It's a magical world

I have not talked about Welcome to Night Vale here before. Suffice it to say that I started listening to it a week or two before the huge explosion this summer, but I can never consume any media but books in a timely fashion and in particular the only activity that I can do while listening to the podcast is cooking, so it took me a while to catch up eventually. But! I am all caught up now and I love it to death. And tonight I went to The Booksmith in the Haight with epershand and we saw Night Vale Live! We have had excellent event planning luck lately, and we managed to time things so that we had time to eat dinner sitting down in the Mexican place next door, which is pretty good, before going back to the line and getting a place only about ten people behind where we would have been…which was enough to get us seats in the third row from the front for the show. We were feet from Cecil Baldwin and the other performers! FEET.

I was not expecting to love it as much as I did, in all honesty, but it was utter perfection in the way of our imperfect world, and I basically sat there with a huge grin on my face for the entire 45 minutes. Carlos. CECIL. THE FACELESS OLD WOMAN WHO LIVES IN YOUR HOME. I love them all so much and I love Carlos and Cecil's relationship and how Cecil has realized that Carlos isn't perfect and that's what makes their relationship great and FACELESS OLD WOMAN FOR MAYOR and also in the end the episode had the moral that I like best of all possible morals, which is that this world is imperfect, and that's what makes it beautiful. (Also, Cecil's self-disgust when he saw mountains! And Carlos wanting a condo! And Cecil's concern for his listeners and his worldview! It's no accident that he's dating an out-of-towner, seriously.) And the weather was Satellite High, and he did a special outro reprise of "Waitin' for the Bus in the Rain" and it was so great, seriously, AUGH. And also Meg is seriously cool-looking. NIGHT VALE <333333 Seriously, the episode made me want to write fic for the show, which is a high compliment.

Also there was a girl there who was cosplaying the glow cloud (there was a lot of excellent cosplay, seriously), and when we were waiting at the bus stop afterward (not in the rain, thankfully) and she walked past we intoned "All hail the glow cloud" in serial and totally freaked her out, which was pretty funny because we were only like a block from the bookstore. Also, for those of you going to future Night Vale Live events, black and purple is totally the dress code.