It was great. Everyone stayed awake and everyone laughed at our jokes. Afterwards, we broke open a small stack of back issues to give away. The magazines were gobbled up instantly, and we were surprised that a lot of people wanted to take pictures and get autographs. Crazy, but fun.
Before we left, I talked to one of the busboys who stood for the entire presentation. He was one of the only non-Asians there, and he was totally into it. He told me that he was in Los Angeles last summer, and was even at our 10-year anniversary party at GR2. He took on the MAASU banquet as just another job, and was stoked to realized that we were talking.
Since the students were so friendly, Eric and I flirted with the idea of hanging out at the post-banquet party. Our minds were changed when we realized that it involved music with drum machines and dancing with glow sticks. Different strokes for different folks. So Eric and I grabbed cans of Mr. Pibb and Mello Yello, said our goodbyes, and accepted our new friend Mary's offer to show us the campus and town. The Missouri campus looks a lot like our alma mater, UCLA, with its brick buildings, classic towers, and huge quad. But it probably resembles a lot of schools. On the way out, we passed the photojournalism building which had a large display of award-winning images. The door was locked, but the photos were pretty striking from outside looking in. Columbia is a prototypical small college town with lots of bars and frat guys. We avoided that scene and checked out a few places that Mary thought we'd be interested in. There was Shakespeare's Pizza, which had a decent pinball machine, a Chinese place run by Koreans, and a Thai place run by Vietnamese--or something like that. We didn't eat at any of those places. We just walked by.