The "Before Times" and the "New Normal"

Despite my last post, I have not spent the past few months in sackcloth and ashes. Yes, we are still in the novel coronavirus pandemic. No, we will not have any in-person SCA events until the end of January 2021 at the earliest. However, I am plugging along.

Since I've been self-employed at home for the past decade, I am quite used to the concept of spending many hours alone at my desk. However, I "get out" quite a bit, thanks to Zoom (and the occasional Google Hangout or Facebook Live). Pretty much all my social outlets -- not just the SCA, but also my church, my professional organizations, and my Toastmasters club -- have moved online. I can "go out" in the evening and not worry about driving in the rain or catching the Metro train home.

If Virtual Atlantia had seams, it would be exploding at them. Check out the Activity Calendar for starters. Is that calendar packed or what? Not all the activities shown there are from Atlantia -- a few are from other Kingdoms. And some baronies don't always put their own activities in the Kingdom's calendar, so there are even more online goings-on than Virtual Atlantia would have you know.

Plus, so many online classes! Early in the pandemic I took several classes at an online university in the Kingdom of Atenveldt, mundanely Arizona. In our Kingdom we had two virtual University of Atlantia sessions, one in June and one in September. At the former, I taught a "Medieval Lithuania" class via Zoom -- and I had attendees from six Kingdoms! Two from as far away as Lochac (Australia)! In September I didn't teach anything, but I learned that my June effort had earned me a "Masters of SCA Studies" degree from the University. (Totally unaccredited from a mundane standpoint, but still a nice feather in my cap for all the work I've put in since 2004.)

Thanks to Zoom, I also had the chance to attend some classes at the Known World Heraldic and Scribal Symposium (KWHSS). This was only the second KWHSS I've been able to attend -- the first was the one that took place in Atlantia's Barony of Sacred Stone in 2011. For me, KWHSS involves expensive travel and hotel arrangements. This year the symposium would have been in Lochac, specifically the Barony of Stormhold, and there was no way I could have afforded that kind of trip. But thanks to the Web, I could even hear the voice of a Stormhold friend, Mistress ffride, with whom I've been corresponding for years.

Their Majesties have been recording nearly weekly messages to the Atlantian populace, and they have also started holding virtual courts to hand out actual awards. This past weekend, They traveled all the way up here to Storvik. Our barony rented a tiny live-theater space in downtown Silver Spring, and the only people permitted to attend Their Majesties and Their Excellencies in person were the herald (Duke Ragnarr) and a couple of tech-crew members. Two poignant moments took place. One was the tribute that Baron Celric and Baroness Ilania paid to the late Baron Rorik, in the presence of Rorik's faithful companion, Fred the goose.

In the other poignant moment, Their Majesties called Duke Ragnarr in front of them to present him with his long-delayed Award of Arms (AoA) scroll from way back when, before he was a Knight or a King or a Duke. Their Majesties pointed out that Ragnarr was always more concerned about other people getting their AoA scrolls than getting his own. What made this moment especially poignant was that the Royals who awarded him his Arms in 1993, Kane and Muirgen, were killed in a car accident a few years later.

These virtual courts are the only ones we're likely to see for a while still. Official SCA events in North America are banned through the end of January 2021, as the pandemic continues to rage. We didn't have Pennsic this year. Atlantia is not having War of the Wings this week.

This is the "New Normal," as opposed to the "Before Times" (I am not the only person using this terminology).

Some people don't like participating in online SCA classes and courts. I get that. I have a Toastmasters friend who spends so much time in videoconferences while working from home that she just cannot bear to sit through another 90 minutes of a club meeting in the evening. That's understandable.

I'm just glad that we Atlantians have some sort of online presence for those people who say, "Hey, I was thinking of getting involved in the SCA once the pandemic is over," or who are curious, or who are super-interested in online learning. We may even try some court video recording after the pandemic, so that people who have a hard time joining us in person because of health issues can still see what's going on. It may seem odd at first, but no more so than internet communications seemed to SCAdians of 20 or 25 years ago.

Losses

Even though I haven't been to an SCA event in person since February, I've been keeping quite busy and social within the Society. However, my reports on that will have to wait, because of the heavy losses we have incurred.

First, Baron Rorik Fredericsson, eighth Baron of Storvik. During these last few years, he had been looking increasingly tired, and he suffered from various health problems. At one point, he fell at home and broke eight ribs all at once. Ow. That set him back for a while. He'd also had some problems with slow-healing leg wounds and a tiny spot of a tumor on his liver. When I saw him at the Bright Hills birthday event in February, I asked him how he was doing, and he replied, "Surviving." In one of his last Facebook posts, he said he actually tested *negative* for the novel coronavirus. He needed the test before some surgical procedure (something to do with his stomach).

He went into the hospital for surgery on April 27, and something went south, and he died that day. I believe he was 73 years old.

His Excellency was well known throughout our barony and kingdom and fought in SCA battles for many years. Decades, even. I think he finally gave it up around age 60 when he got his bell rung pretty hard on the Pennsic battlefield. He also enjoyed the gentler art of playing cribbage, an ancient card game. He was also a huge science fiction fan. the first time I ever saw him was at the Millennium Philcon Worldcon in 2001, more than two years before I joined the SCA. He was wearing a Babylon 5 character's costume and was carrying his gray goose puppet, Fred, the one with the studded leather collar. When I did eventually join the SCA, I recognized him and thought, "Oh, that's the guy with the goose from the Millennium Philcon."

Baron Rorik was also that fellow who looked so much like George R.R. Martin that some Game of Thrones fans actually asked him (Rorik) for his autograph. (But Rorik was taller than George.)

Baron Rorik was very happily married to Mistress Janina for 40-plus years and they had a grown daughter and son (who adored him) and many "friends who are like family." My heart has been grieving with them. I often thought that if I could have told my father (who died in 1982) about the SCA, I would have introduced him to Baron Rorik, who could have explained all the different pieces of armor to my Dad (who was a professional welder) and then sat down and played a good game of cribbage together.

Here is a photo of Baron Rorik from the 2015 Storvik Novice Tourney:

It's not the best photo of him, but it was the first one of him I found among my photos when I heard he had died.

Lest you think that my SCA circles had escaped covid-19 ... in late April the family of Master Liam St. Liam of the East Kingdom said that he was in the ICU with the pandemic disease. I kept checking his Facebook page for updates on his progress, but there weren't any.

Who was Master Liam to me? By one measure, he was the first SCAdian I ever met, although neither he nor I had joined the Society way back then. When he and I were both juniors at our respective high schools -- me in central Massachusetts and him in southern Rhode Island -- our schools' bands and choruses did two "exchange concerts," one in our town in April and the other in their town in May. I honestly don't remember as much about the concerts as I probably should, because my grandmother was ill in April and passed away just before the May weekend (and my mother made me go along on the weekend trip, because "Grammy would have wanted it," but I wasn't in a good mood for it).

Many years later, when LiveJournal was still going strong in the United States and I took an interest in the SCA, I started looking up the journals of people who were posting in the SCA-related communities, Liam posted that he'd graduated from a certain high school in a certain year. I inquired ... and, yes, he'd been part of the same band-chorus exchange! So we "friended" each other in cyberspace, first on LiveJournal and later on Facebook. He was a high school history teacher who went back to his first love, journalism, in upstate New York. He married his second wife, who served a reign as queen of the East, and his grown daughters became Peers, one a Laurel and the other a Pelican.

I met Master Liam in person (in the SCA, not high school) only a couple of times at Pennsic, because he was so busy teaching and writing for the Pennsic Independent and doing a lot of other things. But he always remembered exactly who I was and how we'd gotten to know each other.

A couple of years ago, Master Liam suffered a major stroke and had to give up working as a newspaper reporter. He moved to a rehab facility in Massachusetts and still kept on posting on Facebook as well as he could under his own power. Usually his posts were short exhortations to be well and do good. He didn't go back to Pennsic, but he did get a chance to attend the East Kingdom 50th Anniversary celebration in 2018, albeit in a wheelchair.

So he wasn't posting for a while, and then we waited for news ... and then on May 13, his daughters wrote that, while listening to the Dropkick Murphys and his other favorite Celtic punk bands, he passed away. He was 61.

Tributes poured out from all corners of the electronic Known World. One of his daughters wrote an SCA-specific obituary (I was a bit surprised to learn that his registered name was actually NOT Liam St. Liam), and one of his former newspaper colleagues wrote a very nice tribute to him. Other comments pointed out his tireless efforts to support causes ranging from the Special Olympics to high school gay-straight alliances. Someone praised him for his "radical inclusivity."

We in the SCA have had other losses. The first Triton Principal Herald whom I worked under, Baron Eogan mac Alpein, passed away in late May. I hadn't seen him for quite some time, but I think he was in his mid-60s. Then a woman who was on the winning team at last year's Revenge of the  Stitch died of complications from an aneurysm. I didn't really know her, but she was apprenticed to one of our Atlantian Duchesses, and she was young enough to have three school-age children.

The only good way I can end this post is to note that on Friday, May 29, the Dropkick Murphys played a live concert (without an audience) at Fenway Park. The band members even socially distanced themselves around the diamond as they played their greatest hits. I drank a beer, logged into a Facebook "watch party" hosted by Master Liam's daughters, and agreed with everyone that it was the best "virtual wake" we could have had during the pandemic.

Virtual Atlantia

There's a reason why I haven't been to an SCA event since February 8, when I attended Bright Hills Baronial Birthday. One of the members of my household was awarded the Pearl, which is the Grant of Arms-level award for arts and sciences in Atlantia, so I wanted to be there (plus, our outgoing submissions herald received the Golden Dolphin award -- with the late Pedro's medallion).

My attitude toward the SCA hasn't changed. But the world has, with this COVID-19 pandemic we're currently experiencing.

It was if society packed up their toys and went home around mid-March. SCA events left and right were canceled. One minute the staff of Gulf Wars XXIX in the Kingdom of Gleann Abhann (southern Mississippi) said that the event was still on, and people should use hand sanitizer; the next minute it was canceled, even though people were starting to arrive on site and many more people were en route.

Overnight, it seemed, most of the rest of the March events on Atlantia's schedule were postponed or canceled, followed by virtually all of the April events.

Except Coronation. But how could Coronation go on if gatherings of more than 10 people were strictly prohibited? The outgoing King is a lawyer and, as an officer of the court (as, I think, all members of the bar are), he can't be found disobeying the law.

So yesterday we had a Virtual Coronation, live-streamed on YouTube from the back yard of the incoming King and Queen:



The woman who was elevated to Laurel was supposed to have been elevated at Gulf Wars (but see above). The outgoing Majesties wanted to make sure she received her due recognition before she and her husband moved out of Kingdom for mundane reasons and she had to make a whole new set of acquaintances. There were also a few other pieces of business that were supposed to have been transacted during March.

As you can see, it was a nice enough day in North Carolina that the "event" could be held outside. A woman in Storvik, Dame Emma West, made the beautiful silk banners hanging on either side of the tent.

So, now the next big Kingdom events are supposed to be Spring Crown Tourney and Ruby Joust, both in May. However, both are scheduled to take place in Virginia, where the stay-at-home order does not expire until June 10. The new King and Queen did not announce anything about these events, particularly Crown, yesterday. Probably they are working behind the scenes, and communicating with the SCA Board of Directors, to figure out how to handle the situation.

I haven't surveyed all of the SCA kingdoms -- there are 19 of them besides Atlantia -- but I do know that the East Kingdom has postponed both Coronation and Crown and combined them with another big East Kingdom event on Memorial Day weekend. That won't quite work for us, because our Memorial Day weekend event, Ruby Joust, is still technically prohibited in Virginia. I don't think the Kingdom of Aethelmearc has yet postponed its Spring Crown Tourney, which is supposed to be held the same day as ours (first Saturday in May). I am less familiar with other kingdoms.

So far, Pennsic 49 is still a go. The Mayor of Pennsic 49 decided to nip rumors in the bud by putting out an emphatic statement that Pennsic 49 will be held unless HE says it is canceled (link goes to a PDF). I suspect that the Pennsic executive staff uses the annual Aethelmearc War Practice event (held the weekend before Memorial Day weekend) as its big planning meeting, because the Mayor said the meeting would be held virtually if War Practice has been canceled in person. (Update even as I continue to write this: Today the Sylvan Kingdom announced that Aethelmearc War Practice has been canceled.)

I don't want to start any rumors, and I do NOT speak for the Pennsic staff, but I can't help thinking that the go/no-go decision needs to be made no later than late May. At least the decision *by* the Pennsic staff (obviously, if the state government shuts down fairs and festivals, it's not the choice of the Pennsic staff). The deadline for paid, online pre-registration for Pennsic 49 falls on June 16, and that is also the deadline for refunds. Yet some other SCA branches have offered refunds after the cancellation of their events (Pennsic is a different beast altogether, though, because of its sheer size -- it's kind of a partnership between the SCA and Cooper's Lake Campground). I don't think the Coopers want to give back huge amounts of refunds, and I really don't think people will be happy if they can't get refunds from a canceled Pennsic. So ... we shall see.

Anyhow. Back to my own Kingdom of Atlantia.

Just since this crisis began, Duchess Adelhait and the Kingdom Web Minister have put together a page called Virtual Atlantia, a central location where online gatherings and classes can be posted. People can even get University of Atlantia credit for teaching or attending classes!

One of the first online Kingdom-wide happenings was a Saturday afternoon in which the participants in a Zoom meeting started to read aloud The Decameron by Boccaccio. Reading aloud a book of stories "told" by people stuck on an island during a huge plague -- what a medieval thing to do! There were about 15 or 16 of us, including a few bardic Laurels, and we managed to get through the introduction and all ten of the stories from Day One in about three hours. It was enjoyable, but I have no idea when we will take up Day Two.

The SCA on a Budget -- The Handout!

Finally, here is the link to the handout from my recent University of Atlantia class titled "The SCA on a Budget":

https://ladypatriciaoftrakai.blogspot.com/p/the-sca.html

I got frustrated with trying to post the PDF of the handout, so I just did a cut-and-paste into Blogger and made a page. Then I had trouble displaying the handout page on my main blog page, so that's why I'm creating this post.

Grrrr.... Is it just me or is Blogger really that much clunkier than Wordpress.com, which I use for my non-SCA blog?

I may try a new layout/design for this blog in the near future. This template is the closest thing to "something Lithuanian" that I could find originally, but it seems quite dated. If you return to this site after an absence and it looks radically different, please don't freak out.

Another year in the SCA

Happy New Year! Yes, I know that the New Year's holiday was a month ago already. At least we can all agree on that. (Whether the new decade starts at the beginning of 2020 or the end of 2020 is still fodder for debate.)

I know I haven't posted here in a while, so let me catch up.

In 2019 I attended more than twice as many SCA events as I did in 2018. Nice side benefit of having a more reliable vehicle (even though it's still pretty old)! And some of the events came my way -- like Fall Coronation, hosted by my Barony of Storvik.

The incoming Royals, Cuan and Signy, let it be known that They wished Their coronation and Their reign to have a late-period German theme. Many, though certainly not all, attendees decided to wear their best German garb -- think Landsknecht, Cranach gowns, and the like. I personally did not have a German dress, but based on the little I know about late-period Lithuanian and Polish women, I figured that making a German dress would be a good place to start learning how to sew late-period clothing.

So, with the help of a few friends, I drew up a bodice pattern and, based on various images I collected on Pinterest, I managed to put together what I call the "base" of a German Renaissance dress. It doesn't have sleeves yet -- I'm going to make some detachable sleeves, because I hate boiling under multiple layers in the summertime. It doesn't have guards (the contrasting horizontal stripes around the bottom of the skirt). It doesn't have a proper hat yet. But it looked plausibly German enough to wear to Coronation.

I really, really want to do a "dress diary" type of entry with photos and such, but in the meantime, here is a link to a photo of me at the event: https://www.flickr.com/photos/34356022@N03/48855928906/in/album-72157710604512416/. (I had to "kilt up" the skirt because it stretched while hanging overnight and it was suddenly too long. That's what happens when you hem garb the night before the event!)

University of Atlantia

This past weekend my Kingdom held a session of the University of Atlantia, where I taught a class called "The SCA on a Budget." I had some enthusiastic students who made suggestions of their own. Overall, a good experience.

I know I said I'd have a copy of the handout on my blog … I'm still trying to figure out the best way to get it up here, though. My professional Wordpress-based blog handles PDF uploads just fine, but I can't figure out how to do a similar upload here in Blogger. *grumble*

I'll have it up here as soon as I can, honest.