LEGO (29 page)

“You here for the blind build?” asks a skinny guy with a ponytail, looking up from a clipboard.

“Yes,” I lie as I turn around to see a room of twenty people staring at me. I usually answer questions I’m not ready for with a positive response. It’s not based on some life-affirming creed, but instead is a residual effect of a decade of improvisational comedy performances. The fundamental rule of improv is acceptance, the idea of building a scene through “yes and...” This is one instance where I will regret that my instincts guided me offstage. The guy glances briefly at my convention name tag before nodding to a folding table on his right.

“Well sit down, we’re getting ready to start.” The organizer goes on to explain the rules. Each of the fifteen competitors has been given a LEGO Racers set, number 8152. We will be making one of the three vehicles inside the set—the four-stud-wide police car. I look at the box. It’s a neat little car, maybe fifty pieces, with lots of translucent red and blue. This is the last time I’ll see the pieces: they’ll be hidden underneath a black cloth-covered triangle during the building competition.

“On my count, you will open the box and take out the bags for the police car. You’ll build the set, and the shortest time with the fewest errors wins. Each error will count ten seconds against your time,” says the organizer.

I feel better going into this competition than I did with the Belville challenge, confident enough to wish my neighbor good luck. My hands are steady when I grab the box. In front of me is a wooden triangle covered with black felt. It’s open in the front because “[the contest] is being filmed and will be used by LEGO,” according to the organizer. This is as close as I’ll ever get to
The Real World.

We all rip cardboard on the organizer’s cue. The blind build has started. I glance briefly at the three plastic bags before shoving the one containing the parts for the police car underneath the black curtain. I rip the bag open with too much force and I hear the pieces scatter, a wheel careening off my finger.

I open the first page of the instructions. Thankfully the rules don’t mean that you have to invent your own steps for putting together an existing set. The front of the cruiser comes together quickly; it’s a 2 × 8 plate attached to a 4 × 4 plate. I mistakenly think this is easy. I roll parts between my thumb and forefinger, feeling for the bumpiness of studs.

The true challenge is that there are a number of similar pieces—1 x 4 tiles and cheese wedges—in different colors.

“How do you know which is which?” I ask a guy sitting in a chair facing my box. He could be the twin of Notre Dame University’s football coach Charlie Weis.

“The blue feels different from the red,” he says, laughing. I try to decide if he’s serious before laughing as well.

At this point, the first competitor, Ryan, has finished. In fifteen minutes, he’s put together his police car with just thirteen errors. Ryan will win easily. I wish I were Ryan.

I’m snapping together pieces of the fender and dying a bit inside. The space inside the black triangle is only a foot wide, and yet I still can’t find parts. I didn’t understand how much I rely on sight when building. I may know the vernacular and can imagine uses for parts, but I have no touch memory. I’m halfway through the instructions when I notice that the police racer has a glow-in-the-dark hood. The irony is not lost on me.

“If you don’t make any mistakes, you could win. You just have to get them all right,” says Charlie Weis’ twin when he notices I’m getting frustrated. I know he’s just being nice, but the support is welcome.

After forty minutes, the blind build is called. I’m the only competitor who has failed to finish. They have to get the room ready for the build in a bag, where AFOLs will put a set together without taking it out of the plastic bag. I walk over to the table with fourteen police cars and put down my mangled creation. I place the remaining pieces next to it. The base is off line and the axles are not attached properly. In the first few steps, I attached a plate one stud further than the instructions specified, and everything I built after that was incorrect. But the LEGO gods are not without a sense of humor; all of my colors are right.

I commiserate with Joe Meno afterward, who has just finished a creative build challenge where he’s turned a blue coast guard set into a beautiful bird.

“Blind builds are tough,” says Joe. “You have to stay on track or you don’t have a chance.”

I confess that I hadn’t entered my name for the blind build, but just went into the room to escape the public.

“You needed a break, huh?” asks Joe. “These days can be stressful.”

Joe would know. At conventions he is constantly in motion, taking pictures and talking to builders about what they’ve brought. He’s also doing his best to promote
BrickJournal,
leading seminars to find out what people want him to include or what they think of the magazine.

“Tonight should be fun,” says Joe, smiling.

He knows about the new set that LEGO is planning to unveil at BrickCon. He’s known for months, and now he’ll finally be able talk about it. Later that night, the crowd of adult fans is buzzing over the unveiling of the Medieval Market Village, which includes two female peasants, two cows, and a whole turkey among its 1,601 pieces. There are as many whistles for the rare whole turkey as for the bar wench when they are shown on a slide.

Female minifigures are always in high demand because they are a scarce resource. They have been since the hospital nurse minifig debuted in 1978. Adult fans often complain that female minifigures have been disproportionately included in big-ticket sets.

“So many of the ‘cool’ female figs are in rare or expensive sets. The result has been that budget-concerned buyers only end up with the male or generic figs in their collection,” wrote AFOL John Henderson in July 2007 on LUGNET

When you combine scarcity with the demands of a male-dominated secondary market, the prices for female minifigs can skyrocket after the sets have been taken out of production. The Ice Planet babe, a female minifig with a pink space helmet from a 2002 set, goes for $10 in new condition. The female islander, a tourist with a blue flowered shirt (from the ill-fated Paradisa line for girls), and Astrobot Sandy Moondust both regularly sell for over $15 apiece.

And that might explain what’s happening at the front of the room. Matthew Ashton, the lead designer for LEGO Playthemes, has just finished talking about how a set moves from development into production, when he announces that LEGO has one more surprise for the adult fans at BrickCon. Matthew is British and has the habit of holding his hands together like a choir singer when he speaks at the microphone. He asks the women attending the convention to come to the front of the room.

“It’s time for the first ever Little Miss LEGO Beauty Pageant 2008,” says Matthew. “I know you’ve wanted more female minifigs, well here they are ... the mermaid, Willie Scott, the queen ...”

As he calls out each of the names that appear on the projector, a female convention attendee walks in front of the crowd carrying the actual minifig. The crowd hoots and hollers, not for the women, but for the minifigs. The troll hag sorceress is crowned the winner.

The contest is simultaneously sweet and slightly chauvinistic. The female minifigs are what is being objectified, but I can’t stop thinking that LEGO will never really understand female builders.

 

 

The next event is gender neutral. The Dirty Brickster—the AFOL equivalent of the White Elephant, Dirty Santa, or Yankee Swap—is a game held at most fan conventions. To participate you have to contribute a wrapped present worth $10 to $20, which is placed on a table inside a circle of chairs where the players sit. If you are the first player, you pick a present from the table. There’s no shaking or rattling a wrapped gift. You have to take what you pick up. The second player may then choose a new present to unwrap, or he may “steal” your gift. After a present is unwrapped, it can be stolen up to three times by any player whose turn hasn’t come yet.

AFOLs root for boxes to be stolen because then they get to launch into a monotone chant of “Dir-tee Brick-stur.” Some adults even take particular joy in stealing a box from a child, believing that he or she won’t appreciate a rare set or a piece of LEGO ephemera. “Some people bring lame sets, others bring really cool surprises,” wrote Joe Meno when I asked him in an e-mail what is a typical gift for the Dirty Brickster.

Forty-nine people have gathered for the Dirty Brickster, and Wayne divides us into two circles. I sit down on a chair in the circle next to Abner Finley, my fellow Belville competitor from Minnesota.

I’m a bit worried about what I ended up putting on the table. Before I left for Seattle, I wrapped the pair of Ewoks and the Chewbacca that I had picked up at a yard sale, certain that the minifigs would be a hit with the Star Wars crowd. But they’re still on top of my bureau in Kansas City, forgotten in the packing process, when I join the game.

The first bag to be unwrapped has a collection of LEGO pens. By the appreciative murmuring of the crowd, I can tell it will be stolen. As with any white elephant, the size of the wrapped gift has nothing to do with its value. A LEGO Racers set is unveiled, and a box of classic space parts is admired.

It’s quickly my turn, and I know the LEGO pens have been stolen twice. While it would be nice to have something I could use in my profession, I can tell Abner wants them, so instead I walk up to the table filled with yellow LEGO bags and gifts that clearly have been wrapped by men.

My Dirty Brickster gift turns out to be a ziplock bag filled with hundreds of fill parts from SpongeBob SquarePants and Star Wars sets. Nobody wants to steal it from me. Abner walks around the circle, scratching under his chin. “Hmmm ...,” he says before stealing the pens. The crowd chants, “Dir-tee Brick-stur.”

The unwrapping seems to drag on, and I get more anxious for my gift to be opened. I see someone finally pick up the bag and take out the two minifigures I purchased at Tom Erickson’s booth for $20 right before the Dirty Brickster.

He takes out the Princess Leia and classic spaceman minifigs, turning the bag upside down to see if there is something else inside.

“That’s it?” asks someone to his right.

“Yup,” he replies, and a little of the enthusiasm goes out of the circle.

“See, that’s too bad,” says Abner, and I wince. “Probably some kid, has no idea what something is really worth, just going off the prices off BrickLink.”

I don’t tell him that I’m the kid who ruined it. I am really embarrassed.

Afterward a guy in a Mets cap walks up to me. It’s Alan Bernstein, the guy who bought grass from the LEGO Crack House in Bellaire, Ohio.

“I just wanted to make sure you’re happy with what you got,” says Alan.

“It’s great. What I need most right now is bricks, so a random assortment is perfect.”

“Cool, I just wasn’t sure. Glad you like them,” says Alan.

At least you didn’t just put in two minifigs,
I want to tell him. I don’t walk up to the guy who got my bag. I already know whether he liked what he got.

 

 

I wonder if by getting too comfortable, I’m revealing myself as some sort of poser. Just a day after feeling at home at the convention, it seems I can’t really do anything right. This is the LEGO epic fail. Am I a guy who shows up to all of the events but doesn’t really get what everything is about? I never want to be the fifty-year-old executive who congratulates himself for beating out a grounder off a washed-up former major leaguer at a fantasy baseball camp.

But then I see Joe across the room. He smiles and waves. Aaron Dayman offers me a beer. Dan Brown comes over and brags about the sets he ended up purchasing before the store closed. Thomas Mueller invites me to go out for a beer down the street. None of them cares about my performance in the blind build or my poor taste in gifts for the Dirty Brickster; they just don’t want to stop enjoying the convention and talking about LEGO.

And the next thing I know, it’s close to two in the morning and I’ve been sitting next to Lino Martins for the better part of two hours. He’s clad in a red and black bowling shirt that says LUGNUTS, the LEGO car club he helped launch in 2007. With a black circle beard and a pirate-skull cap, Lino should be a tough guy. But he’s an artist with a sweet, self-deprecating sense of humor. Lino builds jaw-dropping Miniland-scale cars like perfect El Dorados. My favorite of his creations is a version of his brassy girlfriend, Sue, who is at the convention not out of a love for LEGO, but out of love for Lino. Her Miniland doppelgänger stands in a gothlike black outfit next to her dream car: a ‘57 Pontiac Safari.

“I love these things. It’s all about building,” says Lino when I ask him why he’s at BrickCon.

I call it a night shortly thereafter and head back to my hotel room in downtown Seattle. When I get there, I lie down on my bed and the bag of bricks from the Dirty Brickster pokes into my side through my jacket pocket. When I wake up the next morning, I find a half-formed car there. It’s a terrible idea, as most are after a few drinks, but it’s mine. I put it in my pocket and head out for the last day of the convention.

The completed Stegosaurus set looms on our living room bookshelf, behind the finest example of a LEGO camel you’ll ever see.