The personal authentic travels of a world-wide drifter, you'll always see pics of me at the locations being described (if the other blogs you're reading don't do that, odds are they were NEVER there, just saying…)
Category: Music Scene
Self explanatory I think, every town or place has it’s own music scene
Wow! Every Saturday night Disney hosts a dance at Disneyland! WHO KNEW? The dance happens in Disneyland’s Royal Hall, a spot normally reserved for character meet and greets. (How they convert it from that to a dance space I don’t know.)
I was wandering around Disneyland on a Saturday night, heard jazz music, assumed it was yet another of the obligatory Disney entertainments and found THIS… HOW COOL!
From what I read, not only does this dance happen almost weekly (and has for a few years) but it has a dedicated group of regular dancers.
From what I could it’s a very friendly crowd of very good dancers (for the most part) and more than few of them seemed to know each other. Back before my inner ear broke making spinning an impossibility for me anymore, I’d totally have been here every week.
The Pennsic war is a two-week-long yearly event held in Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania organized by the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA), a medieval reenactment group. Having just completed its 46th year, it regularly draws between 10 and 15K geeks (who have a passion for all things medieval) from all over the world to fight, meet, and frolic… and of course SHOP… the latter being why I wanted to go.
On that topic, according to one of my friend, this two-week event generates about 40% or more of the county’s tax revenue… so the local government is VERY willing to do whatever is necessary to keep these SCA folks happy (police support, etc).
I will say this, my Pennsic experience got better daily. At first I felt like a fish out of water, depending on the one or two people I knew from before to help guide me. However, the more I got to know people and make new friends and developed a better sense of what was going on, the more I enjoyed it. I had intended to just try it out this once, so that I could say I had, but after the fact I’m seriously thinking its going to be an event that I will be attending with regularity.
SO, what is Pennsic? I found a couple of TV segments that were done on it, and since I didn’t shoot any video while there, I’ll suggest you watch these (if you’re interested)
Some back story: I’ve been what I like to refer to as SCA adjacent since college. When I was a freshman at the University of Wisconsin — Madison, while checking out the local Irish pub (my father’s side of the family being British) I met a group of folks who were sipping beer and singing funny drinking songs (something most Americans never do). It turned out they were the local contingent of the SCA, a group I’d never before heard of but which sounded like something I’d enjoy, so I started to hang out with them on a regular basis. At least, I hung with them until I got in a bit too deep, and as a result of some serious drama, decided that in fact they were a pretty dysfunctional and unethical group of people (long story) who I wanted nothing more to do with.
That said, over the last 30 odd years, I have repeatedly found myself dating or being friends with any number of SCA-type folks from other parts of the country (or in their parlance “kingdoms”), who have repeatedly assured me that the particular group that constituted my first contact with the organization actually had a really bad reputation with the society at large; and, more to the point, should NOT be considered by me as reflective of the whole (every time I describe the drama to them they’re horrified by what happened) ….
Going forward, while I have repeatedly found that on an individual level most SCA members are exactly MY sort of people; I have since then avoided getting too close, or too invested, into that culture — because as an adult my willingness to deal with drama is significantly lower than it was as a teenager — and the SCA seems to breed drama. Additionally, I tend to find that the SCA as a group has too many members who behave like “big fish in small ponds”… for my liking… something I generally only put up with when forced to, like at work (Academia REEKS of it).
[Oh, and a note: SCA people create persona’s for themselves. They have who they are in real life, and then they have the character they play within the organization. In real life they are any and everything from folks who are in the military or academia, to Hollywood producers (an old High school friend of mine who started out as an animator but has since gone on to become a successful producer and director of animation — The Simpsons, Animaniacs, Pinky and the Brain, Monster High, Hot Wheels, etc — still likes to occasionally dress up in armor and thwap other folks over the head with his broadsword as a form of exercise, although he hasn’t as much time for it as he used to), and of course there are more than a few Silicon Valley types (from NASA to Facebook engineers). In the SCA they take on new names, which have to be historically documentable (as in folks in that time period may have had a name like that… and there are ‘experts’ in the organization who have to “OK” your choice), and create story lines for who their characters are.]
A group of SCA folks who have opted to be Romans (early medieval period). There are a lot of Romans at pennsic — I dressed as one myself — because the clothing makes significantly more sense on hot Ohio and often humid days than that of the late medieval period clothing, when the mini ice age had begun.
Once at Pennsic, individuals will bond together as communal ‘camps’ that take on many forms. Some consist of friends who want to camp together for two weeks every year and may, or may not, come from different parts of the country; but other camps form around how those members want to ‘play’ the game so to speak, with the campmates all playing characters from the same time period, etc., and/or staying in firmly character for the whole two weeks.
That said, political correctness is only just starting to creep in: as in at Pennsic I saw a whole camp of folks of European decent play acting that they were Japanese, etc. —
A collection of Royals from the various kingdoms sitting court with their banners behind them
So, keeping that my own personal context in mind, while the Pennsic wars were something I first heard about 30 odd years ago, and everyone whose ever been seems to have LOVED it, (the same way folks who go to Burning Man LOVE that, and it’s also on my to do list) … I had never yet attended either event until just now. Those of you who actually follow my blog, or are personal friends of mine, know that one of my priorities has been supporting a very old friend of mine who’s doing time in a Prison that is very far from where his family lives (which makes it difficult and expensive for them to visit). As such, I’ve been focusing my travels to the general vicinity of his Prison, so that I can visit him when possible. So while looking at the map and asking myself what there was to do in the area, I suddenly realized that he wasn’t all that far from Pittsburg, and since the central joke of the Pennsic wars is that whichever side looses is supposed to take control of Pittsburg (or was, it isn’t now that Pittsburgh has formed own kingdom), it stood to reason the event MUST be somewhere in that vicinity…. SO, I on my Facebook account declared my interest in attending this year, and for the first time, and asked if any of my friends were intending to go as I was sure it would be a lot more fun to go WITH old friends rather than show up all on my own — but that I had no intention of camping at the event and intended to, as usual, rent an Airbnb close by (historical authenticity be damned, running water and air conditioning are GOOD things).
Immediately, a ‘old Facebook friend’ by the name of Greg messaged me, and told me that he goes every year and that I could go with him (couldn’t remember why he was a friend till he told me we’d gone on a date about 10 years ago and had been unable to schedule the next date — yah, kind of embarrassing). He explained that and in order to get more room allotted for his tents and that of the group with whom he camps, he always pays for “ghosts,” i.e., entrance fees for people who aren’t actually attending — and that since I intended to Airbnb anyway, this would be perfect for me. This way, I would NOT have to pay the full camping fee of around $200 to attend for the whole two weeks, and instead would only pay around $65… and that it would be nice to have a friend make use of it. So I was going to essentially go as his guest, and was welcome to consider his camp group as my own… which I did and made many new friends in the process.
Peace Week As Greg had warned me, the first week has lower attendance and is called Peace week (he had even suggested I might not want to be there that week, but I wanted to do the whole thing). During the Event he worked at what the SCA folks in their parlance call “Troll” but the rest of the world calls ‘registration’ and as such was able to help me through the process. The very first days of the event they allow cars to drive right up to their camp sites (once the event really gets going, that is no longer allowed unless you’re making a delivery of something heavy). You stand in line (via your car, or truck, or trailer, if you have one)…
Cars lined up, waiting to get checked in, Saturday morning
During that day of the event the various groups lay out their camps within the segment to which they’ve been assigned, as designated by number and letter combination (see map below) — but then it’s up to them to set the specific geographic boundaries of their specific camps within those smaller areas (a process known as landgrab)… with any disputes being brought to troll, but it usually goes pretty smoothly as most of the camps have been using the same sites for many years now and are friendly with their various neighbors.
and once that’s completed they start to set up camp, a process the that can take a few days to complete; personally I really enjoyed this part, it allowed me a way to get to know some of the key camp members — and I argue that as a newbie it was the best way — by working together. I strongly suggest it.
Setting up our public spaces, the living room known as “Big Red” because the tent is red (the only one, and visible from aerial shots of Pennsic) and our kitchen (which had running water), as well as communal shower for the folks who aren’t staying off site (like I was).
In the evening of the first day, on the suggestion of one of my camp mates, I volunteered to spend four hours helping with security. The SCA, and Pennsic, are volunteer organizations. All the people “working” security, or helping to organize the event, or log people in as they arrive, are all volunteers. As such, every single person who attends is expected to pitch in, although only a certain percentage ever bother. For three hours, 10pm to 1am, I acted as the 2nd person riding on a security golf cart (connected via walkie-talkie to the main tent) around and through the entire event — the first person was someone who was experienced at the job — making sure no one needed help of any sort. That night the temps dropped, so that ultimately it was so cold that we had to keep stopping to put on more and more layers of clothing, and to grab hot chocolates from this one ‘bar’ that sold them. By the end I was wearing my heavy dress, my woolen hood (see later in this post), my down vest, and a black velvet cape with its own hood over the first hood, and I was still freezing. I did however get to meet some nice people.
The food court: they actually had some pretty decent food. There were all you could drink iced tea and soda (if you bought a $28 mug), veal stew in a bread bowl, and shrimp cocktailsA motorized wheelchair camouflaged as a horseNo, the SCA isn’t full of nerds, what makes you say that? These folks are all standing around playing Pokemon Go.
Once all of the attendees have unloaded their vehicles they are expected to move them to assigned parking areas, and leave them there…. there’s even areas for RV parking.
In this photo, down the hill all the bits of white are the tents people have set up
While the first week is designated as ‘peace week’ some fighting does happen. Fencers or archers (those who fight with light weapons), will compete with each other one on one or in small groups, in tournaments for awards and merit
Archers are also involved in the major battles, and have to be “inspected” to prove they’re ready to do so.
while those who are heavy fighters (broadswords) will practice, and go through a certification process to prove that they are fit and able to fight in the following week’s wars.
In the evenings, various camps will throw parties, etc. In the medieval period people brewed their own alcoholic drinks. In fact some argue that it was originally a woman’s task and it was only when men began to yank authority over that task away from women that the symbols of brewing (when held by a women) became evidence of witchcraft: i.e., the caldron, the cat to keep mice away from the grain, the pointed brewer’s hat, the ‘brewing’ itself, etc. (It’s a historical theory actually worth reading up on). As such, among the many medieval skills the SCA tries to revise among SCA members is brewing… and since a lot of SCA members also love to drink, a lot of these various parties held every night of the event are opportunities for the brewers to show off their recipes….
Sign in front of another group’s camp — they had a full bar set up, with a high table and chairs surrounding a center set of taps where they served libations hand brewed by their own members
Other parties are more ‘culinary’ than inebriated … with the cooks of the group showing off their medieval recipes,
My favorite party was a chocolate tasting… while other parties were doing alcohol tastings this camping group had in their front room a massive collection of different chocolates, flavors and brands…. and grapes and fruit to go with it… in their back room different members of the group took turns performing songs and theatrical pieces around the fire.
While it wasn’t during the first week, the camp I stayed with has a tradition of doing a steak party which is invitation only, for obvious reasons…
This bottom photos reminds me of Toulouse Lautrec’s “At the Moulin Rouge” painting, which hangs at the Art Institute of Chicago’s museum (my ‘alma mater’), and is one of my very favorite paintings. As a kid I always referred to it as “The Lady with the green face”
One camp site brought in a band to perform, and served some really great food, and drink… a major investment
Bagpipes, drums and belly dancers all jamming together… what’s not to like? And later a guy dressed as a jester deep-throated a sword
… apparently there was this one really wild party down in what they called the bog (where there’s a lake and it gets flooded if it rains) where even held a slave auction of willing slaves (who usually ended up doing things like a camp’s dishes).
So, while there is some fighting during the first week, classes on all things medieval and or SCA related happen daily (I’m embarrassed to admit I didn’t attend a single class session)…
A decal on someone’s car: Slippery Rock is where Pennsic is held, and FAFSA is a US federal student aid program
and peace week is also when some of the best pickings are available at the shops…. not to mention there were dances and parties at night. That said, attendance during this first “peace” week is usually well below the 10,000 people mark, and is usually made up of the folks who are the most serious about the SCA AND of course can afford to take that time off from work.
And for those of us who don’t care about the fighting:
For me, the DRAW really was NOT the fighting or the classes. In fact I slept in during most of the hours when that occurred (I usually didn’t get there till 2pm). I took a few photos, granted, but honestly… not my thing.
What made me WANT to go to Pennsic this year was the shopping!
Hey, I’m girly in SOME ways… and I KNEW from what I’d heard over the years that the shopping at Pennsic was supposed to be GREAT (if what you’re looking for is not modern). The event is full of venders’ tents that HAVE to open up by Wednesday of the first week (even though attendance is still low), and there are as many as 250 different ones who tend to show up each year, all of which carry handmade goods that appeal to this demographic (historical nerdom such as myself). BECAUSE all of these goods are usually hand-made, no two things are exactly alike, and as such the early bird quite literally gets the worm.
This store specialized in hand blown glass, using styles and techniques specific to various time periods and geographic locations
That said, you really SHOULD have SOME period clothing before Pennsic begins because it is highly frowned upon to be wearing modern clothes at the event. As such, before I got to Pennsic I was all worried that my clothing was not period “ENOUGH” to satisfy the folks who my friends have referred to as the “period police” (individuals who go around critiquing your clothes for authenticity, with comments like: “you’re combining 13th century shoes with early 15th century pants which simply would not have happened, and that tunic you’re wearing is Hollywood/fantasy garb, it’s NOT period.” Some of these people take their historical accuracy very seriously. This fear was heightened by the fact that my host, Greg, a guy I’ve known for over 10 years, who even came to visit me when I was working in S. Korea, just happened to fall into that category.
That said, IF you come to the event as part of a group of friends, the odds are some loaner garb will be available — but it’s a good idea to check it out ahead of time.
For instance, This young man is Chris, a guy who had never attended an SCA event before, and showed up with no garb of his own (but he’d been invited so they knew he’d be coming, and were prepared to help him out). He’s wearing his own t-shirt under a loaner tunic — the thing around his neck is proof of payment to be at the event. He had come to camp wearing a British style wool flat-cap … and struck me as the sort of guy who usually wears a hat (which he confirmed). As this was his first major SCA event and he didn’t have any garb of his own (and the loaner garb they had didn’t include any head coverings) I said to him “dude, since you always wear hats, if you’re going to be doing a lot of SCA you’ll need a historically appropriate hat!” As he’s a young struggling musician, I offered to buy one for him. We went looking for what was available, ran into a long time Facebook friend of mine who is one of these sticklers for historical authenticity (she’s got AMAZING clothes, all of which she has sewn herself), and she agreed with the right hat, you can actually fake the rest of the clothing and still pass as period… so with her help (he decided to stick with his heritage, which is Spanish) this is the hat he chose — it’s Southern Europe — the sort you see in Shakespearian Italian dramas, Romeo and Juliet, that sort of thing.
I however wanted stuff for myself, and can afford to buy it (within reason). As such, before Pennsic began I reached out to my friend Greg, and he directed me towards one of his favorite Pennsic vendors who also has an online store Historic Enterprises; from whom — since there wasn’t enough time to do a full custom ordered gown, I ordered what an off-the-rack mid 14th Century Herjolfsnes ”G39” gown size 12, that was SUPPOSED to have then been altered down to my measurements (because the only part of me that is size 12 is the breasts, while the rest is currently a size 8, and NOTHING they had actually fit me); I paired that with their 14th-15th century ‘London’ style, buttoned wool hood. When it arrived however they had simply sent me a size 12 gown whose ONLY alteration was that had been hemmed, in spite of my having sent them LOAD of painstaking measurements for the various parts of my body.
Like I said, the operative word was SUPPOSED to have been altered… the dress that arrived fit me like a tent. I was besides myself because the dress cost me $189.95 and I couldn’t wear it. Not only because of the size, but also because I had been very clear with the stores owner that I needed it for Pennsic, and that part of Ohio is VERY hot during that part of the summer, AND I am in menopause, so really I needed a summer weight linen which they promised it would be — but was not. (Why the SCA insists on holding the event there instead of a different rural location with a much higher elevation — not to mention a location with no risk of lime disease from ticks– I don’t know).
Because of my lifestyle, I had the gown sent to the home of a friend of Greg’s who was also going to be part of our camp, who lived near Pennsic and about 1.5 hours from my friend’s prison. The week I swung through to pick it up, he suggested I join him to an SCA event he was going to be going to. At it I was directed towards an SCA member who was a respected seamstress, and I paid her an additional $100 to do the alteration I had been promised by Historic Enterprises, which I picked up from her home a few days before the event.
Happily, I found that while Pennsic COOKS during the daytime (it can get very HOT), once the sun goes down the temperatures drop precipitously, making the gown and the hood usable. While the arms were still WAY too baggy, the now altered gown (at the cost to me of an extra $100) came in around my waist enough to be wearable — and, since I didn’t have the proper undergarments anyway, I opted to wear it over my camouflage shorts, so that 1) I’d have pockets, and 2) the gown would flare out a bit more at the hips as it would have with said undergarments.
Suffice it to say, I was so unhappy with Historic Enterprises that I did NOT buy anything from their tent while at pennsic, and was actually too livid to even tell the owner how unhappy I was with them — even though a few people were pushing me to do it.
Of the stores that did visit, my personal favorites were (not surprisingly) the sellers of women’s clothing:
Firstly let me rhapse melodic about, Armstreet, is a Ukrainian dressmaker whom I first found online maybe 10 years ago selling her hand-made clothes on eBay (now she has her own professional looking online store). While it should be noted that MOST of what Armstreet sells is more “Hollywood” medieval/fantasy than it is historically accurate … and as such isn’t REALLY SCA kosher… but in a pinch it’ll pass and most SCA people won’t make much of a fuss about it.
Back when I first found Armstreet, you chose from various images she posted to eBay, and then sent her your measurements for custom-made outfits that looked about like what the photos had, but never exactly. At the time she was by far, the cheapest way to go for medieval garb —- but since it was mail order from the Ukraine, you were kind of stuck with what arrived.
At the time, I was dating a guy who was seriously into the SCA and I needed garb to wear to events that I was intending to go to with him… so I ordered a few different basic dresses from her. However, between the making and the long distance shipping, by the time they arrived, he had become my ex-boyfriend; I only, finally, had a chance to wear them at this Pennsic (10 years later). The first is a black linen dress with patterned ribbing, which looks far more like a traditional Ukrainian gown than a medieval one:
The second dress was basically the same, only white linen with gold and red edging, which in the photo below I teamed up with a vest I found at one of the stores (I forget which), a white turban (purchased from Revival Clothing who also had a shop at the event, only I wrapped it a different way from how they suggested), and a middle eastern necklace I had purchased over 10 years ago in Tel-Aviv’s Shuk ha’carmel.
Me and an old friend from high school (we were in orchestra together), EmilySue (her SCA name is Amelie d’Anjou — it rhymes with her real one), who is wearing a brand new early Italian Renaissance gown a friend of hers made for her. We were in the Dance Tent (see below)
Was I authentically period… well no, and definitely NOT when compared to what EmilySue was wearing … but this is Pennsic and as long as you make a good effort MOST folks will let it go.
When I bought the vest, I had been wearing another Armstreet item that I had happily fond for sale on eBay about a month before Pennsic (again, more Hollywood than historic). As I mentioned above, I had intended to wear the gown from Historic Enterprises, but couldn’t because not only was it so big that I had to pay an additional $100 to get it altered, but it’s weight was far to heavy for the daytime weather. HAPPILY, I found this gown of very light weight linen, size small, for sale on eBay used for $76.00 including shipping, instead of the $129+ $21 for shipping new it was selling for on their site (as I post this it’s currently on sale for $94 + $21 for shipping)…
trying on my newly delivered eBay purchase… never did wear the necklace — the long sleeves are apparently called tippets, and were only the “trend” for about 30 years (let’s face it, impractical), even though they show up in almost every medieval themed Hollywood movie
which armstreet describes as it’s “Medieval Linen Chemise Archeress” and had walked around the various first vendors to open shop looking for something to pair it with, till I found the above stripped vest which I THOUGHT might work equally well with jeans and a T-shirt, but have since decided it really doesn’t. While Armstreet was ultimately at Pennsic, they were one of the very last shops to open up, and even when they did open up I couldn’t find anything to go with it that I thought was better than the vest.
That said, I was happy to see that now Armstreet’s owner is now so profitable that she is able to ship both her stuff AND her staff to the US and set up what was one of the larger shops at Pennsic. It was nice to finally meet her, reconnect her to this dresses she’d made years back (back when she was just learning her trade), and to try on some of her new, and far more elaborate designs. There’s one dress their Lady of the Lake gown — also way more Game of Thrones than period, that I tried on at her shop, looked amazing in, and am trying to find the justification for buying.
I will admit however, as I keep finding her new stuff popping up for sale on eBay USED and in my size, it might be a while till I’ll actually buy much from her that is custom ordered and new; especially now that her prices are now far more dear than they used to be.
In fact about less than a week after Pennsic I found this dress (see below) that while being from Armstreet was in fact period… for sale on eBay, used and in my size, and bought it — in a package deal that included a similar but different chemise, a thin medieval style belt (which I needed anyway, it’s secured through a loop rather than a buckle), and a matching cape — not in the picture — for $199 including shipping when the same package now would have cost me:
Chemise $104+20 shipping Kirtle $179+34 shipping
cloak $149+ 42 shipping
belt $25 at amazon
So, $199 used including shipping used at eBay vs $457 new, not including shipping which I’m guessing would bring it to $500… That said, I DID have to take it to a seamstress and pay her $40 to hem the length (it was the right length in the back, trailing on the floor, but too long in the front where it needed to be just above the foot… we had to take off 3.5 inches in the front and then taper it to the sides ).
same dress, but with a belt
My next favorite store (and based on what I saw people wearing, it’s a favorite with a lot of the Pennsic folks) is Linen Garb from whom I bought this hand dyed (no two were alike) and embroidered (the design at the top) Roman style dress for $95. Not only is it beautiful (and something I could wear to a dinner party), but it is impressively cool on very hot days — and Pennsic can get both hot and humid:
Same dress, just different sizes and pinned differently: The ‘dress’ is essentially a large tube of cloth, how you choose to pin it alters its appearance (you can even do it upside down, in which case it becomes a Roman tunic that comes to just above the knee)
I initially pinned it up (at the shoulders) — the cloth is essentially a large tube that you can wear multiple ways– with Celtic pins which the owner of Linen Garb was giving away with the purchase of the dress
image is about to size
(single coil fibula pins that were hand-made by ThorThor’s Hammer another artisan owned shop at Pennsic which sells hand-made museum replicas of Viking and Celtic jewelry), but when I went to that shop to get extras (in case I should lose one) I ultimately decided to upgrade to their Spectacle brooch, which I felt not only better suited the dress, but also better obscured my bra straps:
Displaying image at about to size of item: Because the dress is linen, it’s very forgiving about holes — this has a very thick metal pin at the back
and then I went ahead and teamed the dress and brooch with their replica Roman earrings (also made by Thor, but which aren’t shown on his website). For headgear, and to keep the sun off the back of my neck, I bought a purple gauze scarf, and a cheap plastic hair-comb, and had the two sewn together for me at the seamstress booth run by this woman, who I had met a few weeks before Pennsic at a dance event (where she was wearing the most amazing Tudor gown, all hand-made by herself).
…. My orange necklace however was a Ukrainian necklace of amber which my father had purchased for me maybe 20 years before while on business travels there, but I had never before had the right occasion to wear. (The green medallion I’m wearing is worn as proof that you paid your entrance fee to the event.)
I later verified that I could also wear this to normal events, like to the theater in Stratford, Canada — where three different women complimented it, and more than that just scanned it covetously. My friend Dayna, who tends towards honest, said it looked amazing on me. I wore the same jewelry I wore at pennsic, but added the medieval belt that came with the used blue Armstreet dress, a black fedora and a pair of croc’s sandals.
For the previous year Linen Garb designs had made a tunic that I would have purchased, had it been available in my size (but it was not, which was probably a good thing). A LOT of people had it, and while it looks period, it was deceptive in that if you looked at it closely it had imagery from George Lucus’s ‘StarWars’ woven into it, including Storm Trooper’s helmets and the symbol of the resistance deceptively hidden in Roman like images … so this being an event that draws over 10k geeks to one place, it had pretty much sold out quickly the year before (she had a handful left in XXL) even though they cost about $300 each.
This guy combined is StarWars Tunic with a Lord of the Rings necklace … no geeks here, none at all
Boots by Bohemond, Didn’t buy anything from these guy, but my friend Greg did.
Midnight madness happens on the last day the shops are open, about 3 days before the event is officially open: it is the only night that the shops are open till late and they bring in electrical lighting. According to my friends it USED to be they had great sales that day, selling off items they’re rather not ship home… but not so much anymore (because they realized that people weren’t buying anything the rest of the time and would just wait for the midnight madness sales)
I bought a used deerskin tunic for $95 ….. feels like butter and it looks fabulous. It had been owned by the woman who owned the shop that sold it with her husband (one of them made it) and according to the hubby, I looked better in it than she had. They make their clothes from deer skins given to them by friends who hunt which they tan themselves, the bellybutton hole is actually where the deer was shot.
But of course, there’s more to Pennsic than shopping… although to be honest it’s what I did when I ran out of things to buy… well that and I tended to opt to stay late at Pennsic for the late night camaraderie and then went home to the Airbnb where I slept in, and tended to not get back to the event till mid afternoon.
There is general people watching, and the appreciation of the ornate costumes people come up with.
A Chinese woman of the Han Dynasty & a woman from the early renaissanceTwo Vestal Virgins from the Roman period
And of course…. the happy side-effect of a large percentage of the men enjoying thwapping each other over the head with broad swords, is that there’s plenty of eye candy for us girls; I even saw a LARGE number of men in their 50’s, who still had it going on…. because swinging broadswords while wearing full armor is not for the scrawny. So, even if their day job is sitting around programing computers or teaching science — these are men are physically strong, AND they prefer their women nerdy. Nuff said…
LOOK at those arms! I asked him if I could take this picture (even had him bend the arm to pop the muscle); he hugged me afterwards. I think I made his afternoon.
Although, as a noted before, there are also some highly athletic women who suit-up in armor and fight,
War Week The 2nd week, which is known as War week, is considered the “Main event” and is when the event really gets into full gear… attendance hits its maximum, of 10 to 15 thousand people, sometimes more…. and the main battles begin… at least up until Thursday morning, at which point the battles have been completed, and it’s as though a cloud of mild depression settles itself over the whole event, as people start to pack up to go home.
for the women who want something that’s athletic but a “tad” less violent (emphasis on the tad) ……. There’s Helga ball!!! (otherwise known as Rugby, with a cabbage as the ball)
Helga Ball is based on a viking game; it is a type of Female Rugby, with a cabbage for the ball —
To Play Helga Ball (Cabbage ball):
– Organize a team of 5-10 women. (Having substitutions is a good thing.)
– Each player must be over 18.
– Each team member should bring one or more paper or hygiene product for donation. (No monetary donations.)
– Points are scored by getting a cabbage through/past your opponent’s
goalposts. Two members of the Chivalry (or squires) shall serve as
stationary goal posts for each goal.
– All players must wear a dress. (Viking garb encouraged, but not required.)
– Players are encouraged to wear do-rags, heavy shoes/boots.
– Players may kick or dribble the cabbage with their feet, but may not touch
the cabbage with their hands or use hands to pick up the cabbage.
– Players may scoop the cabbage up in a skirt, apron, or do-rag, and move
the cabbage on the field.
– Tackling is not allowed, however “Group Hugs” are legal.
– Goalposts shall signal a “score” by raising one arm and yelling either
“Helga Ball!!” or “Olga ball!” to identify the scoring team.
Pennsic also makes an effort to be child friendly. I saw any number of young mothers with fair-haired toddlers in toe, and it was beyond cute:
There are in fact a whole schedule of “family” activities, to include the kinds. For the older kids there is even a special massive children’s water Battle, that utilizes the Castle built for the adult’s war, and includes water balloons, squirt guns, etc
Another one of the cool things at Pennsic is a lot of couples find each other at the event. Back when I was 18 and first learned about the SCA I remember people saying “if you can not get laid at Pennsic, you cannot get laid at all,” i.e., it’s a self selecting mechanism through which a certain kind of nerd (who might not have a lot of luck locally) is far more likely to find someone who thinks your over the top nerdiness is a good thing.
I’m sorry, either you understand the embedded cultural references of these images or you don’t.
As a result, during war week, these same couples…. should they make it that far, will often choose to hold their nuptials — or at least one of them — at the event. Not only is it a place where your friends from around the country are probably going to be anyway, but it’s the ultimate theme wedding… even the guests are in costume… and it’s relatively cheap.
An SCA wedding; as at all nerd events, there are knitters
And then finally, in addition to hanging out at the fire pit in the center of our camp with the other members of our “clan” (each camping group refers to themselves as clans) — which often included drinking, singing, and just getting to known each other, pretty much every night I would go spend a little time down at the dance tent.
Medieval Arts:
One of the ‘lost arts’ that members of the SCA painstakingly, from available documentation, try to recreate are the dances that were performed in the medieval period. My friend Greg, who goes by the SCA name of Gregory Blount of Isenfir, has actually been awarded an SCA “Order of the Laurel” from the kingdom of “Atlantia” — he grew up in for his knowledge of historical dance, and as a Silicon Valley Geek of the highest order — his expertise is designing and building search engines for handling big data sets — he has built a website to help anyone interested in historical dance.
On the topic of Laurels: At Pennsic I met up with my friend EmilySue (seated on the stage, bottom right, with her light hair braided in a Swedish kind of hairstyle) at an evening event where her friend from the Central Kingdom (think Chicago), was being awarded a laurel for music. After this is when she and I went to the dance tent (see picture above)
This young man was also awarded a laurel for dance by his kingdom, and was gifted the calligraphy scroll (or I think it’s called a writ) being held by the woman in red, as well as a having someone handmade him the black velvet cloak he’s wearing.
Of course it’s hard to write about what this sort of dance is looks like (hence the historical issues of trying to recreate it from written instructions), and I didn’t film it, so instead I found coverage by ABC of a previous year’s pennsic that is from the dance tent (Although I will note that during my visit dance tent was usually closed during the daylight hours, so I’m pretty sure this was “put on” just for the camera crew)
[So, on the topic of WHO are the sorts of weirdo folks who join the SCA, the guy playing the music for the dancers in this video, on what I THINK is a lute but don’t hold me to that, goes by the name of Master Avatar (you have GOT to love the pun inherent in that name), but in real life he’s an Aerospace Engineer, specifically he is a ISS Payload Support & Mission Science Integrator at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. — And THIS ladies and Gents is an example of why I’ve always been SCA adjacent.]
I also found this video from 2015, which I find amusing as I now recognize a lot of the dancers, including the one guy who with the long hair and red hat who isn’t dancing… namely my friend Greg who is the person who allowed me to come as part of his group.
Bottom right is my friend Greg, being a shark (his period appropriate shoes were at the shoemaker’s tent/shop being repaired, so he’s wearing bright red tennis shoes instead)
In addition to nightly dances there were also slightly more ornate “balls” which usually included something special in terms of a theme, or snacks, etc. There was one ball with a ‘let’s be silly’ under the sea theme organized by Asa (or at least I think that’s her SCA name — she was in the same camp as me, but only arrived during the 2nd week). She is the one in the pictures who is leading it while playing on the hammer dulcimer. My friend Greg, in order to be supportive, has donned a shark hat and floated around imitating a shark passing among the dancers — when he wasn’t stepping in and stealing people’s partners (which apparently is referred to as sharking). It was amusing. Someone later handed me a shark cap and I also walked around circling the dancers, but I don’t really know the dances well enough to be willing to try to “shark” a partner.
This ball had a chorus of singers as well as musicians; geek fact, the girl in the light blue gown is the granddaughter of a Jewish/American Nobel prize winner in the area of economics (on the on-going question of why am I continually drawn to SCA folks)A performance of song
In addition to dance, music and song, there is an SCA theater group that puts on regular plays at night, that all are freely invited to attend:
A cute enough town with many of its buildings dating back to the 1880’s or 1910, with a lot of top of the line yet affordable resturants; the fact remains that the only real reason to come to Stratford — and MANY people do, is to attend the internationally recognized, Shakespeare festival, which runs yearly from April through October (i.e., not during Canada’s winter).
Normally when I blog, I break up an extended visit like this — 23 days — by the day or by specific things I’ve seen or done, but since Stratford is not that kind of town… people come here for one reason, the theater, I’m going to do it as one extended post …. with the caveate of a day trip I took to Niagra Falls (in part because I had a day off and some business I had to do early the following morning in Toronto, before returning to Stratford that night for another play)
The Town
Originally a railway junction (and you can still hear the train as it passes) Stratford’s main industry (which collapsed) had been furniture making. Today the town has a population of around 31,000 and has a new main industry — theater. The Stratford Shakespeare Festival began in 1952 as a way to stimulate the local economy, with its first production (Richard III, starring Alec Guinness) being staged the following year, the festival is now held in such high regard that they often attract the best of Canada, the US and Britain to take part in their productions, and their company has nurtured Canadian talent that has gone on to be world famous. While the central theme of the festival is to produce the plays of “The Bard of Avon,” they also produce musicals and plays ranging from the ancient Greeks to modern works. In fact this year only half of the shows were by Shakespeare, although one of the non-Shakespeare plays was about him. And they offer all sorts of deals, which vary based on if you are purchasing well in advance, or during the festival, so that if you plan it strategically you don’t have to pay through the nose to see every play (which is exactly what I did).
I was here for slightly over three weeks, I stayed at the home of a friend Dayna Manning, a local musician (and someone whose been successful enough that she’s been able to support herself fairly comfortably just on her music — which is a hell of an achievement). In fact while I was visiting she and a friend put on a ‘test’ concert at a local venue. They’d only played together once before, at the request of a friend, enjoyed it, and decided to work together to build material for a gig to take on the road. This concert was performed mostly in front of friends and family (and local fans), with the aid of some friends who just joined them to jam.
Granted, most people might not have a local friend but not to worry; the town sports plenty of proper B&B‘s & Airbnb‘s — in fact practically every block seems to have one or the other, as well as various hotels (some chain, some historic) serving the town’s visitors. While here I met a LOT of older (usually retired, or semi-retired) people visiting from Chicago. I also discovered that there is in fact a dedicated bus line (of the air conditioned tour bus sort) that runs from Toronto to Stratford that only costs about $25, saving people a drive back late at night.
Like I said, Stratford’s main industry is the Theater, and as a result the local schools have a very STRONG arts mandate. I’m constantly running into packs of local teenagers who all claim to be theater nerds, and the streets are full of VERY YOUNG musicians (most often found providing entertainment to folks waiting for their plays to begin) whose parents can always be found standing guard just across the street or down the block. According to Dayna, Canadians with musically gifted children will in fact move to Stratford, just to take advantage of the musical programs there. The overall quality of the music these kids were preforming was very high.
I did not discover this until about half way through my visit but apparently Justin Bieber hails from Stratford. (There are t-shirts for any visiting Beliebers) when I mentioned it to my friend Dayna, this is actually her home town, she said that his mom was a year ahead of her in high school and had been the only teen mom in their school, and that she used to bring him to class.
Architecturally the historic downtown of Stratford is very cute; most of the building were built in the late 1800’s or early 1900’s, spiral out from the central point of the town hall, and sport a strong emphasis of multicolored brick work as their main form of decoration.
Running through the center of Stratford and offering a pretty walk between the Patterson and Festival theaters is a very cute river, with loads of ducks and swans (not to mention a plethora of Pokemon stops).
Locals and visitors both make active use of the river for boating (rowing), picnicking, and just enjoying it.
On nights when there is a play being performed, and the weather is fine, there’s a boat that travels up and down the river, performing live music.
Right across from the main (largest) theatrical venue for the festival is Tom Patterson Island, which is a pleasant place to hang out, and had the benefit (from my perspective) of being a Pokemon hub — a place where three poke-stops are so close together that assuming you’ve got active lures in place Pokemon emerge rapidly — and the more players there are taking advantage of the spot at one time the even more rapidly they emerge… its not uncommon to find groups of young adults playing the game there at 3:00am
Right along the river along one of my favorite areas — and it was only two blocks from the house where I was staying — was the lawn bowling club.
The Theaters
Currently, the festivals takes place in four venues scattered around the small town: The Festival theater, The Avon theater, The Tom Patterson Theater (named after the guy who had the idea of creating the festival in the first place), and the Studio theater (I will describe each in detail later on). And, if you have the good sense (as I did) to find digs that are centrally located to those, you can quite easily walk to any of them (assuming normal mobility and reasonable weather). There are taxis in the town, but they are few and far between (I’ve rarely seen them), so if you’re going to need one I strongly suggest contacting the companies directly and reserving them in advance (there is no Uber or such in the area, although you think the locals would push for it as a way to earn an extra buck during the festival season). Otherwise, parking at these locations is at a premium, and you will actually have to RESERVE parking in advance if you’re going to need it, or try to find street parking nearby, which won’t be all that easy.
One of the slightly odd things I noticed about the productions here was that extreme ‘Color Blind Casting’ seems to be the rule, to the extent that it can sometimes be disconcerting with absolutely no thought to reality … so that thought of race does not even happen in casting family units, forget about historical likelihood. As such, I saw a Caucasian actress as the mother, with an actress of African decent (who appears to lack any mixed heritage) as her daughter, and then a granddaughter played by an Asian actress (in this case Vietnamese)… whose father was played by a Caucasian actor…. in a play set in the 1850’s in Sweden, a place and time where even brunettes were a rarity. While I appreciate the need and desire for color blind casting, I wish they’d at least integrate some deniable plausibility…. otherwise its much harder for the audience to suspend disbelief and enter into what I refer to as the magical transformation of theater… where you forget it’s a play and stop seeing it as actors on a stage.
I had heard about the Stratford Festival in Canada all my life, but growing up — as much as my family LOVED theater, we never came here. (In fact we never crossed the northern border to Canada… I came once on a business trip as my father’s assistant, and once for an academic conference when I was in grad school, but that was it). We did however go to London almost yearly to visit with relatives (at least until most airlines stopped offering the “kids fly free” deals in the mid 1970’s) and that’s where we would gorge ourselves on government subsidized theater, sometimes seeing as many as three shows a day in our attempt to see EVERY possible production before heading home to Chicago; that, or we’d attend local student productions at Northwestern University (which has always been one of the top ranked drama programs in the country), getting the specially priced for staff tickets (dad was a professor at the business school). So, what drew me to decide to invest almost a full to the Stratford Festival this year? It was a school friend who has been coming here almost yearly with her mother, and listening to her going on and on and on … and on… about how great it was.
As previously stated, four venues make up the festival:
The Avon Theater: Let me admit right now (to my utter embarrassment) that I completely missed the punny nature of this till my cousin by marriage pointed it out… The Avon in Stratford? Get it?
Anyway, it is located in the heart of downtown (which is only about four blocks square), so its very convenient in terms of you go, you eat dinner, and then you wander over to the theater.
The Avon Theater, and its upstairs lounge areaThe theater’s interior
This theater seems to get the shows expected to do well, but not SO well that they will require the festival theater; during my stay I saw Shakespeare in Love, The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe (a musical); and Sondheim’s a Little Night Music.
Festival Theater:
The Festival Theater is the main venue for the Festival; it is where all of the ‘classic’ Shakespeare plays are performed, as well as any performance expected to bring in the crowds — which this year was A Chorus Line.
It is the venue located farthest from the Historic downtown of Stratford, alongside the Tom Patterson Island (located in the river).
Hidden within the building (by the stairs on the way down to the bathroom) is a real find, a chair that is strongly believed to have belonged to the Bard himself.
Tom Patterson Theater:
The building that this venue is in doubles as the Kiwanis Community Center. It’s one of the smaller theaters, with a full in the round construction. It’s located directly adjacent to the river, and when there are performances (and good weather) musicians will perform on a small dock.
This is where they host the Shakespeare shows they’re not expecting as much interest in — in this case a mashup of four of the historic plays, as well as serious dramas from top play-writes. In this case I saw “All my Sons” and one of the lessor plays by Ibsen.
Studio Theater:
The studio theater, which is 3/4 in the round, is located directly behind The Avon Theater. It doesn’t even have a proper lounge area, just a little stand which doesn’t even take credit cards. Most of the audience ends up hanging out at a book store located across the street (about where I’m standing when I took this picture).
It is the smallest of the Stratford venues. It’s where they display experimental theater or new plays that have never been seen before. As in, at my high school we had an in the round theater for when we put on Shakespeare plays and the like, which was bigger.
The Eats
The Good:
Bijou (midpriced Farm to table, French gourmet):
Located smack in the center of Stratford’s downtown. The food is French/ Farm to Table & prix fixe… and MOST of what’s on the menu I can’t eat. I explained my dietary issues to the waitress, who GOD BLESS turned out to be a dietician. She immediately agreed I could only eat the main and changed the price to adjust for that. I had trout on a bed of grilled veggies, which was delicious.
And then she brought me a little champagne cup full of fresh blueberries for my desert — and didn’t charge me for them.
CrabbyJoes (chain type):
Located outside of the downtown on the main road from Toronto. I came here under the mistaken assumption that it would include crab… it doesn’t. Its sort of like a TGIFridays, or a Chilies, type place… only the wait staff is actually HELPFUL and KIND and CONSIDERATE. First time I came in I explained my medical conditions and asked for a suggestion. The waiter said, “well to be honest most of what we serve you can’t eat… but there’s this one page in the back of the menu you should look at.” (which had healthy options I decided I would try at some later point — the fish dinner was delicious with lots of raw veggies as the salad, not boring lettuce)
But I wasn’t hungry enough for that at the time, just wanted a snack, so I asked if I could have the grilled chicken breast that comes on the salad… but without the salad. The waiter immediately pointed out that they normally brush it was garlic butter, and should they not do that? HALLELUJAH, the man earned his 20% tip.
I later had their Mediterranean Chicken from the skinny menu, sans the dressing on the salad (because it was pretty much oil). That was NOT as good as the fish, for a lot more calories — 500+ instead of 300+
Foster’s Grill (mid-priced Gastropub):
Center of downtown, almost next door to the Avon & Studio theater: I had tried this place before for dinner and was highly unimpressed with their “healthy” options… ended up eating the mussels which (this being the heart of the Midwest) were uninspiring. However, friend Dayna whose house I’m staying at, suggested that they’d be among the best local place for me to get breakfast, so I gave that a try. BINGO…
The dish is normally two pouched eggs on steamed spinach for $9 (Canadian), but I asked if I could only have one egg as I have high cholesterol, and they accommodated me, dropping the price to $6 … add one slice of dry toast which they didn’t charge me for, and a cup of coffee. Now THAT’S a breakfast! … For a grand total of $6.97 in US currency. The DOWNSIDE is that with the exceptions of Sunday Brunch, the breakfast menu goes away at 11am, and that’s about when I’m waking up — that said I found it pretty easy to get other local breakfast diners to make me the same thing (usually sans the avocado which these other diners don’t seem to ever have on hand) for a few dollars less.
The Prune:
Firstly, reservations are a must. The restaurant is in a converted house, on a street off to the side of downtown (with a bunch of other homes also converted into businesses — you get the feeling downtown is bursting it seams, but that the homes are considered historic so they can’t be torn down and replaced with business appropriate buildings).
This place is a fixed price only, two courses minimum restaurant. As I’m on a diet and have gotten used to small portions, $55 for two small portions and no vedge didn’t bother me, but I could see it pissing off a lot of people wanting US sized portions (see Demetre’s below). That said everything was tasty, and they were able to accommodate my dietary needs. The appetizer was smoked trout on a green apple vinaigrette (the assured me almost no oil), with one little bit of crisp bread with trout row on it (forgot to take a picture before I started eating), there was another large piece of fish where the fork is.
The main was Skate wing, which I’ve only had once before as it is most definitively NOT kosher (it’s a form of shark), so my parents never ordered it for us at restaurants. (I discovered it while eating out with a friend in Brighton, UK). You all know what Skate looks like, there’s barely a major aquarium that hasn’t got them in the main tank… they are the fish who look like they are flying through the water, rather than swimming… The wings are tasty.
Everything was tasty, but I think it was a bit overpriced (Skate wing is hard to find more because there is little market demand for it, but it’s actually relatively cheap to purchase — it’s by-catch, stuff that gets caught in the net when they are fishing for other things) … I just wished there had been more vedge served with it (all there was was a bit of shaved cucumber underneath it to prop it up above the broth.
Demetre’s Family Eatery (Greek owned Diner)
And in the best bang for your buck (but not necessarily all that tasty) category: Again, located away from downtown, this is a place that apparently all the elderly folks already know about (based on the average age of the customers) and that locals like (according to the person whose home I’m crashing at). They have smaller “elderly” portions, but on average their portions on MASSIVE. Where normally (for the same price) I’d get one blackboard eraser sized portion of grilled fish, here I got four of them. Also, as they have a predominantly elderly clientele they had NO issue with adjusting the dish so that the fish was almost bone dry when it arrive (barely any oil was used while cooking)
Unfortunately what the restaurant seriously lacks is vegetables. The fish came with baked, mashed or fried potato, or rice… no veggies. They didn’t even have them in the kitchen to make compromises with (the girl told me they’d have to unfreeze them, always a ‘good’ sign, NOT). When I explained my situation they compromised and gave me salad. When it arrived the fish tasted frozen…
Looking around EVERY portion for every dish was massive. Additionally I spotted two deals:
So gourmet food it isn’t… but if you want a family owned place comparable to any of the major ‘diner’ chains… think Perkin’s … with a lot of Greek style dishes, this is the place.
Revival House:
This is converted church is the most architecturally “interesting” restaurant in town, and is also a favorite of my friend Dayna (although I found relatively little that I could eat on their menu).
For myself, I thought the food was OK but nothing to write home about…
The bad:
Mercer Hall (mid-priced Japanese influenced Gastropub):
HIGHLY overrated in my humble opinion. Yelp had this listed as one of the best places in town… my experience did not support this. First, they had run out of the mussels and it was barely dinner time. Then I asked them if instead of deep frying the fish option could they bake it or grill it or steam it as I have fatty liver and oil is poison to me …they flatly refused (I should add that this is a request no restaurant has EVER before had an issue with unless they also unblushingly admitted that they’d already fried everything up in advance and are just re-frying it to warm it up — mercer made no such admittance) finally I opted for the only low fat item left on the menu (its a VERY unhealthy menu), which was a smoked salmon appetizer platter, and it was unimpressive and massively over priced. In general the wait staff treated me like “how dare you come to a restaurant if you have medical problems, you’re weird.” (And let’s keep in mind that elderly people are the majority of the tourists that come into this town for the yearly festival.)
Annie’s Seafood Restaurant (Diner):
One of the reviewers on YELP had described this as a greasy spoon fish place, and wasn’t kidding. It’s an inexpensive mom and pop looking place outside of the center of town, but on one of the main roads into town — the one you’d take coming from Toronto. I had come in before actually eating there, to check it out, explaining my health issues and telling the waitress I could only eat there if they ALSO served up the fish as a healthy option, not just fried… she assured me they did and pointed to their grilled and steamed options… When I finally went there to eat I specifically told the waitress I had diabetes and liver disease, and that’s why I was getting the grilled haddock, and I couldn’t eat the potatoes, rice, or bread either … So, for $17 what I got was a tiny sliver of fish sitting in a puddle of fat (and I’m not overstating it), and then a mass of steamed carrots (high glycemic-index — lots of natural sugar, and cooking it breaks down the fiber so you don’t even get the benefit of that) with some broccoli… so, I separate out the carrots … I eat the fish, first letting the oil drip off of it as much as possible and when I get to the broccoli I realized that even though it had been steamed, they then DOUSED IN BUTTER!!!! WHY bother to claim you have healthy options only to serve them up swimming in fat? So I couldn’t eat that either cause its impossible to get fat out of broccoli once it’s doused in it. And then… not even an offer to reduce my bill because the mostly served me food I could not eat after I had been more than clear about my medical condition when ordering.
The Shows: All 13 of them — or at least that was the plan
I’m now going to give my take on the shows I saw, as this will only be helpful to anyone showing up in the 2016 season, I’m putting it at the end of the post. The shows I saw were (in order of viewing):
LOVED it! I will admit that the politically correct/racially blind casting threw me for a while, and kept me from turning my brain off and just ‘entering the magic’ created by highly talented and skilled actors. (The grandmother was white, her daughter was pure African Black, and HER daughter.. the granddaughter.. was Vietnamese… and the show was is set in Sweden during the beginning of the industrial revolution, a time and place were even being a brunette was a rarity.) Ultimately however my brain was able to suspend disbelief and I enjoyed this production of the Sondheim classic greatly.
And my $58.50 (achieved by utilizing their half price Tuesday night ticket deal) got me great 4th row/ center orchestra seats…
I think the last time I saw this show I was maybe 14 going on 40, and it was with my mother on the London stage; and, at that time I did NOT enjoy it half as much. I really do think it’s ‘adult’ material, in that you really can’t appreciate the full depth of the humor till you’re a bit older.
It was good. I found the staging of it to be really impressive. They had constructed a stage within a stage where they could move sides back and forth so that sometimes you were looking at the “back stage” events (which were being performed stage front) while the play was being performed (stage back), and visa versa…
Other than the innovative staging however, it was good but not great, and to be honest, I think the movie was better. One major change from the movie is the increased role of Christopher “Kit” Marlow, who is played as much more Gay (many historical scholars suggest that this is anachronistic, as sexuality was a much more fluid thing back then, with bi-ness being almost normative) — and strongly suggesting to the audience that he was in fact responsible for many of Shakespeare’s best lines, plot ideas, etc. (something that historians argue about — one theory being that Shakespeare’s early works were in fact written by Marlow — which is true in the movie as well, but not to the same degree — here Kit plays a ‘Cyrano’ in the garden to William’s ‘Christian’ with Kit even helping William climb the wall by literally “boosting him on his shoulders” … as Will initially woes Viola — in the balcony scene that will… according to this tale.. later ‘inspire’ the one in Romeo & Juliet…. .
My $32.77 ticket ($29 US, achieved by utilizing a deal where you waited till a specific date, and then bought a ticket where you had no choice as to where you’d be seated) got me a ticket in the upper balcony — the nose bleeds if you will — but once the doors had closed and the “please turn off your ring tone” reminder had been issued, the Jewish couple from Chicago seated in front of me – he was a professor from Loyola – and I all picked up our stuff and moved forward about 6 rows, as almost all of the rows before us were empty seats (they tried to stop us but, hey, they were empty!) … and then during the break the couple had even gone down to see if there were better empty seats in the orchestra level but then decided that where we now were was actually much better, especially considering the fact that 1/2 the play took place elevated up on a balcony
As You Like It – by William Shakespeare (Festival Theater, August 11th, 8pm)
This was a ‘modern’ interpretation of the show with a high level of audience participation.
According to the advertising the show was supposed to be set in 1980’s Newfoundland (a part of Canada), a concept that sounded cute in theory but kind of died in execution. To be blunt about it, had I not read the inserts all I could have told you was that the actors seemed a bit confused as to which accents to use, most of them starting off the show as an accent I was unfamiliar with (it sounded garbled, and made it very hard to hear them) but by about 1/2 way through they were all back to their regular accents or something a bit more British sounding. Also, the 1980’s time period was mostly identifiable by the MTV inspired fashions and one character wearing a Walkman. But the whole gender bending aspect of the show, women being able to hide their gender just by wearing pants, kind of dies in a time period where women in men’s clothing is normative. So in my opinion, this switch of location and time period was a bit of a fail.
Other than that, the show was a lot of fun with a lot of physical humor and singing and dancing thrown in. I also enjoyed the interactive elements. As we walked in each of us was given a bag of items. All the people in orchestra seating were given an artificial pine branch, a laundry pin, a poem, and a green party hat; the people in the balcony were given stars instead of branches and some other items but I forget what as I wasn’t sitting there. Any time the scene was set in the forest we were supposed to hold up our branches, and before the scene where the romantic lead Orlando litters the forest with poems to his love we were instructed to pin our poem to our branch, and the actors as they came through plucked various ones off the branches… the fans (where were all blue) were supposed to represent the sea with the audience creating waves… and at one point a massive rabbit was passed around the audience as the characters went shooting for rabbits, etc. And then everyone on the lower level was instructed to put on our green party hats (I noticed only about 1/2 the people were willing to play along with this), and we were bathed in green light… I think we were supposed to be a meadow.
Very cute show; I was expecting it to be a play, but it was a musical and there were some cute songs in it. It is of course an adaptation of Lewis’s children’s book by the same name (while many think of the book as just a harmless piece of fantasy fiction, for those who don’t know, Lewis was lay theologian and story is in fact allegory of the death and the resurrection of Jesus, ‘who died for the sins of man’).
That said, whoever did the set design did a really amazing job; the curved screens altered images as needed, some animated, some not. For the animals they did every thing from hand held puppetry to a massive oversized Aslan the Lion (that looked to be deeply influenced by the oversized puppet-horses that practically breathed, that I saw used in the London production of Warhorse a few years ago), and the little podiums in the photo are constructed of what looks like over sized books — A design touch that I really liked.
… and there were a few more”adult jokes” thrown in — so for instance among the books Lucy spots in fawn’s home in Narnia was “how to train your unicorn” and “50 shades of fun” — followed by, “we don’t have these books in my world”
I was able to snap a few decent images of the show (once I noticed other folks in my row doing the same)
For the White Witch, better known these days as Elsa from Disney’s Frozen, and I think partly to avoid the confusion of one with the other, the same actress who had played the part was same one who had played the actress in A little Night Music (see above), who is most definitely black… as in ebony skinned. (Again, race blind casting, but in this case I think it might have helped distance the character from the Disney version, helping to reduce confusion in little kids.
One thing I found rather odd was while the local candy stores are selling Turkish delight, a confectionery that most American and Canadian kids have probably never tasted… and that is central to the story… it was NOT being sold at the food and drink counter during intermission… MARKETING FAIL!!!
My $32.77 ticket (Again, $29 US, achieved by utilizing a deal where you waited till a specific date, and then bought a ticket where you had no choice as to where you’d be seated) got me a seat in the 2nd row of the balcony, just off center. I overheard a conversation among the folks sitting right next to me. The show was completely sold out and they had been unable to get tickets just a few days before, but had been able to the day before and day of… cancellations I assume. They asked me how much I had paid, and when I told them one of them actually gasped, “we paid three times that amount of our tickets!”
Let’s heard it for planning in advance.
One very cute thing at this show was this couple, I passed them on the stairs before the show started:
“Did you guys just come from a wedding? ”
“Yes ” … light bulb goes on if my head
“Was at your wedding? ”
“yes ”
“You guys are my kind of theater nerds “
All My Sons – by Arthur Miller (Tom Patterson Theater, Tues Aug. 16th, 8pm) 1/2 price Tuesday/Thurs = $68.48
All my sons (1947) is an Arthur Miller play(author of such crowd ticklers as: Death of a Salesman (1949), The Crucible (1953) and A View from the Bridge (1955) — or Marilyn Monroe’s ex-husband for those of you who know nothing about the theater). It is set in the aftermath of World War II (and costuming and hairstyles placed the piece in the period as written). The central family has a son who died in war, Only the mother refuses to accept it. The surviving son now wants to marry his brother’s “girl” … That is the initial conflict. Over the course of the play we learn that the girl is actually the daughter of the fathers old business partner and that they were next door neighbors, so the kids had grown up together. Then we learn that both fathers had been initially found guilty of producing faulty airplane parts that resulted in the deaths of 21 pilots, they had both gone to jail but the father central to the show (we never see the other one) had on appeal been found not guilty, while the other father is still in jail.
Like I mentioned before, Stratford likes to play fast and loose with the racially blind casting.But a play is not a TV show, if you’re going to change the racial profile of the characters then you are changing backstory and motivation… And you have to do it without actually changing the script, so it has to be far more strategically done in order to work, especially if it’s set in a certain time and place.
In this show, however, it actually worked powerfully. The casting of the show the main in central family is cast with white actors while most of the neighbors are actors and color. This did not bother me, In fact I think it’s made the story line stronger… In that, firstly, the liberalism (for the day) of the relationship between the father and his black neighbors strengthened the inability of the son to believe his father’s guilt, and it brought in modern-day concerns about how the justice system is not in fact colorblind. The white business partner (who we ultimately learn is the guilty party) gets off Scott free, while his black business partner who had actually tried to do the right thing ends up spending years in jail. That brought a modern relevance to the play. That totally worked.
That said, Stratford has in one aspect of the show done the beyond all reason blind racial casting again. This time there’s a black family with a white son and a white family with a black son. Now I can perfectly understand let’s say replacing one of the white families in the show with a black family or a Asian family or a mixed racial family even, but if you were going to cast two black adults as the parents and you’ve got a black kid in the cast wouldn’t make sense to have the black parents have a black child? There is a point where political correctness becomes absurd.
That said, at least they cast a black actor to play the brother for the black actress– I was seriously worried till he came out that he’d be white, like in a little night music. That said its a very good production. In fact, in this play I think most of the actors of color acted the pants off of the white actors.
The woman sitting next to me was really bothered that there was an interracial relationship going on in the 1940s and nobody said boo about it. I don’t agree with her; as Arthur Miller wrote the script these families have a backstory that goes back years and the deceased brother was involved with his African American Neighbor — if there had been any race issues it stands to reason that these families would’ve already worked all of that shit out years ago, before the son who died had even gone off to war. So that I’m not saying anything about it now is utterly reasonable.
However, the fact that the African-American couple (that had moved into the house that used to be the home of the family whose father is now imprisoned) have a white son…. That’s just lazy casting. You’re casting a kid who basically runs across the stage II or three times and has no lines…. They could’ve picked up anybody to do that.
After I got home I bounced this off my friend Dayna, the local woman whose home I’m staying at, and she laughed and said, “Rebecca, this is the whitest town I’ve ever seen, they probably couldn’t find two black 8-year-olds to play the parts.” So she might be right, it may have just been a practicality issue.
Molière is considered by many to be the creator of modern French comedy. He was successful enough in his day that his troupe performed for the king, but his works didn’t really become popular with the public and the critics until the 19th century. Known for comedies that so scathing in their criticism of social norms (as to border on impossible to not realize that “respected members” of the highly class structured, and patrilineal french society were being made to look like fools), in his day he was often getting into trouble with censors (French media back then was HIGHLY censored — which basically meant the ONLY way you could publicly criticize the status quo was via humor, etc.).
The Hypochondriac, which premiered in 1673, or to use its original French title, “The Imaginary Invalid” is a three-act comédie/ballet by the French playwright Molière with dance sequences and musical interludes (which is NOT an innovation of the festival but rather is true to its original design). The story centers around a very rich, but miserly, merchant who produces all of the carpet pads for King Louise XIV’s carpets, and his hypochondria. Add to the mix a much younger unfaithful wife, who is a professional black-widow, who is constantly conniving to disinherit his daughter while refusing him sex… and is just waiting for him to die, who he none the less loves blindly; a daughter he uses as a tool, who none-the-less loves him dearly, but is also completely in love with one of his apprentices (who is also smitten with her); a maid who treats her boss with a completely disrespectful tough love… so more like a son than her boss; and the father’s obsession with marrying off his daughter to a doctor (no matter how much of an idiot) so he doesn’t have to pay doctors bills (and Molière’s complete disrespect for pre-Enlightenment doctors) and what you have is silly farce whose real objective was probably to function as a revolutionary document intended to upend many of the values of French cultural norms during the reign of Louise XIV (who reigned from 1643 until his death in 1715), otherwise known as the Sun King.
Now to put this in context, I have a post graduate certificate in history and one of the courses I took was on French history, specifically the years leading up to the french revolution (and got an A) … So I’m well versed in the culture of the time and how the Enlightenment reversed a lot of it… which means when I was watching the show my brain, rather than perceiving it based on current social norms (and laughing along with the audience, who were laughing a lot) was busy interpreting it based on what the author was trying to communicate to the audience of his day… and just how radical and sociopolitical a lot of what was happening in the scenes would have been to them (which is why it was fine comedy for the court to see these shows, but not “appropriate” fare for the common man).
When intermission rolled around I started to try to discuss what I was thinking with the British woman seated next to me. At that point, even though she admitted she couldn’t actually hear what the actors had been saying, and had been enjoying it more for the physical comedy than because of any of the ideas hidden in the text… so I got her to follow me (she required a cane and some assistance), and took her to where they passed out the hearing aid devices. Apparently, she and her Hubbie had been coming to the festival for years and didn’t know they were even available, let alone that they were free. She got one for both her and her husband (thanked me repeatedly) and they were both laughing the whole way through the second part and thanked me a lot after the show was done for pointing out the hearing aid option
One of the really CUTE touches was how they reminded the audience to turn off their phones… At all the theaters in Stratford what they do is play this recording of highly annoying ring tones right before the play starts, often followed by a voice saying “thank you.” Here they had some actors dressed in the doctor’s robes of the time, examining this odd thing they had found and trying to identify it… (a smart phone)… and they’re arguing about it in a sort of mini play when suddenly it starts to ring … freaking them out, and they start attacking it and claiming it is a devil item, or demon spawn, or what have you… and stomping on it trying to kill it… The audience all enjoyed this a lot and gave them a round of applause.
Macbeth – by William Shakespeare (Festival theater, Aug. 20th, 8pm — $32.77)
Very well done, very scary and spooky from first special effects of lightning and fog, and very well acted… and I had great seats (2nd row balcony just off center)
I am a bit embarrased to admit this but….
… I left at intermission. I packed up my stuff, returned my heard of hearing headphones and went home.
To be honest, I bought the ticket more as a “any self respecting adult going to see the Bard should of course want see his master work The Scottish Play … it’s expected. It’s adult.” Not, to be honest, because I “wanted” to see it… That and I had decided to see EVERY play, and that included the ones I had not enjoyed as a kid.
I blame this on a certain degree of intellectual pomposity and lack of self awareness on my part … As a kid, my parents took me to ALL the Shakespeare plays (Dad was British, and we went to London every year), and as part of my ‘education’ I got heavy douses of Shakespearean theater; and, at a certain point I began to realize that there were certain plays they just stopped taking me to and I knew it was because I didn’t like them … I just didn’t remember why I didn’t like them (assuming that at that age I would have even been able to understand why I didn’t like them). They did however supplement this with repeated viewings of the shows I did like, “As you like it,” “Midsummer’s night dream,” Etc… There’s even a family story of my being like maybe 7 and attending one of the comedies at a Shakespeare in the park performance in London, my laughing to it… and a stranger commenting to my dad, “she can’t possibly understand it, she’s too young.” So my dad had him quiz me about what was happening and to his amazement I TOTALLY understood it… I had by then been exposed to so much Shakespeare that I had no difficulty following the language.
So … when buying my tickets for the festival I figured, “hey, it’s ONLY $35,”… I’d give it a try. Basically, I’m 51 now and I think the last time I was the Bard’s Play I was maybe 8… So …
Anyway, all through the first half while intellectually appreciating the acting and the staging, and the special effects (of which there are many) I was uncomfortable and uncontrollably yawning through the whole thing… I disliked it for the same reason I don’t go to see horror films and fast forward through the star trek episodes that are all about violence… To be blunt I am quite simply NOT a fan of blood and gore and violence, no matter how well written
— A few days later, watching A Chorus Line, the woman next to me told me that in fact the reviews for Macbeth had NOT been good, and as such, that I shouldn’t based my feelings on this production… we’ll see
I didn’t like Aeneid either, but mostly because they veered away from the original story of the founding of Rome, and made it into a really pompous and self indulgent lecture to the audience on the current refugee crisis. I had known when I bought the tickets (based on the description) that they were going to modernize it and play on it’s parallels to refugee crisis… I just had no comprehension of how heavyhandedly they were going to be about doing it. At half time, while struggling with the decision of should I stick it out or leave (as I had the night before with Macbeth) I walked around looking at the audiences’ dour faces and overheard bits of conversations by multiple folks, each trying to convince their friend or partner that, yes, they really were in fact enjoying it (and sounding like they were really working hard at also convincing themselves). Personally, I think it fell more in the category of they didn’t want to admit they didn’t like it — more than a bit of the Emperor’s New Cloths (only smart and wise people can in fact appreciate how beautiful and fine his clothes were).
At the very end of intermission, and walking around the crowd and hearing the same sorts of comments from multiple directions — I decided I wasn’t enough of a masochist to slog it out till the end, went home and loaded the romantic comedy NottingHill into my Netflix in order to clear my brain of my annoyance before going to sleep. That said, the play was sort of a cross between 1930’s modern theater (the type Hollywood movies love making fun of because of how self indulgent it was – often is more about making actors feel important than about entertaining customers) and traditional Greek theater. I did notice that 90% of the lines were delivered by men, which I found ironic considering how hard they were pushing liberal politics. When I got home, I had decided to pull up reviews of the show (I had purchased my tickets WAY before the season had even started, so I couldn’t check reviews then) and found this inconsistency noted by a few of the reviewers who didn’t like the show either.
**As a side note, one of the things I’ve noticed during my stay north of the US border is that Netflix while your Netflix account works across borders, the options of what is available changes; and in Canada there are fewer TV series available, but a lot more/better movies on streaming, including stuff that in the US you’d actually have to get a DVD shipped to you in order to see).
No one familiar with Ibsen attends one of his plays expecting to do any laughing. Ibsen, sort of by definition is about dysfunctional people behaving dysfunction-ally, hence his designation as “the father of realism” in that he put skeletons onto the stage of the sort of stuff most families kept stuffed firmly in the closet — a tendency that in 1896 (when this play was written) was pretty radical stuff. The fact is without Ibsen you might never have had plays like Arthur Miller’s “All My Sons” which I had seen on the same stage back on August 16th — which in a way runs thematic parallels to this show (both have fathers who had been thrown in jail for committing fraud that destroyed the lives of others, both involve adult children breaking free from parents who want to live through them, etc.)
Also, this is pretty much by any standard one of Ibsen’s lessor plays (most folks probably haven’t ever heard of it, unlike A Doll’s House, Hedda Gabler, or Peer Gynt) and as such you just can’t expect it to be a great play, even if it was by a great playwright…. and this wasn’t. But, that said, it was OK. It dragged a bit in places, and they managed to make the audience laugh in a few others, but to be honest it was bit like going to the dentist to get your teeth cleaned, you go because you know it’s good for you rather than because you expect to enjoy it.
The only racially blind casting in this show was the son’s girlfriend was black — in turn of the century Norway (again, a place and time where just having dark hair would make you stand out).
Good thing I went to the bathroom before the show. Apparently, there will be no intermission; that, and they warned us that if we left for any reason we would not be allowed back in.
So here is an admission, I forget who introduced me to a chorus line in high school (1980?), but my girlfriends and I, we all, as a group, memorized ALL the songs and used to walk around singing them. However this is the first time I’ve actually seen the show in its entirety on the stage. I remember there was a movie version (1985) and I saw that, but I’ve never seen it on the stage before this.
That said, I was mouthing along to every song. And felt that this is a great production (although I would have recast about three of the characters). The girl who performed “Tits and Ass” one of my favorite songs stole the show… the only weak point was the girl who played Cassie couldn’t dance.
Both me and the woman sitting next to me bonded over this; we agreed that Cassie had all the grace of a bouncing elephant. — When I got home my friend Dayna (who had already seen the production although she wants to see it again) said it was because they had updated the whole show, but NOT that one dance… so the dance was really outdated, but personally I also think it was also that the girl playing the character lacked grace
Breath of Kings — (part 2 redemption) – adapted by Graham Abbey, based on the Henriad plays by William Shakespeare (Aug., 26th, Tom Patterson Theater, 8pm)
This play is a mashup if you will of Shakespeare’s Henry IV part 2 and Henry V (think Battle of Agincourt). You’re supposed to see the part 1 ‘Rebellion’ play before you see the part 2 ‘Redemption’ one, but I had set a low priority on seeing this one, and bought the tickets last (at the $35 sale), and had been unable to fit it into my schedule in the correct order — I HAVE to leave here on the 31st of August because I have two friends getting married on the 4th in Chicago, and needed to leave myself spare time (in case) for the drive there.
2 min before show — place is 1/2 empty
Intermission — I slept through most of the first 1/2, just couldn’t keep my eyes open.
Freezing ! I think the Aircon was set to accommodate twice as many people it’s freezing in here — I did not sleep through the second half, battle of Agincourt
During the show last night there was a scene where actors walk through the stands and sit on the lapse of audience members in the far right corner (the part elevated above the doorway); I now realize, looking at the photos, that only four of the five seats had audience members seated in them when the show started, but were full when the actors showed up there; so the staff must’ve moved people into the empty ones right after intermission so that the gag would work.
Dayna, the friend whose home I stayed at, and I discovered we both had tickets to the same show tonight so we decided to do dinner together. Granted we are almost on opposite sides of the theater. That said, according to Dayna our next door neighbor is playing the title character, and is a very nice woman. Apparently that home is rented out by the festival as housing for visiting artists, so that Dayna has met quite a few of the actors that way.
That said, I think bunny was probably the best play I’ve seen so far from all of the plays at Stratford. The title character, Bunny, was an incredibly relatable character, both Dayna and I were like, “we know this woman we would be friends with this woman.” The character seems to be ever so slightly autistic, but cursed with the looks of a model. Women don’t like her and she doesn’t understand why, men drool over her. She is the daughter of two academics, and ultimately becomes a professor of romantic period literature. The story begins with a confused scene that in retrospect is her running an event over in her mind trying to come to grips with it, and then jumps to her childhood, running through the major events of her life (often in soliloquy) so that we can get to know her and understand her when the events happen again at the end of the play.
It was very funny, very well acted, and poignant.
Breath of Kings — (part 1 rebellion) – adapted by Graham Abbey, based on the Henriad plays by William Shakespeare
Yes, I know, I should have seen part 1 before viewing part 2, but I just couldn’t work it out in my schedule. As thing evolved I didn’t actually get to see this one either. Essentially the night started with an illness, and ended with one… mine
Before the show started one of the staff members apparently collapsed, and had to be taken away. What was sort of ‘interesting’ was that most of the people waiting outside were more concerned about getting into the theater, than the guy who collapsed. When they reopened the doors to bring his body out they were more concerned with pushing their way in than allowing the emergency staff to bring him out… it was not a pretty picture.
Finally they let us in, but not long after it started my stomach started to cramp, and I was forced to disturb my neighbors, get up and get out as quickly as possible. Ah the joys of irritable bowl syndrome… spent the next 20 minutes or so in the bathroom, and then staggered home. The staff was all worried about me since I was in there for so long. But this has become one of the downsides of my life, … Growing older, it’s not for wimps.
One of the things you need to remember when in this part of the country is that you are not in the deep south, but rather in Appalachia. People tend to distinguish between “The North” and “The South” by the historical civil war Union vs Confederate boundaries, and the “Western states” being those that joined the USA after the war — and usually involve cowboys and Indians, but from a cultural standpoint that would be a mistake. I tend to agree with Colin Woodard who instead breaks the US up into 11 cultural regions, and Dalton GA by that reckoning falls into the Appalachia. As a result, one of the great things about this area is the active Appalachian music scene. I ran into live music of this sort on numerous occasions while staying in the area, for instance, there was live music every Thursday night at the whole foods in Chattanooga.
On this occasion it was about 3pm, and my old friend from art school and I … whom I am currently staying with, she also has a travel blog (hers can best be described as “sophisticated and restful vacationing” while mine is more about ‘cheap & earthy travel’), were all dressed up tonight and found we had no where to go. We had been planning to go to this local street event here in Dalton that my friend had been talking about for days. Unfortunately, she had assumed it was going to go till 5pm, when to our chagrin we discovered it had already ended at about 2pm. But, since she’s a woman who will never be daunted, she did some research and found that a band was playing downtown at a moonshine distillery/bar.
Now the thing you need to realize is Dalton’s downtown is that it is about 5 minutes wide, and 10 minutes long … and that’s walking. And yet, you can still, well … to be fair, on a Saturday night, still find cultural things to do within in.
You can’t really tell from my recording, the reverb off the brick walls in the space wasn’t conducive to it, but the band, called “Unbridled Strings“ is very good, with a high level of musicianship.
One of the amusing things that happened that night was the tempreture was beginning to drop and my friend, who was wearing a kind of light and breezy blouse said just as the band had stopped to take a break: “I’m getting a little cold”
Me: “You know you could pop home and get a jacket and be back before the break is over”
Essentially, she is so used to living here that she forgot just how small the place is
(when I first met her we were in art school in London, and she was living in LA).
Everything was tasty, but I think it was a bit overpriced (Skate wing is hard to find more because there is little market demand for it, but it’s actually relatively cheap to purchase — it’s by-catch, stuff that gets caught in the net when they are fishing for other things) … I just wished there had been more vedge served with it (all there was was a bit of shaved cucumber underneath it to prop it up above the broth.
Rebecca Radnor's Personal Blog: Consider yourselves warned! 