Since I got home Monday night, I've just been processing the last weekend and trying to organize my thoughts. A lot happened so this recap might come off more as a random assortment of thoughts. First of all, since there seems to have been a lot of controversy over whether or not this MAL was a disaster, I'll start off by saying that it was great. This was only my second MAL so maybe I wasn't as attached to the previous venue, the Plaza, but I'd have to say that I had an even better time this year than last year.
That's not to say that things ran smoothly. The new hotel didn't seem to have any idea what they were getting into. For whatever reason, they had decided to book a convention of American wheat farmers (about as white bread as it could have gotten, literally). The plan seems to have been for all of us to have been kept in the basement with the leather mart and a huge ballroom with low lighting and bad house music. For most of the weekend, that room stayed empty and everyone ended up taking over the main lobby of the hotel instead.
This of course led to a awkward encounters with the wheat farmers, most of which involved watching them inch their way through a crowd of men in leather and rubber, terrified. However, I did have one pleasant interaction involving them and my new blog bud
Bo Doppel. He introduced me to two women named Fonda and Arlene, from Oklahoma. They were pretty open minded about the whole thing, though they said that the hotel hadn't told them anything about MAL before they got there. They seemed particularly intrigued by the chaps (which they pronounced "shaps") and pup tails.
While I was down there, I got a room with my friend
Neil the Erotic Hypnotist. Along with Bo, I also got to meet a lot of new people like Sparky, who runs the blog
No Safe Word, and also to see some people I hadn't seen in a while like Ben from
Ben in Leatherland. Somehow I ended up wearing more sports gear and Under Armour than leather. While I love leather, sports gear and spandex is a fetish that seems to have creeped up on me. I guess that's just how those things work. I swear, Under Armour would have made a killing if they'd had a booth alongside Mr. S, Nasty Pig, and Fort Troff. A friend took some pictures of me in my wrestling singlet but I'm not posting them because I look underage in them. I tend to be one of the youngest and youngest-looking people at these events, and I got called a twink more times that weekend than I probably have my whole life.
I spent a lot of the weekend in a very dom headspace, and had many "firsts"- most of which involved public scenes, like having my new jump boots licked in the lobby by a few different guys. I was also involved in a very hot, public scene as a dom that involved hypnosis, boots, rubber, sports and military gear, zipping up and unzipping whenever hotel staff walked by... Sparky is putting up an excellent and very detailed post about it all and since it's not my style to go into too much detail on here, I'm going to refer to him when his post goes up so as to not be redundant. Here's a teaser pic:
I can't wait for next year!
