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Oh, and let me mention the other spacesuits.

At last year’s San Diego show, Mimi and I struck up a conversation with Hector Cordoba, a talented artist and sculptor, who, along with his wife Jessie and his cousin Elias Cordoba, comprise Nostrum Costumes, a prop production company outside of LA. We arranged with Elias to come see their warehouse and to pick up a pair of prop spacesuits that we’re going to use to generate interest in ˆ at comic book conventions. Instead of scant ily-clad booth bunnies, I’m thinking supermodels in spacesuits.

But maybe that’s just me.

Elias and Hector hooked us up with the full-on prop: outer excursion lunar suit, backpacks, boots, helmets… the whole nine yards. There was so much equipment to take home that we couldn’t carry it back on the plane, and had to drive the Mustang convertible we had rented back up the coast to San Francisco.

And it was somewhere on that trip up the 5, listening to Mimi scream out the lyrics “I said do ya speaka my language, he just smiled and gave me a Vegamite sandwich...” along with the radio cranked up and tuned to a Fresno oldies station, in the middle of the night at 95 miles an hour sit ting in a Mustang convertible filled to the brim with costume spacesuits and after meetings with some folks who seem to be on the same page as me that I realized I was basically just livin’ the dream again.

“I love that place,” I said, to Mimi, as the glow from the lights of Los Angeles retreated behind us in the rear-view mirror.

So it’s not exactly a stylish return high atop a white charger, but at least it’s not exeunt holding one’s nose.

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