Debriefing

Phew.

Thegns and Thralls is over. It went pretty well, or at least no one's yet tackled me with a list of complaints. We had about 160 people total, and a sold-out feast. My event staff was great, and I didn't have to kill anyone. Martel thinks I successfully herded the cats. So I guess I did OK.

(Martel did a great job running the A&S activities, by the way -- kept everything humming along and made it look easy while she did it. Thanks, darlin').

The weather wasn't ideal; it never did clear up after the 6 a.m. thunderstorm, but at least it didn't rain any more, and it wasn't cold. Several people said that if the sun had come out, it might have been too warm, and they might have been right about that.

In a weird twist, we were never more than a few minutes off the published time for any given activity, until the feast. This was not the fault of the cooks; they rocked. The problem was we couldn't get Their Excellencies to put their excellent derri�res into their seats until about 25 minutes after the feast was supposed to start.

In an ever weirder twist, the Viking is now the baronial champion. Neither of us are quite sure how that happened.

Besides than the feast glitch (would you like to take your seats, Your Excellencies?), the only other glitch was that someone came in, didn't check with me, and set up a tent on the field right where an archery target was supposed to go, so the last shoot in the archery tourney couldn't be done. On the other hand, there were something like six or seven shoots as it was, so losing one was not a tragedy.

Did I mention that my cooks rocked? Great feast, and all of it documented. I hope maybe it will help change some minds about period food being unpalatable. Given how few leftovers we had, I think I can say that the feast was very palatable. It was better than palatable. Because my cooks rocked.

People were excellent about clean-up, so I was able to get off site in time to get home, take a hot shower and a nap, and dress up to answer the door for the trick-or-treaters. I did finish my costume before the event, so all I had to do was put it on and fill the treat basket.

I made the costume from some spiffy-keen cobweb print fabric I found -- it looks like a fabric with a small check in yellow, orange, green and purple was treated with some kind of resist-dye thing to create multicoloured webs on a black ground -- very fun. It's a fairly basic faerie dress, but I did poufy Italian Renaissance style sleeves from an old McCall's costume pattern (think it was 2806), and I had the wings. Big wings, by the way. I had a wingspan of something like 3 1/2 feet. I had to go up and down the stairs sideways.

There is also about a 6-inch step up into our house from the front walk. So, when I opened the door to a very small girl in a sparkly pink dress with little white wings and a wand with a star at the top, I must have looked huge to her. She stopped dead a couple of feet from the door and her eyes opened wide. She didn't bolt, though. I knelt down in the doorway and smiled reassuringly, so she edged a little closer and held out her pumpkin basket. I gave her two pieces of candy for being so brave.

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