Photos From The Stuff Of Legend Live Final Dress Rehearsal From Steven Ricks On Instagram.

Photos from The Stuff of Legend Live final dress rehearsal from Steven Ricks on Instagram.

When you were young in fandom did adults try to stop you and tell you to "grow up"?

Hmm... Not in that way, as far as I remember? I never got the "you'll grow out of it" nonsense from my parents, who always encouraged me to enjoy books, film, and TV, as long as I used my brain and thought about what I was consuming. We didn't use the TV for vegging out, and books were precious even though they were much more affordable relative to the average income back then. I was expected to progress towards adulting and not let hobbies get in the way of study then work, but as long as I did that, and was willing to at least try other activities for size, I was left to do my thing.

Spending money on fandom was more of an issue - for a while they imposed a ban on family gifting me books about Star Trek for birthdays or whatever, considering it a waste of our very tight funds - but once I had my own income, and proved I could meet my obligations, my parents were generally on the disinterested-to-vaguely-supportive scale.

At my first convention in the 1980's, both mum and I befriended a fan over twice my age, and we all stayed in touch, visiting and writing. I think mum meeting a functioning adult with the exact same interests as mine made a big difference to her comfort level - she could see that what I was doing wasn't so different to her own hobbies, and that I coped infinitely better in adult company than I did with my peers. My dad never really knew about most of what I got up to, other than that I used any tech he helped me access to write stories on, and occasionally shot off across the country to do something vaguely involving actors or a TV show!

I was into my 20s before I really shared my fandom life with my mum, all the same. I hosted quite a few fannish friends who were travelling from overseas, and I ran fanclubs and print zines and interviewed cast/crew all over the country like it was a second job, travelled to conventions and meets rather than taking 'proper' holidays, and my family began to grasp that fandom was my way of engaging with the world on my own terms rather than hiding from it. I was in my 30s before I realised that I'm a textbook introvert (and happy that way), probably have autism, and that I got pretty bloody lucky in finding a strong coping mechanism and harmless means of self-expression as young as I did. And I was always pretty good at choosing my role models:

12.01 Keep Calm and Carry On

on the head of a pin🕺

they gave that fifty year old man a fuck ass bob and some skin tight leather pants and he took them and gave us one of the best television performances of the 2010s