So, what are you doing in August?
Turns out the weekend of August 11 and 12 this year is going to feature two Sherlockian events of note, a mere fifteen hours and twenty-one minutes apart. (By car, traveling around eight in the evening on Thursday.) St. Louis's Holmes in the Heartland and Saratoga's 2018 Baker Street Irregulars Silver Blaze Weekend.
This is St. Louis's first Holmes in the Heartland, priced at $114 for the whole weekend, sans hotel and travel, and Saratoga's eighth(?) Silver Blaze, current price $165, sans hotel and travel. The former features Sherlockian talks and demos in a library, while the latter features a horse in a classic horsey venue. Both will be sure to have Sherlockian company and conversation.
Silver Blaze races are almost an "experience collectable" in the Sherlockian world, as there's one in Los Angeles coming up in a little over a week at Santa Anita, and I've personally attended Silver Blazes in Chicago and Dallas. I'm sure there are a few more out there somewhere, and if you're a Sherlockian who's into horse racing, you've got a grand overlap of your hobbies every year happening somewhere or the other.
First-time symposium weekends are also a bit of an experience collectable, as you just never know how they'll go or if they'll ever be repeated. I remember one particular weekend in Dubuque, Iowa that was key to my development as a Sherlockian, and that town has never attempted a repeat of that event due to the rare confluence of stars that had to come together for it to even happen. Another first-time weekend, the ongoing success called "221B Con" is something I remember as a real dice roll, but I wanted to be there just in case it did come up a winner. On the other side of the coin, what would have been my very first Sherlockian weekend, a John Bennett Shaw symposium that actually was about to happen in Peoria, got cancelled before I ever met my first Sherlockian, due to some newb mis-steps by the planners. You just never know.
Summer's here, though, Sherlocked: USA is just over, and plenty of Sherlockian events await, so it's no surprise that an overlap has popped up for two whole-weekend productions. If something was being held in Seattle, San Francisco, or L.A. that same August 11-12 weekend, we'd pretty much have the country covered. (Well, maybe adding Denver in there for good measure? St. Louis isn't exactly the middle.) In any case, we're off to the races again, whichever track you choose!
The ongoing investigation of Sherlock Holmes, reported from the Peoria, Illinois outpost of Baker Street's dirtiest half a dozen.
I simply don't have the vacation time or the money for all the Shelockian events one can attend these days. One must pick their favorite poisons so to speak, and remember to plan and budget well ahead of time, which I for one am extremely bad at doing. Put me down for a visit to The Nashville Scholars at the end of June and 'Gillette to Brett V' in early October. Then officially mark me down as broke. The one I'll miss the most is the SFSFF June 2nd showing of Richard Oswald’s 1929 German version of Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Hound of the Baskervilles". Long considered lost, this version was the last silent Sherlock Holmes film ever made and is considered the most important Hound produced in Europe. Daniil Dubshin, Alexander Orlov, and I are all receiving credits towards the finding and restoration of the film, but unfortunately none of us will be attending. San Francisco is a bit too long and expensive of a journey for a Floridan and two Muscovites whom would have loved to have been there. We will have to wait to witness the rewards of our efforts until the DVD is released.
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