NEW YORK (TNA) – Swots and poindexters, welcome to Toronto – or, from Sept. 21-23, La Villa Strangiato, the world capital of all things Rush.

For the seventh straight year, the city hosts RushCon, this continent’s largest international convention for fans of the Canadian power trio.

Today's Tom Sawyer gets high on bottles of 2112 beer, which are specially brewed for RushCon.

“It’s a 55-hour party where everybody likes the same music,” says multimedia coordinator Elizabeth Maxwell of the event, the largest of its kind in North America.

Assuming your favorite number is “2112” and you vacation in “Xanadu,” you might enjoy a weekend slate of events, including:
-- A mixer and pub-crawl through the city featuring various Rush sites like Maple Leaf Gardens, the Canada Walk of Fame and the Hard Rock Café (to ogle Geddy Lee’s bass)
-- A Rush trivia contest (quick: what crackpot writer inspired “The Trees?”), Wheel of Fortune and other prize contests
-- Video screenings and a tour of the band’s label, Anthem Records
-- An auction of band memorabilia benefiting a major Toronto food bank
-- A tribute band concert by New York’s Limelight
-- A trip to the final show on the band’s highly successful Snakes & Arrows tour Saturday night in the Air Canada Centre
-- The grand finale: An Elf-King fashion show

OK, that last one was made up. But Maxwell is well aware of the lingering image people have of the dedicated Rush fan – a Tolkien-obsessive, undersexed teenaged boy in lumber-jacket and Spock ears playing Dungeons and Dragons in his mother’s basement.

Get enough of those in a room and RushCon would be the world’s largest nerd circus. No joke: Among the Web sites devoted to vigorous debate on the absence (or presence) of religion in Rush lyrics, one site explores the “Mystic Dissociative Phenomena” of the band’s songs and informs that the 2112 album cover “alludes to our psychological state in the Garden of Eden, when we ‘knew not’ the moral system of constraints.”

“Well, I bet you there’s a lot of us who played D&D,” Maxwell says. She did. So did her husband. “We’re not as geeky as ‘Revenge of the Nerds,’ but we are…tech-savvy,” she says.

In fact, the convention predictably draws “a lotta drummers, a lotta bassists” enduringly fascinated by the virtuosity of drummer Neil Peart and bassist Lee.

“Once you see a Rush concert, that’s it,” says Maxwell, who bucks the prevailing image of a Rush fan in several ways – she lives in Houston, and she’s a girl. Attendees, she says, are “mostly guys, but all of the organizers are women.”

Maxwell came on board for the Presto tour (1989). “It’s the musicianship,” she says, “the quality of the lyrics. How the words touch you. And the music blows your mind.”

The convention draws between 150 and 350 people, “depending on whether Rush is touring,” and attracts fans from as far away as Florida, Wales, Australia and Japan, home of the legendary Seiji Harada, who has made the 6,400-mile trip each year since RushCon’s inception in 2001.

In the early years, Harada spoke little English and connected with fellow Rushlings by singing songs from every one of the band’s albums from memory.

But here’s the real surprise: Rush endures. Critics who long ago tuned out, figuring the band plays progressive hard-rock fugues to a dwindling cadre of techies and Trekkies, might take note: Their 18th full-length studio album received four-star reviews and debuted at No. 3 on the Billboard charts, and the subsequent tour has played to packed arenas across America. The band currently ranks fifth among rock bands for most consecutive gold and platinum albums.

Just don’t expect Lee to show up for a Q&A – no Rush member ever has.

“They know about us,” Maxwell says.  “We invite them every year. But they’re usually on tour or on vacation.”

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