Have you ever heard of MechaCon? It's a convention here in New Orleans for anime, video games and other pop culture things. This story is about one of my times there and the greatest day of someone's life. The people attending with me were my friends from out of state and my cousin Kevin. Kevin is not the skinniest guy in the world but he is surprisingly athletic. Kevin is also very, very competitive.
Enter the Hilton hotel in downtown New Orleans. On a normal day this building would be filled with guests like business workers, families, etc. This was not a normal day however, this was Mechacon. Instead of suits, people were wearing costumes dressed up as their favorite characters from tv or video games. It's a very fun experience because everyone is having fun and you get to see all of the effort people put into their costumes. A lot of people take pictures with people wearing interesting costumes, after all you don't see this type of stuff very often. Along with the festivities (interview rooms, costume contests, etc) there is a foam sword fighting room. You can buy a hardened foam sword and "duel" people in a 1 on 1 ring they have setup in a large room. Most of the people like to simply watch and cheer for the winners (kind of like gladiators). As my group of friends and I entered this room we immediately went to the ring and watched the people dueling. It's quite entertaining to see people in costumes fight with foam swords, I gotta' tell ya'. .
After watching for a bit one of my friends suggested for one of us to go fight and see how we do, after all we all play video games and are decently in shape so we would do pretty good. A little while later we see a guy dressed in a full Gumby suit (the character) wielding a pink foam sword who walks into the ring against a person dressed up as some whackadoodle anime character, doing all kinds of funny poses and stances trying to act as if he were in an anime.