End of the Holiday Crush

Well, 12th Night is over, the apprentice is well and properly laureled, the remaining item from the mad sewing rush can be finished whenever I feel like it, and I'm finally looking at a stretch of time when I can be selfish and lazy. The ceremony came off quite well, I think, which makes me feel better about my headless chicken dance. (Or, as everyone else identified it: intense mother-of-the-bride syndrome.) But I'm egotistical enough to believe that things wouldn't have gone nearly as smoothly without me fussing and pushing as much as I did. (We got major props from the heralds for not only discussing the ceremony personalizations with them in advance in writing, but having an annotated copy of the ceremony text/staging for them to work from.)

But enough of that. Once the laureling was done, I went shopping. (A bit disappointing, although I was able to pick up a big book on historic shoes in Scandinavia from Pastische. Nothing else really grabbed me.) Back to the main hall to catch most of the Golden Stag play. Plautus, this time. Fairly well done (especially given the last minute handicaps) but the rhythm was off their usual standard. It was sort of as if they were work in an unfamiliar dialect. I don't think it's an unfixable problem -- the Roman comedies have a lot of the same broadly-accessible comic potential as the Commedia material. I think it was a matter of being comfortable with a particular idiom and not yet having practice in a new idiom. Some hanging out, more shopping, checking out the A&S displays, more court, off to dinner with the roomies (xrian and scotica and xrian's non-SCA friend who'd come to do photography). Then back to the main hall to play for the dancing at the Duchesses' Ball. This being the second Ball in a row, I think we can start concluding that its success hasn't been a fluke. I think it's just what 12th Night has been needing to keep the event pulled together and focused in the evening. Lots of dancing. A venue for vocal performances. And a masque that I'd like to think had the feel of how Renaissance masques may have interacted with the participant and viewers. (I'm thinking of details like having the current royalty play Arthur and Guinevere in the masque, and so forth.) I really do hope the tradition continues -- both in the continuity of the content and in coming up with some innovative angle each year that keeps it from becoming stale.

Between staying for the heralds meeting and then a leisurely late lunch before parting from the roomies I didn't get home until after 5pm with no ambitions to do anything productive at all for the rest of the evening.