The ABBAMAILers were indeed seated in the farthest-forward tables. This followed some conversations I had with Marc Johnson. Laura also spoke to him, so I suppose there was some karma that evolved. What I told him was the ABBA fans prefer to be upfront, and since it was a dance, the regular American Swedish Institute members were not as interested in pressing the flesh with the band. To them it was just a dance. But to our people it was a special event, a once-in-a-lifetime for some of us.

Actually, it was Wayne who won the jackpot. Wayne is already an ASI member, and he had the double whammy of being an ABBAMAILer too. Two of his worlds (which were really not unrelated in the first place) came together in a splendid riot of sound and tradition, I'm guessing here. Anyway, Wayne was sitting so close to the band, he could smell their after shave. The tables were all lined up in the bulk of the room, but in our area, they crept along the edge of the dance floor, about halfway to the stage. Wayne and his cohorts were closest. But most of us were pretty close too. I was in the next tier with several ABBAMAIlers. Only Lars-Erik, that I know of, was seated along with non ABBA fans. But our table had three empty places, which was kind of weird considering the rest of the room seemed like it was packed. So we invited him to sit with us. Also, I think part of the problem was that some ABBA fans found out about the event on ABBAMAIL.com, so they might have mentioned me, Laura or ABBA-Day (I don't know what went up on the site before the event) and were assumed by ASI to be part of our group. That guy from Japan, Isao, was one of those. There might have been others. But I treat ABBAMAIL as a private-public organization, with its online discussion forum, its worldwide availability, and Graeme's virtual celebrity status in the ABBA world. ABBAMAIL, the list, is actually just a part of ABBAMAIL.

But as soon as the meal was over, and the music underway, none of the table business mattered. People congregated, met up, took casual strolls across the floor to where BAO was playing, returned, sat down, changed camera batteries, dished about who was there, and enjoyed the festivities. Only a rock-hard trio of ASI members insisted on staying at one ABBAMAIL table, table 4, if I recall rightly, where they were assigned. There were also many fans of Swedish culture who are also ABBA fans (a lot of these were ASI members), so where do they fall anyway?

True, there was a knot of ABBA fans (only a minority of who were ABBAMAILers, I should add) up front snapping, watching, doing fan things. And, for some dancers, getting in the way. But the dancers coped. I know someone got offended about that because it made us look bad. But I have to say that (1) management did nothing to stop it, preferring to take a very Dutch live-and-let-live attitude; (2) it's what happens when you put a celebrity of the stature of Benny in front of ABBA-starved fans. Did anyone really expect them to sit down and watch from afar, dance (some of them don't dance for myriad reasons, including physical problems), and comport themselves like little ladies and gentlemen when there was nothing but air between them and Benny? NO! I say! What happened was as natural of trying to get some action on a date, as real as the cramps a student gets when the dog ate his or her homework, as predictable as Tony Blair's lockstep with George Bush on Iraqi progress; oh, you get the idea. Why fight it? It happens when you put Benny near ABBA fans. He seemed to accept it, glossed over it when he concentrated on the music, kind of looked beyond the fans, except when he wanted to notice someone. I did see that when I was right behind Anita Notenboom. He looked right at her and made a knowing smiling head-nod. Well, of course, she's Anita, founder of the ABBA Fan Club (and a wonderful person, I might add). I never heard anyone say that Benny had trouble handling his fans.

I really don't think anyone got a bad feeling from any of it. But, back to the tables. We did not have every seat on every table filled in solidly. Laura covered this. Marc Johnson apparently told her, and repeated it to me, that there were many political intrigues over seating. ASI is run by contributions, hence the obnoxious auctioneer, the double charge for attending the Sunday night soirée (one for food and one for admission), and the CDs for sale in the lobby. Nobody objects to that. But apparently, some of the movers in ASI had priorities we couldn't match with our block seating. If there were 40 of us, that accounted for $5,000 just to get into the Saturday night venue. The meal could not have been more than $25 to ASI, so they made $4,000 off of us for just that one thing. But it looked like some well monied people were in attendance too.

I think the weekend was spectacular. I am glad that so many of us were there that the people who couldn't make it will have a good idea of what it was like. A lot of the posts that have been coming in are more like personal blogs. What I like is that this all happened without any significant expenditure of money by our group. We did it all with ABBAMAIL and with ABBA-Day, which exists to keep static off ABBAMAIL. Everyone paid their own way, no one had to be responsible for collecting large sums of money, and it was an event, from our viewpoint, that emerged spontaneously from the members -- the ABBA fans who worked together to make this a success.

Ron Miskoff Edison USA