Reply To: Failed your will save against JoCo?
The first time I interacted with Mr. Coulton was at my first concert (December 2006). I still hadn’t heard all his music, and was making my way through back blog posts & comments, forum threads, and so on.
The day of the concert I ran across the video promo for the AoME paperback edition, which puzzled me but which I found amusing. Why was he dressed in buckskin? What was the meaning of the coonskin cap?
Either way, given that there was a ferret on the cover of the hardback edition (which I owned) and a feral mountain man theme to the schtick he obviously did with John Hodgman, I decided that he needed a stuffed toy weasel.
Which I just happened to have half a dozen of, since earlier that week my IKEA store had suddenly shown up with a wire binful of my favorite stuffed toy — the Soft Toy Weasel. They had been available the previous Xmas, but disappeared thereafter. I was delighted! I bought weasels!
And such was my admiration for this new musician I was enjoying so much, I was even willing to sacrifice one of my cherished and valuable Soft Toy Weasels for him, because it would go so well with his costume.
At the performance, I was seated just opposite the doorway to backstage & to the restrooms (which was convenient). I hadn’t quite figured out how to get the weasel to the musician, but suddenly I saw a familiar-looking face in the doorway. In the comforting darkness and hub-bub of the pre-show audience chatter, JoCo had evidently decided to head to the bar to pick up some kind of refreshment. As he went past, I stood up and handed him the weasel, saying “I brought you a weasel.”
He apparently didn’t think anyone would notice him — it was billed as a Paul & Storm concert, after all — and he was taken aback. “Wait,” he said, “are you saying you came to this concert with the intention of giving me a weasel?”
“Yes,” I told him, quite earnestly. “It’s from IKEA.” I thought that might be enough to explain things — I didn’t know exactly how to reference the strange video with the coonskin cap, so I hoped I wouldn’t have to convey my reasoning.
The place, though, was loud and full of the buzz of lots of people talking, glasses clanking, muzak in the background and so on. He apparently didn’t quite hear me.
“How old’s the kid?” he replied. I was taken aback myself. “There’s no kid,” I said. “It’s from IKEA. The store — IKEA.”
His mind instantly went to the product identification habits of the IKEA AG holding corporation. “Oh!” he said. “What’s its name? Does it have one of those weird Swedish names?”
Oh god. Where to start? That it no longer had the original name from the previous season, which had related to the Xmas season? That the new version, although identified in the signage as “Soft Toy Weasel” had one of those temporary merchandise names based on names of villages — one of dozens of things called ALLEBY, or BRATTBY, or FANBY or some such name? That, being temporary merchandise, the only way to clearly identify it was by the eight-digit Article Number unique to it (which was 601.200.90, btw)?
I finally settled on “It’s seasonal,” along with “it shares a name with a lot of other stuff.” He paused (probably wondering if maybe I was ignorant about the weird names things have at IKEA) and then thanked me, wandering off towards the bar. I blame it on the noise level of the venue, but it was definitely an Awkward Encounter with JoCo.