Movies (or even Sci Fi) — which admittedly, this would have matched to very well.  And of course, they might have wanted more hands-on direct sex interaction with the boy, or even disliked the boy zapping the Sir, despite the audience loving that.

(I finally received the scores, although no notes.  I placed 5th out of 15 for the fantasy, which isn’t too bad.  Out of seven judges scores and 60 points possible, I had two scores at the very high end — a 58 and a perfect 60, the two highest scores on any of the fantasies!  [woo!] — and two quite a bit lower — a 35 and a 37.  Looking over the scores from the other contestants, there were a few with score ranges that broad, but most were tighter.)

Several people asked why we didn’t do the ice cream fantasy from my regional contest.  Both Dan and my original title boy, Danny, gave a hard “No!” to that idea.  [pout]  You’ll notice the brief presence of a Klondike bar in this one, when I ask for lube.  That was Dan’s idea.

We will be doing the fantasy again (and the ice cream one, also!) during the Northwest Leather Weekend on September 1, and presumably again at Northwest Sash Bash in 2013.