Welcome to the Preenactment...

Preenactment: n. the weekend before a reenactment, usually filled with various and sundry reenacting-oriented projects, only 50% of which will actually be finished before zero-hour.

This weekend consisted of finishing off the button-holes and hem for my new workdress.  Tah-Dah!  (It only took me 3 months to make...). 

           

I made the mistake of going to Joanne's to pick up more thread.  After being sucked into the vortex of New-Seamstress-Retail-Doom (40% off final purchase coupons!!), I came home with this new fabric in my bag (NO idea how they got there):

 So, I decided the dress needed something - maybe a bonnet?  I set to work:

Then, of course the cat wanted in on the action:

I ended up having to call for back-up in the form of the Sunny Seamstress, who cheerfully spent this afternoon coaxing me through my first slat-bonnet.  Here we have the finished product modeled by a local:

Self-titled, "Bro-Peep"

The Seamstress also helped wax the inside of my washtub (a two-person Preenactment task if there ever was one) and together we planned the menu for Knotts.  Now I just have to pick up laundry to wash from various non-participants in the troop, wash my dresses, collect and pack my various sundries and I'm ready for the first reenactment of the year!  

At this point in the game I always wish I had done more research - my book on Winchester civilians is still languishing, and my laundress manual isn't near memorized.  This is where the improv skills learned in acting classes at LBCC come in handy.  

"What is this demonry??!!"

Conan O'Brien gets it.

A Touch of Self-Abasing Nostalgia

It's been quite a long while since I wrote what I consider to be a "good" poem.  But shuffling through some old writing of mine today, I was reminded that my writing passion was birthed, truly, at a reenactment.  The first "series" of poems I ever wrote were composed shortly after visiting both the Gettysburg battlefield and the Huntington Beach reenactment for the first time at the age of 13.  I can laugh at their maudlin awfulness now, but am still delighted and bemused by the continuity of my hobbies 12 years later.

For your tongue-in-cheek pleasure, I give you a sampling of the "best" to be had from my budding, 13-year-old pen (present-day comments in italics):

Thoughts at Devil's Den
The following is what happens when you let junior-highers read Pablo Neruda and forget to explain the purpose of enjambment.  


Pale grey sky
Overhead
Seems
to Mourn
For souls
long ago
Gone.

The brook
Tumbles
Down, down
From the hill
Did it once
Run red?

Wind, past my ears,
Cool, it goes by
Was it once
Filled
With the smell
Of Death?

Cold stone
Monoliths
Piled like blocks.
Were they once
On a fine
summer's day,
The Last to
Cradle
The bodies of
Boys?                                                                                                                                                            

Wind pas

Maybe I was channeling the memories of an asthmatic octogenarian veteran climbing the famous pile? ;-) 


 The next one did once make Karen Turner cry.  From joy or pain, I'll never know.  Come to think of it, she was probably imagining it set to music - as you can see, it came complete with a chorus.  Now, just imagine the "warbler" (some of you will know who I mean) singing it through, and, yes, the tears will come . . . Miss Copeland would tell you that comfrey is a great remedy for, you know, ear-bleeds ;-)


Sons of the South


Sunlight streams down through the trees,
Upon the Grey and Blue,
Their banners ripple in the breeze,
Their hearts steadfast and true.

Ah, look!  How young is the cheek of one,
How grey and old is another -
Oh, do they know that across the field
Stands a man they once called brother?

And so they stand and lean
'Gainst the muzzles of their guns
How many souls will die today,
How many mothers will mourn for sons?

CHORUS:
For every cannon, an empty embrace,
Every order, they're down by one 
Every charge, another orphan,
Every bullet, a mother's son. (I obviously overestimated the accuracy of blackpowder rifes...)

Without a warning, fire pours forth
From the dark blue line ahead,
"Charge!" shouts the man on the great, grey horse
As he rides o'er the fallen and dead.

Fast and thick falls the snow of lead
Hear the shriek of the Rebel Cry!
Brave as lions they charge the lines
And silent as panthers, they die.

What now becomes of that Barred Red Flag?
Is it flutt'ring atop the hill?
Or does it hang now from the hands of a boy,
As he lies, cold, and still?

As you can see, I have not grown any less morbid in 12 years...  If I don't get alot of "stop, you're making my soul hurt" comments, I may later choose to inflict y'all with an almost-decent-ish poem about a cannon, and the pretty-much-tripe poem I once dedicated to Steve Fry of the 3rd Texas, 9 years before I knew everybody who knows him . . .

Thoughts a

The Vagaries of Character Development

One of the delightful things about reenacting is the opportunity to invent one's own character.  Lately I've been researching the War's effect on Winchester, VA (where my character, Margaret-Ellen Hamilton Copeland, grew up), hand-spinning techniques, letter-writing, and agricultural practices of the 1860s Shenandoah Valley - and trying not to get overwhelmed with all the stuff it's possible to know but that I don't have time to learn!

Not everyone creates a first-person impression (it seems less common in Civil War reenacting than in earlier periods of living history practice), but I find that it gives me incentive to delve into the place and times of the actual people who experienced the War, as well as gain a deeper understanding of their motivations and thinking.  In addition to the personal benefits, I think having a convincing first-person impression offers the public a truly immersive historical experience (I don't do reenactments purely for the fun I have - one of my main goals is to make myself available for the education and edification of the public).  My memories of going to reenactments as a child are filled with the living historians who actually took the time to take your hand and pull you into their times with them - they wouldn't break, no matter how much you tried to get them to talk about TV and the Lakers, and they weren't afraid to portray the underside of their historical eras either.

This is the issue I've been mulling over lately.  I reenact with a Confederate unit, for various reasons which I hope to ponder in a future post, but, perhaps unfortunately, this means that my interaction with the public will always work it's way back to the question "what do you think about slavery?"

Sigh.  I don't want to avoid the question, or give a pat, P.C. answer that will satisfy the school-children and their teachers.  I also don't want to give an answer that gives a false, 21st century sheen to an issue that was a very ugly and unavoidable issue of living in the Shenandoah Valley in the 1860s.  If there's one thing I despise, it's when moderns appoint themselves "Official Envoy of 21st Century Ideals to the Dark and Ignorant Past."  But I also don't agree with the kind of wooly-eyed, paleo-conservative idealism that sometimes prevails in Confederate reenacting circles - wherein slavery was just a grand misunderstanding and slaves were basically fat-and-happy farmers who didn't get paid.  I wan't to be able to portray a character convincingly - and the reality is that my character, with 2 brothers in the Confederate army and 2 slaves at home, probably wasn't a closet abolitionist.

I recently ran across this very thoughtful and satisfying article on the ISI website, which discusses the aristocratic culture of the South as observed by deToqueville in the 1830s.  Believe me, it's very easy for a Berry-ite agrarian like me to get starry eyed over "defending the Southern way of life."  But this meant far more than beating Yankees away from one's hard-plowed, hand-sown cornfields, this also meant keeping an entire people-group enslaved in order to keep the agricultural wheels turning.  I don't think this gives us free-reign to lord it over our "ignorant forebears," especially since much of our modern way of life also depends on other people or animals (farther away this time - at least Southerners had to confront slavery every time they walked out their front door) being exploited in order to provide our modern comforts (chocolate-harvesting slaves in Africa, oppresive coffee monopolies in South America, plus a carelessly anti-life culture and disgustingly cruel animal farming in the U.S. spring to mind), but it is an aspect of southern life which is hard to explain in a "sound bite."

As a farmer's daughter in Northwestern Loudon County, I imagine that Miss Copeland, with her Quaker relatives and agricultural surroundings mostly-free of the large-scale slave-holding operations which flourished just a little farther south, thought slavery was an unfortunate, but necessary, piece of the southern landscape.  Like most around her (from both North and South - even abolitionists often wrote in terms which to us would seem unabashedly racist), she probably accepted the idea that the black culture was suited for and desired little better than slavery.  She was probably something of a Unionist before Lincoln won the election, and her father was probably part of one of the abolitionist societies which dotted the South before the Nat Turner rebellion and which thought the best solution to the "negro problem" was resettlement in Africa.  Perhaps I'm lucky I picked a character from a part of the South where it would be possible to be both anti-slavery and pro-Confederate - if I were interpreting a woman from Mississippi or Georgia it might be even harder to address this issue.  Margaret was a virtuous, hard-working young lady who worked just as hard as and respected the slaves in her household, though she did not question the idea that she was right-and-properly their mistress and they were right-and-properly her property.  I can recognize the slow-acting poison which this attitude was to the South, while also remembering and honoring the Margaret Copelands of the time as regular humans who faced the challenges in their lives and times the best way they knew how, without the benefit our our 20/20 historical viewpoint.

Now if only I can get the public to sit around long enough to listen to that explanation . . . ;-)

"Close by the window, Young Maggie is spinning . . ."

Blame my Aunt.  She listened for two seconds about my Laundress Impression last Thanksgiving and decided she needed to impart some inter-generational wisdom:  take up the spindle (...as have thy mothers before thee...).  It would give me another period skill to share at reenactments, she said, plus it was hipper than washing long-johns.  And it's a more portable than a washtub.

Since then I've come to appreciate the hypnotic, meditative "groove" one can find while spinning.  Once you get going, the thread seems to almost make itself - you get into the rythmn of swiftly-drafting wool, winding on to the spindle, humming little old tunes to go along with your 10,000 year old hobby.  It's a great conversation starter, and demands less concentration than hand-sewing or knitting.  I admit, I'm a total geek reject for bringing it to parties, but somehow I find it's easier to talk to people when I'm doing something with my hands.  Don't ask me why.

If any of you are interested in giving it a try, leave a comment and I'll point out some resources you might use to get started!

Fightin' fer my rat . . .

Oh, the dangers of trying historical experiments without communicating with one's house-mates/family.

I got the idea from these lovely ladies to gather some of my own hair from my brush everyday in order to make a "rat" - a net-wrapped clump of your own hair which can be used "Bump-it" style to create the symmetrical-and-wide-on-the-sides hairstyle which was so popular in the 1860s (now if only it looked good with my facial structure - sigh.  I can see the suffragette slogan now: "Style Rights for the Round-Faced!").  Of course, unless your hair falls out in reliable clumps every time you brush, it can take a while to gather the right amount of hair needed to make 2 rats.  But I was willing to give it a quasi-patient try.  I got a plastic bag and began to diligently deposit strands of stray hair from my brush each day.  I also forgot to label it.

So, one day, Mama-Bear comes along and, reaching into the bathroom drawer (did I mention she likes to do things without turning the lights on?), pulls out a plastic bag in which to store her toothbrush for a weekend trip . . .

My baby "rat" was thrown away in horror and disgust in a hotel somewhere in Orange County.  Why is it people are so freaked out by hair simply because it is no longer attached to someone's scalp?  It's made of the same stuff and keeps the same properties off your head as on it . . . but everybody shivers when they find hair anywhere but growing from their own bodies.

So, yes, starting over on the whole "rat" project.  And mom knows it's there now, so, hopefully there will be no more defiling of toothbrushes.

Until, I, oh, I don't know, try making toothpaste out of chalk and Strontium . . . ;-)

Living Histor(ies)

I've been thinking of ways to better focus this blog.  It's harder to think of things to write when you've got your whole life waiting to be picked-through and written over.  But one aspect of life is easy enough to make a little public art of.

So, I'm selecting to emphasise the little hobby which has slowly-but-surely been taking hold of my life lately.  It combines two loves of mine - histoy & theater - without the tedium of the first nor the "drama" of the second (well, depending on your unit, I suppose).  It allows my storytelling side to craft a persona, my crafty side to learn new skills, and my geeky side to delve into reams of quasi-useless historical facts.  Did you know, per exemplum, that Loudon County, VA, grew almost no cotton or tobacco in 1860? 

Since plunging in to this strange world of canvas, gunpowder, and multiple-layers-of-clothing-on-hot-summer-days, I've learned the basics of sewing, spinning, Spencerian handwriting, soap-making, period-laundering, and giving impromptu historical lectures to curious high-schoolers, notebooks-in-hand.  I've danced, sung, and pitched my tent on ant-hills.  But there's definitely alot about the hobby I'm still learning and experimenting with, and I plan to use this blog to map the journey a little.

My first batch of hand-spun yarn.

Welcome aboard - the Laundress is In!



Ink can be a pain in the bustle.