my Avatar adventure story

Before the scifi film Avatar came out I was pretty excited about it. I bought tickets months in advance and posted this pic on facebook asking "who wants to go see the 12:01 opening day premier midnight screening with me?

A friend, seeing my enthusiasm invited me onto the Fox studios lot where she worked (exciting) and gave me a full sized promotional poster (awesomeness!). My roommate and I, being total nerds, hung it up in the hallway. This only helped get us more excited about the film, and the night we were to see it, I went hours early to wait in line to get us good seats. Now, my roommate had had blue face paint from Halloween, and I brought it to the premier. I figured "if I am going to really geek out on this film, I might as well geek all the way out." I decided to abandon all fear and shame and convinced the girl next to me in line to help me paint my face blue. I hadn't anticipated it, but soon every camera there wanted a picture of me. Then a video team was interviewing me, and then the guy in charge of promoting IMAX nationally was having me pose for pictures. I realized this wasn't going to work. Who cares what one dorky guy does? I told them to wait a minute (boy was that a powerful feeling) and I went outside and started asking everyone if anyone wanted to paint their face blue and get their picture taken. Honestly, I knew we needed a woman for to make it work but there were no takers.
I walked back surprisingly defeated. Then the gal who painted my face trotted in, and volunteered. Hot! So I painted her face while her boyfriend waited outside (double hot!), and then the two of us posed for pictures. She was really nervous about it, so I told her how to pretend this was normal and look really excited. I think she had a good time :-) They gave us free t-shirts and Avatar toys, which was pretty cool. Like we'd won a contest or something!


Then, the IMAX guys told us James Cameron, the director of Avatar, was coming. We were going to get to meet him and pose for a picture! Hot damn! When he showed up we weren't supposed to talk to him, but he ended up talking to us. He shook my hand and said to his friend/associate "See this is what I'm talking about." When we posed for the picture (as you can see below) we used the pose and face we had practiced before (with less eyes bugging out). And despite the fact that we were the one's wearing blue face paint, Mr Cameron managed to out-geek us by saying "no no, you are supposed to be like 7 ft tall, we should make you look taller than me!" Well played sir, truly your are a king among the nerds!



I got the email address of the cameraman, and asked him to email me the picture, which he did at 4am. I posted it to popular social news site reddit.com at 5am, and by midnight it had 25,000 page views. Wow. I had succeeded at making myself the most visible person in the role of avatar fan. So of course, the next day ABC news in New York called me and asked if I would be interviewed for a segment on Avatar to air on Good Morning America. Holy shit! How did they even get my number? I told them I would do it if they promised they could interview me in under a half hour and have everything ready for me when I got there. NYC agreed to my terms. So I took an hour off of work, and drove over to their studio. On the way there I called to check they were ready for me and the receptionist said "I'm sorry, who are you?" OH NOES! but when I called back 10 minutes later he was super apologetic "I"m sorry Mr. Mahdroo, yes we are ready for you, everything is set up!"
Outstanding! I painted my face blue as I drove, so that they could interview me blue-faced (dangerous yet worthwhile). Then I called my mom who called everyone she knew and told them I was going to be on tv. Apparently the mayor of my mom's town called her to say he'd seen me on tv while on vacation in Maine. Epic win! Here is the clip below:



Our pictures were included in Entertainment Weekly two weeks in a row (good gracious! see below) as well as being featured on the Yahoo homepage, and on my favorite scifi blog io9.com <---pretty much anywhere they needed to represent Avatar, the put up the picture with me.