hrj

There is too much -- I cannot even sum up. Highlights only. Very gratifying to get four students for the "survey of heraldic jobs in the SCA" class for the Kingdom Enrichment Program track. I felt like I did a lot of blathering on, but it seemed like a genuinely interested audience. The Dublin/Viking cap making class on Sunday had full attendance, although my voice and brain started giving out midway through the "I blather on historic context while everyone sews" part of the program. As expected, nobody finished the project within the class period, so I was right in asking for first period so that interested parties could adjourn elsewhere to finish sewing. And I got a firm invitation to reprise the class for Teufelberg A&S night sometime soon.

And, of course, there were the goddesses of Villa Luna. You have to understand that the first goddess party was planned in reaction to two A&S Tourneys in a row that were blazingly hot. The theory was that if all one wanted to do was lounge around in filmy draperies, one might as well make it an official theme. So, of course, in the three years of goddess-themed A&S-ery, the weather has been moist and foggy and sometimes downright cold (corresponding to when we started holding the event at Ed Levin Park). But hey, a theme is a theme.

So this year, having spent the last several years' worth of A&S's as a guest of the household, I got invited to be one of the organizing instigators. This consisted mostly of coming up with some "high concept" additions to Saturday's dinner and helping organize Friday's (completely non-medieval) sushi feast. The "high concept" stuff was the previously-blogged classical backdrops, which we strung across the back of the sunshade where dinner was held, and the idea of people doing little "performance bits" relating to their chosen deity-of-the-event as dinner theater. I figured the latter could either be a blast or a complete flop and I was prepared to be content with either. As it happened, the idea succeeded beyond expectations. Some folks had prepared bits to do -- mythological skits, interpretive dance, poetic recitation -- but then the momentum picked up and it turned into "mythic charades" with the goal being to guess the depicted deity. Random passers-by joined in the fun.

My underlying idea was the pervasive medieval concept that one of the skills expected of those of gentle birth was the ability to entertain your fellows. The sort of concept that is expressed in the Canterbury Tales, or the Decameron, or any number of more fleeting references. And I wanted to add something to the dinner that would turn the "goddess" theme into something more than just dressing up. But I had to be careful not to scare people! At any rate, it seems to have worked.

I did feel bad about two-timing the tavern. (Pretty much Saturday night at the event was the goddess party and the tavern.) But there were too many of us to have been able to do that instead of our own dinner. So it goes. When it looked like the tavern had finished the dinner service and programmed parts of the evening, we formed an Olympian line-dance and danced in to join the fun. I even got to do some dramatic readings from my collection of medieval Welsh pornographic poetry eventually. (I've been getting requests lately to start bringing the book to events again but this is the first time in a while that the opportunity has been right to read from it.)

I think I managed to bring home more food than I took. My tables were pretty much the last ones left unpacked as the encampment rolled up, so all the various leftover food contributions got concentrated onto them as people left, having decided it wasn't worth packing the food up. Eventually I declared, "I'm packing my tables in 10 minutes and anything left on them at that point belongs to me!" So I ended up with a nice assortment of fruit, several large hunks of cheese, and a handful of what I believe are some of