My old e-buddy (and LiveJournal pioneer) Ana Voog is doing her first public performance in ages Sunday night in downtown Minneapolis, warming up for Midge Ure of Ultravox fame (a story about the show is here). Fifteen years ago, Ana became the second 24/7 "camgal", and did a dozen years of multimedia art on-line before finally pulling the plug in 2009. I think I first discovered Ana a few weeks after she started, and was hooked, and for much of the time I was running my old publishing company, I'd have Ana's cam in a window on my desktop. I was there when she was in various IRC chat rooms ("ANAfan", "ANAslam", etc.), and followed her over here when she (one of the first couple of thousand users on LJ - she really should get more credit for pushing the "cool" factor of LJ up a notch in those early days) opted to use 
ana as her main outer (as opposed to the "Under The Bed" board on her site) communication zone.While we spoke once or twice on the phone, I never had the opportunity to actually meet Ana, and I was excited to read about this weekend's show, even more so when I discovered that the club where she'll be performing is only about 10 blocks from where the MegaBus lets off in downtown Minneapolis. Tickets to the show were only $20, and the MegaBus would have run under $50 round-trip, so throw in a few coffees and burgers, and I could certainly make the road trip up there for under a hundred bucks (which, even in my financial distress, I'd have been able to scrape up).
It was even enticing in that I could have gotten several book reviews done on the bus, as the MegaBus is "work friendly" with wifi and some laptop-accommodating tables ... and there was lots of time for that, with 8 hours of travel time in each direction. I could have caught a late morning bus here and been in downtown Minneapolis by 6-ish, seen the show, and then caught the 7am bus back home on Monday morning. Ah, but then there's the one problem. The club closes at 2am, the bus leaves at 7am, and I was unable to ferret out any data on 24-hour places in downtown Minneapolis ... it appears that there are none. I would have been reasonably happy to park myself in a McDonalds or Starbucks (or the equivalent) and read/caffeinate for 4-5 hours, but no such critter seems to exist in that part of town. To add to the quandary, the weather forecast I saw was for double-digit sub-zero temps, with predicted winds that were going to be pushing things to something south of -30° with wind-chill. Not exactly weather for loitering outside (which is pretty much what I did when I made a similar trip up there for my college friend Kathy's funeral a couple of years ago - in warmer months).
Needless to say, were I gainfully employed, I could have gotten a hotel ... but while scraping up $75-100 to do a quick road trip was possible at the moment, throwing another $150 on top of that to get myself out of the cold for 5 hours was not. So, instead of coming up with a real fun post on Monday about going to see Ana (and Midge Ure ... I'm not discounting the coolness of seeing him in a club setting!), you're getting this one with me bemoaning the not-happening-ness of said adventure.
Would have been a blast, though.
{edit} Oh, by the way ... while Ana has pretty much abandoned her LJ accounts, she has re-surfaced over on Facebook, at http://www.facebook.com/anavooganacam where she intermittently posts some quirky stuff (and links to her music and videos, etc.). I'm wondering if, with this show, she's "sticking a toe in the water" about moving back into a more public role. I, for one, miss her online, and hope that she can put something together that works with her mom-of-small-children lifestyle these days.
