fun weekend
Jul. 4th, 2011 08:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7Saturday I worked until 5 then went down to my roller derby team bench manager's house, which has a little beach front on Lake Erie, for our end-of-season team party.
It was wonderful, probably the most fun I've ever had-- I've had fun every year with my team, every team party, every meeting and practice, but this party was really truly wonderful. I wore a bathing suit for the whole thing, there were nonstop shenanigans and hilarity. There was great food, Shots O'Clock, beer, more beer, more food, and then we had an awards ceremony and each of us gave a teammate a special award to recognize their contribution to the team and life. I was given a styrofoam cooler full of two enormous racks of ribs, and the lid of the cooler said, in marker, "BEST RACK." Ha ha ha ha ha! It was great.
I wound up with a group of people in the water as the sun set, with a collapsible cooler full of beer floating in the lake with us, standing on the hard sandy bottom looking back toward the shore as the host kindled a bonfire, with the patio of the next-door bar raucous with a cover band playing a set that veered from Stevie Ray Vaughan to Lady Gaga to Bon Jovi and back.
We waited until dark, at least, to take our tops off.
Z and I left around 2am, as a thunderstorm threatened; it didn't rain, but there was a small tent city set up. I'd planned on camping, but wrangling my camping goods proved too much for my fragile brain the day before. I'm really quite fragile lately, so I'm trying not to ask too much of myself: if the prospect of preparing for something daunts me, then I won't do it. I don't have a free weekend just off until September, so I'm trying to be gentle with myself so I can get through it all. Almost all of it is fun, so I don't want to cut anything out of the calendar, but it's a little overwhelming.
Yesterday we declined another party invitation-- it seemed too overwhelming for me, again, and we'll catch up with those people later-- and went instead to Old Fort Niagara's French & Indian War event.
I love this event. I don't really go for the theatrics-- oh, they have all kinds of things, artillery demonstrations and formation marches and things. They're great, and I like taking pictures of them. But that's not why I go.
I go for the shopping.
There are so many sutlers. So much stuff. I go to buy Pennsic-y things. Part of what I don't like about the SCA is the sameness of it-- you get subsets of re-enactors borrowing each other's research and then they look like a medieval J. Crew catalog, you get everybody shopping at the same place and getting precisely the same mass-produced wooden mug, you get nobody doing original research and so either they parrot the "experts" who may or may not know anything, or they say "whatever!" and go find anything that looks "pseudo-medieval" and bring it along.
I don't mind any of those approaches, I should say-- I do that sort of thing myself. I don't play at SCA or go to Pennsic because I want an authentic medieval experience. (Actually I'd love that, but there's nobody local who does it so that's OK; I also want a pony that can fly so I'll probably live.) I do these things because it's more like living in a fantasy novel. It's just that the one thing I can't overlook is everybody having the exact same tankard, etc.
There's a whole universe of 18th- and 19th- century re-enacting, all of it much more serious than the SCA stuff. That's what I grew up with. My parents bought a pig to slaughter it themselves to have the real authentic where-your-meat-comes-from experience. My parents made their own buttons for their Rev War stuff. Part of this was that it was the 70s. Part of this is that Mom was a museum curator and Dad worked for the NYS Dep't of Historic Preservation. And part of this is that Rev War types, and moreso Civil War types, tend to be much crazier than SCAdians.
I've already decided I'm farbing out for Pennsic this year. I'm going to dress pseudo-Turkish in the Swamp, but not well-researched-- more comfortable. That means hand-hemming my hand-dyed silk veil with modern metallic machine embroidery thread, so that it glitters. That means making "Turkish vests" with a self-drafted pattern partly made from the cups of my modern bras, so I'll be comfortable. And that means I have a bunch of farby-but-beautiful 18th-C kit. Including a hand-made folding "penny knife" that I bought on impulse yesterday because it was beautiful, and the man who made it was standing there joking with the middle-aged ladies running the market stall.
(I'm also working on another parroted-research 15th-century outfit-- I've done tons of research, sure, but it's consisted of collating the research of others on the Web, which mostly has just confused me, so I'm not really contributing anything new here-- and on getting some actual accessories done so I'll look like a person, not a costume, for Topside use. I like to be able to hang with the people who take it seriously, and at least not ruin anybody's "moment" if I'm going into the places where people have those things. But in the Swamp? Fuggit, I'm-a be farby and fabulous.)
Oh! I almost forgot the coolest thing that happened at the Fort. I was wandering along with Z and there were some people doing Native re-enacting-- there are always a lot, at this event, including some fairly serious types with the part-shaved hairstyles and long hair and face paint and whatnot. One of them was giving another a tattoo using the old-fashioned techniques, and other tourists had paused to ask about it, so a young woman was explaining the technique and materials. She had a stylus made with four sewing needles bound between a stick and tied with sinew; the tourist was being dubious that Indians would have had sewing needles, and she quite tactfully reminded him that by the 18th century, the Indians had quite a lot of things. Prior to the Europeans, as well, things existed in the Americas which could have been used to poke a hole in skin; metal just lasts longer.
Meanwhile a man was poking ink into another man, and they let me take a picture. Another young man showed me a tattoo he'd received the day before, and let me photograph it. They looked wonderful, clean and neat; they all said the tattoos of this type healed faster than ones with a tattoo gun because you actually wind up getting stabbed a lot less.
I should have gotten their contact info, though.
It was wonderful, probably the most fun I've ever had-- I've had fun every year with my team, every team party, every meeting and practice, but this party was really truly wonderful. I wore a bathing suit for the whole thing, there were nonstop shenanigans and hilarity. There was great food, Shots O'Clock, beer, more beer, more food, and then we had an awards ceremony and each of us gave a teammate a special award to recognize their contribution to the team and life. I was given a styrofoam cooler full of two enormous racks of ribs, and the lid of the cooler said, in marker, "BEST RACK." Ha ha ha ha ha! It was great.
I wound up with a group of people in the water as the sun set, with a collapsible cooler full of beer floating in the lake with us, standing on the hard sandy bottom looking back toward the shore as the host kindled a bonfire, with the patio of the next-door bar raucous with a cover band playing a set that veered from Stevie Ray Vaughan to Lady Gaga to Bon Jovi and back.
We waited until dark, at least, to take our tops off.
Z and I left around 2am, as a thunderstorm threatened; it didn't rain, but there was a small tent city set up. I'd planned on camping, but wrangling my camping goods proved too much for my fragile brain the day before. I'm really quite fragile lately, so I'm trying not to ask too much of myself: if the prospect of preparing for something daunts me, then I won't do it. I don't have a free weekend just off until September, so I'm trying to be gentle with myself so I can get through it all. Almost all of it is fun, so I don't want to cut anything out of the calendar, but it's a little overwhelming.
Yesterday we declined another party invitation-- it seemed too overwhelming for me, again, and we'll catch up with those people later-- and went instead to Old Fort Niagara's French & Indian War event.
I love this event. I don't really go for the theatrics-- oh, they have all kinds of things, artillery demonstrations and formation marches and things. They're great, and I like taking pictures of them. But that's not why I go.
I go for the shopping.
There are so many sutlers. So much stuff. I go to buy Pennsic-y things. Part of what I don't like about the SCA is the sameness of it-- you get subsets of re-enactors borrowing each other's research and then they look like a medieval J. Crew catalog, you get everybody shopping at the same place and getting precisely the same mass-produced wooden mug, you get nobody doing original research and so either they parrot the "experts" who may or may not know anything, or they say "whatever!" and go find anything that looks "pseudo-medieval" and bring it along.
I don't mind any of those approaches, I should say-- I do that sort of thing myself. I don't play at SCA or go to Pennsic because I want an authentic medieval experience. (Actually I'd love that, but there's nobody local who does it so that's OK; I also want a pony that can fly so I'll probably live.) I do these things because it's more like living in a fantasy novel. It's just that the one thing I can't overlook is everybody having the exact same tankard, etc.
There's a whole universe of 18th- and 19th- century re-enacting, all of it much more serious than the SCA stuff. That's what I grew up with. My parents bought a pig to slaughter it themselves to have the real authentic where-your-meat-comes-from experience. My parents made their own buttons for their Rev War stuff. Part of this was that it was the 70s. Part of this is that Mom was a museum curator and Dad worked for the NYS Dep't of Historic Preservation. And part of this is that Rev War types, and moreso Civil War types, tend to be much crazier than SCAdians.
I've already decided I'm farbing out for Pennsic this year. I'm going to dress pseudo-Turkish in the Swamp, but not well-researched-- more comfortable. That means hand-hemming my hand-dyed silk veil with modern metallic machine embroidery thread, so that it glitters. That means making "Turkish vests" with a self-drafted pattern partly made from the cups of my modern bras, so I'll be comfortable. And that means I have a bunch of farby-but-beautiful 18th-C kit. Including a hand-made folding "penny knife" that I bought on impulse yesterday because it was beautiful, and the man who made it was standing there joking with the middle-aged ladies running the market stall.
(I'm also working on another parroted-research 15th-century outfit-- I've done tons of research, sure, but it's consisted of collating the research of others on the Web, which mostly has just confused me, so I'm not really contributing anything new here-- and on getting some actual accessories done so I'll look like a person, not a costume, for Topside use. I like to be able to hang with the people who take it seriously, and at least not ruin anybody's "moment" if I'm going into the places where people have those things. But in the Swamp? Fuggit, I'm-a be farby and fabulous.)
Oh! I almost forgot the coolest thing that happened at the Fort. I was wandering along with Z and there were some people doing Native re-enacting-- there are always a lot, at this event, including some fairly serious types with the part-shaved hairstyles and long hair and face paint and whatnot. One of them was giving another a tattoo using the old-fashioned techniques, and other tourists had paused to ask about it, so a young woman was explaining the technique and materials. She had a stylus made with four sewing needles bound between a stick and tied with sinew; the tourist was being dubious that Indians would have had sewing needles, and she quite tactfully reminded him that by the 18th century, the Indians had quite a lot of things. Prior to the Europeans, as well, things existed in the Americas which could have been used to poke a hole in skin; metal just lasts longer.
Meanwhile a man was poking ink into another man, and they let me take a picture. Another young man showed me a tattoo he'd received the day before, and let me photograph it. They looked wonderful, clean and neat; they all said the tattoos of this type healed faster than ones with a tattoo gun because you actually wind up getting stabbed a lot less.
I should have gotten their contact info, though.
