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Unconventional

From bondage fans to Baptists, Shriners to cartoon characters, they love conventions, some a little unusual. In Tampa.

By Times Staff
Published July 14, 2006

TAMPA

You see them invading Channelside, or pouring into Ybor City bars, or hitting the West Shore and S Dale Mabry "clubs":

Conventioneers.

Sometimes you can pick them out by their name tags and badges, revealing allegiance to, say, the Florida Association of Mortgage Brokers or the National Association of Legal Assistants, both of which have conventions this month.

Then there are the Shriners, who recently poured into Tampa by the thousands. Sure, they wear goofy hats, but they're pretty straightforward folk.

Still, some Tampa conventioneers lean to the more unconventional.

You likely won't need badges to identify participants in the Tampa Bay Tattoo Fest, for example. They'll be extraordinarily colorful.

You won't need name tags to spot MetroCon attendees either. They'll be dressed as cartoon characters.

And you certainly won't need wristbands to know which people belong at next month's FetishCon bondage and domination expo. Because they'll be tied to one another.

Tampa is a haven for conventions from the big to the small, the vanilla to the Heavenly Hash.

Regardless of whether it's the Florida Association of Professional Lobbyists or the Buffy the Vampire Slayer-themed SlayerCon - both coming up this month - it's all good for the city, said John Moors, the city's convention facilities and tourism administrator.

"Conventions generate a huge amount of economic impact," Moors said. "People come into town and they stay in hotels. While they're here, they eat in steak houses, they go shopping, they support our malls, airport, transportation system."

The Tampa Convention Center opened in 1990 but didn't do many major events until about 2000, Moors said. Before that, he said, downtown didn't have enough hotel rooms to support big productions.

"We're in a completely different market now," he said. "That's because of the maturity of the destination, the hotel rooms, the transportation around Channelside and those sorts of things. We're definitely growing and maturing."

For Super Bowl XXXV in 2001, the entire downstairs of the Tampa Convention Center became the professional football event's media center.

"And upstairs there was a large NFL charity event where all of the teams had celebrity chefs that would cook their favorite dish," Moors said. "That was probably the most elaborate and kind of interesting and off-the-wall event that I have seen."

When Church of God in Christ staged its Womens International Conference in May 2003, 15,000 delegates booked 23,000 room nights.

Participating hotels were notified to expect an intense arrival as most attendees checked in with an average of two suitcases, several garment bags and four to six hat boxes.

It seemed most of the women would make three wardrobe changes each day.

Moors noted MetroCon as a particularly quirky and fun convention.

"Kids dress up as their favorite costume character," he said. "They stay there really late at night and they have some really bizarre costumes."

A few weeks ago, you couldn't throw a rock downtown without hitting a Shriner. They "were very well behaved," said Neill Larson, general manager of the Doubletree Hotel on Cypress Street.

Perhaps they were too well-behaved, said cab driver Tim Fasano, who also writes the Tampa Taxi Shots blog, timfasano.typepad.com.

He didn't see a single fare from a Shriner,

"Lets face it, it's a bunch of old men who go to bed early," he said. "For us, it was a flop."

But that's no knock on the Shriners, Fasano quickly noted, pointing out their good deeds.

The Shriners might not dig cabs, but they love their fezzes. Some even dine in them, while others brought special hat boxes and zipped them away, said Bern's Steak House dining room manager Chris Daley.

The Fourth of July is usually slow at the renowned restaurant, but more than 80 Shriners filed in after the parade along Bayshore Boulevard. They also passed out lapel pins identifying their particular units.

By the end of the week, some waiters' lapels were loaded.

"One group from South Carolina was so happy," Daley said, "they wanted to erect a statue of their waiter in the lobby."

The convention center isn't the only Tampa venue that draws sizable conventions and groups.

Managers at the Doubletree similarly loved the Shriners but were less enamored of attendees of FetishCon, which ran there the past three years.

So forget the whips, handcuffs and chains at Doubletree - or at least keep them stashed behind closed doors. The hotel booted FetishCon this year, deciding it wasn't worth the backlash from other guests, Larson said.

"They were a little over the top," said Larson, who heard bizarre tales and complaints from other patrons about the last convention, which focuses on bondage, domination and affiliated interests.

Parents had to explain away whip marks on the barely clad bodies that prowled the halls. Airline employees who frequent the hotel complained of rowdy neighbors.

So the annual convention, which runs Aug. 10-13, moved to downtown's Hyatt Regency Hotel. FetishCon organizers could not be reached for comment.

Doubletree still has plenty of oddball conventions; it has booked the Tattoo Fest through 2009.

Somewhere between saucy and sweet are quirky, family-friendly conventions at the Doubletree, such as the BioniCon Pop Culture Science Fiction event in June, which brought TV's Bionic Woman, Lindsay Wagner.

Noel Neill, who played Lois Lane in the 1950s Adventures of Superman series, is coming Aug. 20 for the Tampa Comic Book & Toy Convention, which runs three times a year at Doubletree.

(Neill, 85, also plays a woman whom Lex Luthor swindles on her deathbed in the new feature film Superman Returns.)

At the other end of the Doubletree spectrum: Florida's General Baptists, the Bermuda Moose Association and the Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.

The Hyatt Regency downtown attracts 160 to 180 groups each year, said Dave DiSalvo, director of sales and marketing.

He said Tampa's warm weather and accessibility attract new groups and keep them coming back. Plus, Tampa offers a lot to do in a short period of time.

Do drunken brawls ever break out between, say, science fiction fans and mortgage brokers? Never, he said. The hotel tries to keep things running as smoothly as possible.

To make convention guests feel content and at home, the hotel has provided a masseuse for a poodle and stuffed six refrigerators in one room. DiSalvo would not dish on which conventions drew such interesting requests.

It pays to make conventioneers happy. While the Shriners might not have fattened taxi drivers' wallets, most gatherings are profitable for cabdrivers, especially in the dog days of summer.

Fasano, the cabbie and blogger, recalled that the best was a gay and lesbian convention about 10 years ago.

"They went everywhere," he said. "They were so determined to show the city how much (economic) impact they have, they stamped their money.

"I got a lot of 'gay money.' You know, it spends as well as 'straight money.' "

[Last modified July 13, 2006, 12:38:49]