David & I in VanityFair.com: "Hug Life: Four Days in a Hello Kitty Convention Tattoo Parlor"

i didn't know that the event today would put the "con" in hello kitty con. sanrio looks like rainbows & kittens --- until seemingly free (@ $500 value) tattoos appear to be involved. we: drove there the day before to prep (get our badges.); then, woke up at 4am; next, had to wait in line for 4 hours; then, had to run like it was hunger games at 10am to wait in another line for an hour, but only if we were lucky, which we were. then, get treated like crap by a bitchy girl who told us everything we'd been told by the convention people up until her was all wrong. no more 3-hour tattoos. pick a quickie. that bitchy lady was even mean to a really sweet deaf girl. (well, the tattoo people still put three hours+ total into our two tattoos.) anyway, we waited in ten more lines, found food, but then our hard-earned grub had

​ human​

hair in it... all was getting progressively worse. darkest before the dawn... finally, we met our tattoo artists & started getting inked. now, we are among the @ 100 (or so) people with the best souvenirs of the first hello kitty con of all of the 30,000 or so attendees! (

​the first pic attached was the 3-hour sugar skull [calavarita] tattoo we wanted, but couldn't get:)

​Story that mentions David and me:​

ttp://www.vanityfair.com/style/2014/11/hello-kitty-convention-tattoo-parlor#

And it wasn’t just women in the ink seat. David Starkey, an already heavily tattooed radiation tech, who, like Kitty, turned 40 over the weekend, got a Hello Kitty take on a traditional swallow piece. His wife, Monique Delatte, the true Sanrio fan in the family, got a tugboat Kitty on her foot.