So, that went well.

Okay: It really didn’t. Everything kinda went wrong at once, beginning with the weather. Because it’s Denver. Therefore March comes in like a lamb, goes out like a lion, and gets chased by sharks with lasers on their heads; by the middle of April, three weeks into spring, Mother Nocent takes to dumping a foot of snow onto budding trees, freeways, surfaceroads, and of course StarFest.

The good news was that StarFest was announced before the blizzard was, so nearly everyone intending to attend had got in before the storm, and was hanging out in and around the Marriott before the Mountain Timezone was closed for the night. The bad news was that CEI, living largely in Denver Metro, weren’t hanging out at the Marriott since dawn, so half the cast were snowed in and unable to get to the DTC for the show.

The half able to get to the address equated to a skeletoncrew—less in fact than enough to fill out the roles onstage. But that’s okay: shows can be more fun when parts are being filled by random [and occasionally willing] victims from the audience. And hilarity ensues, as these unseasoned unprofessionals try to guess what the hell they’re supposed to be doing onstage.

Which no one noticed once the projector system approximately the age of the film itself began screaming Oilcan! Oilcan! and shorting out; the videofeed remained, but the first thirty minutes of the show were largely silent but for a tonedeaf gallimaufry of klingons and comicbook villains crooning out a cacophonous approximation of the soundtrack which CEI, hypothetically able to sleepwalk through the choreography after nine years of shows, were barely able to make sense of.

The silent picture began during the preshow, wherein we learned that geeks, libations, and a glorified lecturehall aren’t the best combination:

Toward the end there, you get to see why Andrew the Acerbic Grownup tends to start the show: he’s the BigFatJew and he doesn’t afraid of anyone.

The show beyond was a disaster: the cast trying to take cues from the audience, those members of the audience abducted to fill roles trying to take cues from the audience, those abducted members trying to take cues from the cast who had slightly less clue what was happening onscreen behind them than the audience, those members of the audience who’d wandered however accidentally into the room based on faulty information that this was the place to see the live performance of Debbie Does Dantooine fleeing like MouseDroids in the presence of wookiees, the remaining percentage giggling at the cast for misunderstanding their cues, the cast giggling at the audience for miscuing them, the abducted victims giggling at themselves for failing to follow the MouseDroids the hell outta the room, and the sound finally being fixed thirty minutes into the film, by which point everyone left was having a pretty good time.

So, in that sense, it went well. Those who’d showed up to see one of the worst films ever made so they could heckle the thing ultimately got exactly what they’d wanted in the first place.

Probably, we’ll see you again at next year’s StarFest. If Denver isn’t being bombarded by oobleck that weekend.