We left Wilmot Mountain later than planned the next morning (see ‘fannish travel arrangements’), heading further west to Madison, capital of Wisconsin and the home of Jeanne Gomoll, where we were due to stay for a couple of nights. The ‘two nights’ bit came as something of a surprise to Stu and me – those fannish travel arrangements again – but what the hey.

Jeanne had given us directions to get to her house through Madison, written in the back of my notebook and hence preserved for posterity, but we had to get to Madison itself on our own map reading. At one point it was crucial we take a right onto a different highway, but we missed the turn, or thought we had, so Joyce pulled into a gas station to check. She didn’t want to buy any gas, so she despatched me into the shop to ask directions. Her judgement that the owners would be more inclined to be friendly to an Englishman who didn’t want to buy anything than an American who didn’t want to buy anything proved sound and we headed back along the highway to the junction which we had indeed missed and took what was now a left.

Jeanne lived on the top floor of a house with an outside staircase to get up to it. It wasn’t a huge place so fitting in four extra bodies strained the available floor space. I ended up in a small study.

Jeanne showed me the first issue or two of a comic published by a company in Madison. We’d talked about my interest in comics during Chicon. I can’t recall whether she was friends with the editor, Richard Bruning, the writer Mike Baron or the artist Steve Rude, all from Madison. She said they were different from ordinary comics with a really powerful and unusual theme. I glanced through them – they were in black and white, not colour, and maybe I was tired or something, but they didn’t really grab me.

My mistake: they were the first issues of Nexus from Capital Comics. After Volume 2 came out in colour I rediscovered them and started collecting. I found back issues, so I now have colour issues 1-80, except for a couple I’m still missing. The original three black and whites, which I’d never found, were eventually reissued as a graphic novel, ‘The Original Nexus’, and I was, in a strange kind of way, cheered to find that the famous Chris Claremont (writer of X-Men and other things for Marvel) confessed, in his Introduction, to the same mistake.

We spent the next morning just chatting and took a picnic down to Lake Monona, where we fed ducks as well as ourselves. Jeanne demonstrated how to trap wasps in a Pepsi bottle, the key to it being to open the bottle and drink the Pepsi first. Then the wasps trap themselves. They seemed unable to find the opening once they were inside.

Back home, of course, the accepted method was an unrinsed jam jar half full of water with a hole punched in the lid, which on thinking about it is more effort than drinking a Pepsi. Still, in my childhood we managed to fill numerous jam jars each year with dead wasps. Nowadays I’m more inclined to let wasps be. They have their uses, and there don’t seem to be as many of them around.

Discussion moved on to dealing with flies if you don’t want to use fly spray on account of the noxious chemicals. Hair spray, apparently, works a treat. Okay, hair spray has its own noxious chemicals, but not the same ones.

We threw a frisbee around, partially successfully it says in my notebook. I guess the biggest part of partially successfully was not throwing it into the lake, which doesn’t say much for the rest of it.

We wandered down to the university area, the University of Wisconsin, and Jeanne explained about the flamingos. In 1979 over a thousand plastic flamingos, all beautifully pink, appeared on the lawns at the university, and became an instant tradition, appearing every year thereafter and getting their own postcard.

At the time, of course, ‘every year’ only meant two or three, but research (in the modern sense of using a famous internet search engine) tells me that it still continues, to the extent that in 2015 the plastic flamingo became the official bird of the city of Madison, and in 2018 the logo of the professional soccer team Forward Madison. [https://www.visitmadison.com/blog/stories/post/madisons-quirky-love-for-flamingos/]

We bought ice cream cones with two or three flavours piled high. It looked precarious, but the vendor was well trained in sticking the scoops securely together, on account of if one fell off it was by all custom and practice the vendor’s fault and a replacement had to be given.

In the evening we played the dictionary game, a do-it-yourself version of ‘Call My Bluff’, which older British readers might recall. One person finds an obscure word in the dictionary and reads out the word. Everyone then writes their own definition of the word on a slip of paper and passes it to the word selector, who has also written down the correct definition. The selector then reads out all the definitions and people have to guess which is correct. Points are awarded to anyone guessing the correct definition, and to anyone whose fake definition is mistaken for the true one. Then you repeat with someone else finding the word, and so on until you run out of words or enthusiasm, whichever comes first.

The next day we packed up the Pinto again, to head further west to Minneapolis, MN.