final thoughts about Pennsic

I remembered the funny story I alluded to in an earlier post.

It's often joked that the College of Arms is the Church of the SCA, with Laurel taking on the role of the Pope, the principal heralds being cardinals, and so on and so forth all the way down. One evening after the point was closed, the Fool's Parade came parading past, and they saw that there were still a bunch of heralds around, so they made a detour to come by the tent, requesting a blessing. So I dug out the Laurel crown, and blessed them. It was all just a little bit strange...

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Not surprisingly, I had a number of preconceptions about Pennsic that were not completely accurate. I also had a number of goals for my Pennsic experience, most of which I succeeded in meeting.

The first preconception was that, Pennsic being two weeks long, it's a chance for people to dig out their best and finest and really dive into the authenticity side of things. After all, it's a long enough even to make the extra work worthwhile. So I expected that the average authenticity level would on the whole be a bit higher than your typical SCA event. What I hadn't really taken in mentally was the fact that Pennsic isn't really an SCA event -- it's an SCA + fringe groups event, and a lot of the fringe groups don't have the same interested in authenticity that a lot of SCAdians do. I was pretty surprised at how many women I saw wearing the typical modern belly-dance style garb. I mean, yes, it was hot, but it wasn't that hot. Which ties in to one of my goals, which was to dress as periodly as I could for my persona, which involves layers, and in this I succeeded. I wore two layers or more every day, and these were floor-length, wrist-length, relatively small neck-hole layers, and I made sure that I never left the tent wearing modern clothes, which means that morning visits to the porta potties and the showers were done in just a chemise. Most of my under- and over-dresses were linen or cotton/linen blends, so I never really felt all that hot, or get that sweaty. And even on the days which were warmer than others, I was also able to stick to one of my other goals, which was to not let my modern ideas about cleanliness interfere with my enjoyment of a medieval event. At home, I normally shower every other day, since washing my hair more often results in badness, and showering without washing my hair also results in badness. I decided to keep to that schedule at War, since if I felt hot and grimy, showering only mitigated that for a few hours, and so I would still be facing part of the day feeling dirty. I washed my hands regularly to get rid of the grime beneath my fingernails, but for the rest? Who really cared or noticed that I wasn't showering every morning? I think that modern people's approaches to cleanliness can tend to being a bit on the obsessive side, so it was nice to try out whether I could get away from that a bit, and I succeeded. I also had my hair in braids and either pinned up or covered with a straw hat or a veil every day, which was my other goal, since I normally wear my hair down and I find veils really irritating. (Veil pins helped. But then I managed to shove one about 3mm underneath a fingernail. Ouucch!!) So this was again another matter of "can I rise above my normal/ordinary/modern preferences and try to be a bit more medieval?" One small step at a time...

What I would like for next year: Better shoes. I've wanted good medieval shoes for a long time (I have shoe envy nearly every Drachenwald event I go to), but I would also like to have shoes that are better equipped to deal with bogs. I had my birkenstocks, which worked for dry days, and a pair of ordinary semi-dress shoes for the rest of the time, and while the latter did keep my feet dry (unless I stepped in a very big puddle), and didn't look too garish, they now have quite a bit of mud ingrained in them and I really need to sit down and clean them and polish them before I try wearing them as good shoes again.