cellio | interviewed by purple

1) What do you miss most from your life as a non-Jew (holidays, behaviour, food - anything)?

Bacon, and eel as implemented in sushi. (Not at the same time.) No, really!

I kind of miss some of the choral music I used to sing, but my discomfort with singing to Jesus long predates my conversion to Judaism, so that's been a gradual transition anyway. I've written about music a bit before.

On one hand I miss the flexibility of being able to do errands, watch TV, go out to restaurants, etc on both days of the weekend, but on the other I don't because I like having one day a week that is set aside to be special. Absent a religious need, though, I'd never have done that on my own. And I recognize that the cost of that is the flexibility and convenience that I said I kind of miss, so in the end I guess I don't.

2) How did you become involved in the SCA? What is a typical event like?

I joined in college. I got sucked in by the fighting ("ooh! real armor and real-enough weapons and it's not choreographed!"); the rest came a little later. A couple years after I started fighting I wandered into a dance practice out of curiosity and stayed; a couple years after that our group formed a choir and I started playing instrumental music. Somewhere in there I worked up the nerve to sing solo in front of other people.

A typical event in this area is a day-long gathering on a Saturday. At an event (as opposed to a meeting), everyone wears medieval or renaissance clothing; some people do lots of research and get all the little details right and some wear generic tunics, and you get everything in between. The SCA commonly covers the fall of Rome through 1600, so there's quite a bit of room for variation, but you'll see a lot of Vikings, Italian Ren, and high middle ages.

There is often a heavy-weapons tourney and/or a fencing tourney. Heavy-weapons fighting is with weapons made out of rattan; typical forms are sword and shield, greatsword, and polearm. Some people put a lot of effort into making their armor and weapons look medieval or renaissance; some don't. There are marshalls to keep everything safe.

Some tournaments focus on the pageantry, and you may see people entering the field with banners, surcoats bearing their armory, and heralds proclaiming their goodness to all assembled. Other times people show up, put on their armor, and start fighting. It depends on what the people running any particular tournament want to emphasize. In the last few years people have begun recreating real period tournaments, which involve different weapons forms, different methods of determining a winner (e.g. it might be to the first good shot rather than to a killing blow), and sometimes teams. That's pretty neat to watch.

Another big component of events is dancing, which usually occurs in the evening after the feast. We don't have any medieval dance instructions, but there's a lot of material starting in the middle of the 15th century. Most dances are figure dances of some sort, for couples or sets or lines of arbitrary length. Dances are often taught at events (most are not difficult), and dance enthusiasts and people who just want to be social attend dance practices outside of events as well. In this area dancing is almost always to live music; areas not as blessed with musicians use boom-boxes. (Yes, there actually is quite a bit of suitable recorded music.)

I mentioned a feast. Almost every event (around here) has a large dinner, usually multi-course, consisting of foods that would have been eaten in the middle ages and renaissance. As with all things, some people do more in-depth research than others. Off the top of my head, you might encounter most of the following at a feast: roasted chicken; roasted meat (beef or pork) with sauces on the side (usually but not always savory); rice; noodles (perhaps with cheese); cooked carrots or turnips or parsnips; peas; green salad; meat or spinach or mushroom pies; desserts of various sorts. Period cooking uses some different spices; for example, cinnamon is not just for desserts but shows up in meat dishes. Foods you will typically not find at a feast (because they were unknown as food in Europe at the time) are potatoes, tomatoes, most peppers, most squashes, and turkey. (These lists are representative, not complete.)

The feast is usually served at long tables, so you'll sit down with the people you came with and next to people you might or might not know. Feasts are a good time to get to know people. This is not a "restaurant" mentality where you keep to your own; feasts are for schmoozing with everyone around you. People get up and wander around to broaden their schmoozing. Usually people bring candles for the tables and the hall lights are turned off.

Sometimes there are performances, usually musical. Sometimes they're during the feast and sometimes they're at other times. In addition to music (both vocal and instrumental) you'll see storytelling, sometimes juggling, and sometimes theatre (this last is usually not held during dinner). Less commonly you may see a dance performance.

The SCA has nobility -- kings and queens and lesser nobles -- and sometimes they hold court. The primary activity at court is giving out awards to deserving members of the populace. These usually come as surprises; they aren't merit badges where everyone has a check-list of criteria, but rather are general recognitions of merit. People write to the royalty to recommend people and sometimes the royalty seek advice (e.g. from people who already have that award). Awards can be kind of quirky sometimes.

There are lots of other activities that can happen at events -- classes, craft sessions, archery, sometimes equestrian activities, and a bunch more. I'm not trying to give a complete list; what I've described here are the most common factors where I live.

Some events are camping events, either with cabins or where you bring your own tent, pavillion, or other structure. Pennsic is the biggest event we have; it lasts for almost two weeks.

One important thing about SCA events -- and the SCA in general, really -- is that it's "by us, for us". The major activities of events are run by SCA people, not (for example) hired caterers. This is not a ren fair put on for the benefit of spectators; it's participatory. If you go to an event expecting to sit back and be entertained, you'll probably not have fun.

3) You write a lot about music... what instuments do you play, and why did you choose them? What style of music do you play?

I play hammer dulcimer reasonably well, bodhran (Irish drum) competently, bowed psaltery as a beginner, and appalachian dulcimer very rustily. I can generally do something reasonable with arbitrary percussion. I'm hopeless (so far) with woodwinds. I had several years of piano lessons when I was a child and (I gather) was decent at one point, but that knowledge all leaked out of my ears in high school or something.

Aside from piano, the first of these that I played was the appalachian dulcimer. A housemate played one and it looked like a fairly easy, portable instrument. I bought a cheap one to learn on and later won a good one in a raffle. I was never anywhere near as good as that housemate, but I had fun with it.

I was listening to a lot of folk music then and loved the sound of the hammer dulcimer, but I was deterred by the price tag. Then one day at an arts festival I was able to pick one up cheap, so I did and set out to learn how to play it. That particular instrument had a lot of "issues", but it was good enough to learn on while not scaring me off. A few years later I bought my current one.

The other instruments showed up along the way, usually from a combination of "that's a nifty instrument that I might actually be able to play" and "the price is right for pure experimentation". There have been some failures along the way -- recorder, wooden flute, harp -- but I don't regret any of them.

I play medieval and renaissance music and folk music.

4) What is the most important "life lesson" that you've learned so far?

People are generally not stupid or evil.

Allow me to expand on that. Most people are, from their own points of view, behaving reasonably most of the time. Thus, when you see someone who is behaving unreasonably in your opinion, it's worth spending some cycles to figure out why that might be. The person might lack some vital information that you can supply, or he might know something you don't. He might, of course, have different standards of "reasonable", and sometimes a useful dialogue can result if you examine that.

I'm trying to learn to look for the favorable explanation when I see what I think of as bad behavior. Sometimes I'm right and sometimes I'm wrong, but at least I tried to give the person the benefit of the doubt. And it would suck if I wrote someone off as a jerk when there actually was a reason for his behavior.

Of course, some people are jerks -- or, more charitably, in fundamental disagreement with me. We can't all get along with everyone. But I think it's valuable to try in any given case, because hating people is hard work and makes life less pleasant.

5) Seriously. Is Pittsburgh not one of the coolest cities ever? :)

Well I think so. :-)

Ok, I don't know about "cool", but it's a good city in a lot of ways. It's large enough to have culture but small enough to not have horrendous commutes, housing prices, and crime rates. It's got a good mix of stuff -- universities and all they imply, theatre, live music, bars, varied restaurants, sports, parks, museums, and lots more. It's got high-tech jobs. Prices are reasonable for the most part (modulo the mayor who drove us into bankruptcy, meaning higher taxes for all now). There are lots of decent neighborhoods, and most of the housing is houses or small apartment buildings, not mega-apartment-buildings.

So all in all, the place has character and is a pleasant place to live.

Monica

interviewed by purple_stardust

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