Xena Sword Charity Auction -- 1999 Xena Convention, Santa Monica, CA

A shot of the Xena sword auction in action. I don't recall who gave me this photo and the one below, but it was clearly someone sitting in the first or second row.
This is at the end of the auction -- I'm getting up to go forward and pay for the Xena Sword. Standing up on either side of me are Judy and Sharon. You can get a flavor of the intensity of the auction from this photo. The noise was deafening and it was too difficult for me to walk to the stage directly -- the chairs had been packed so close to the stage there was no real path, so I had to walk to the back of the auditorium and and then go around to the other side to find a path back to the stage.

This was the convention with Lucy appearing on stage with a large number of professional bodyguards between the stage and the fans seated in the audience. When I paid for the sword, one of the bodyguards asked me if I wanted one of them to sit with me. He seemed to think that I now might need one of his guys, but I thought it was so strange. I thanked him for his concern but, told him that no one needed a body guard in this crowd; Xena fans were safe.

DJWP, Xena fan fiction author extraordinaire and fantastic party hostess, held a party where I brought the newly acquired Xena sword for friends to see and play with. Lucy Lawless had inscribed the scabbard for me, but I was not present for that -- Sharon Delaney graciously took the sword and scabbard back stage for me.

The Xena sword and scabbard in a custom plexiglass display case. The original chakram I had gotten at the first Xena convention two years earlier is suspended in its own plexiglass display case just to the left of the sword.

While the chakram auction in 1997 opened a lot of doors for me in Xena fandom, the Xena sword auction had the exact opposite effect. The dollar amount I paid freaked out a lot of Xena fans, some of which decided to publicly express their dismay, on the email lists I was subscribed to and in letters to the editor at Whoosh.org. These fell into two basic categories: fans who thought I was crazy and fans who were quite angered. Neither group understood the purpose of charity auctions: that items will go for much more than their material worth because the money is going to charity, and a children's charity at that.

The amounts collected at Xena-themed charity auctions are impressive for the Xenaverse but small compared to mainstream charity auctions, where it is common to collect totals in the six and seven-figure range. So rather than celebrating that the show could raise substantial amounts of money for charity, many fans decided that I had gone too far, and said so, often in very colorful language in online posts. What these fans didn't realize (and actually didn't care) is that some Xena fans clearly have disposable incomes that other don't. What everyone writing the angry posts also didn't consider is that in each auction I participated in, there were several people bidding in this dollar range -- No auction amounts rise on their own.

One materially negative effect of the Xena sword charity auction was that Xena swords began to disappear from the Xena set in New Zealand. I know of one that made it to ebay, where it was purchased by a fan for much less than $1000. So there are other stolen swords out there.

I am aware of one fake-inscribed reproduction Xena sword and scabbard that was sold by one Xena fan to another. The props were Todd Coyle reproductions sold as original, and it's clear that the forger used my items as a template (photos had been published on the web then). As in all dealings with props and costumes professed to be original, buyer beware!