Wow, look at these people! No, not the dragon. Over to the left a bit… plaid button-down… hipster glasses (sans-irony)… Chucks with short shorts… Yeah, those two—check them out! Add 30 years and a pitchfork and you’d have American Gothic for the new millennium, but by the looks on their faces they just stumbled through the portal to Planet Funkotron. These people are not furries—you know as well as I do that her real, full name is on that con badge—but they’ve just wandered into what is arguably the furriest 32-thousand square feet on the planet, and they stick out like nothing else on the dance floor (which is really saying something around here). He’s not sure how to parse what he’s seeing, but he’s maintaining a reassuring confidence for her sake; she’s clinging close to him but about to break into a gigglefit; they’re both as adorable as any of the fuzzies frolicking around them.

At this point, it probably sounds like I’m making fun of the muggles, but you’ve got me all wrong: I’m cheering for these two. I’ve written before about why I think this particular swath of carpet-tiles is awesome, but these two are showing another side to it that warms my heart (almost) as much: Pittsburgh loves the furries—so much so that we’ve become something of a local attraction. Given the multi-million-dollar cash cow that the world’s largest furry convention represents to a rust belt economy determined to re-invent itself as a tech-savvy travel destination, it’s really no surprise that Anthrocon has received an abundance of local media attention, municipal cooperation, and pandering from local businesses. What is surprising and encouraging, though, is the degree to which the locals have assimilated us as an element of their city’s culture; the furries are more than something to gawk at, we’re part of Pittsburgh worth seeing and maybe even being proud of. These two interlopers must have wanted to find out what it’s all about, talked themselves up to walking inside and registering, and after a day on safari in their own backyard, wandered across the skybridge to find out where that pounding bass was coming from. I hope she had a good time (it looks like she did); I hope he snapped some good pictures (he’s in the right place); I hope they went home and told their friends about it (or maybe wrote up a blog or something). Maybe they’ll even be back this year, a bit furrier than they were before.

The AC dances have to be some of the most amazing photo ops I get to try my hand at. Getting anything usable out of them, of course, is never easy, but I can happily spend hours just walking around taking in the lighting, filling a memory card with a seizure-inducing panoply of dazzled exposures that will never see the light of day. That’s what this shot was, but as I was scrolling through the slideshow, our two visitors caught my eye. I’ve since wanted to tell their story—or the story I imagine to be theirs—but I was never really satisfied with the lack of detail in the shot. I’ve decided, though, that while a picture’s worth a thousand words, a good story might just excuse a sub-par photo.