WAR!

I’ve been to bars and pubs before. Shocking, I know, but in places like, say Germany or England or even downtown Tempe or Salt Lake they’re actually quite normal places where normal people go and hang out with friends and eat and drink and whatever. Utah County is the exception. These bars’ seedy facades match their seedy patrons. The advice not visit a bar in the U.C. could be applied to many things here, including “secular” societies. I have been at lodges for benevolent societies in Provo and Arizona, and I’d say the ones in Provo stink like smoke the way the ones in Arizona don’t. Not that I think that the members in Arizona don’t smoke or smoke less, but I think the culture in Provo forces the “minority” to associate only with itself and define itself against the majority. I begin this way to try to explain my reaction to a recent adventure my husband and I had in Arizona. Hopefully by the end it all makes sense.
My husband has been involved in an international medieval/renaissance reenactment group I will call by a fictional acronym of MCRA (for medieval creative reenactment) since high school in Mesa. I’ve been peripherally involved with them since joining a medieval club as an undergraduate.
My friend Karin and I were involved with the music aspect of this club, and our leader was very involved with the MCRA and would have us come play at MCRA events. Our first was a charity feast that we were asked to play at and help serve the food. When we f arrived at the site we weren’t wearing our costumes because we were suppose to be borrowing them. Immediately the garbed members of the MCRA started snide remarks about us for being “naked” ie wearing our normal clothes not our costume. We were a little put off because we were there to help these people, not be made fun of them.
Once we found our garb and had dressed we were hanging out waiting for our cue to serve or play. A balding man, probably in his mid-thirties, came up and started talking to us.
“So, is this your first event with the MCRA?”
“Yep.”
“Do you know what MCRA stands for?”
“Medieval Creative Reennactment?”
“No, Mutually Consenting and Ready Adults”. He then winked at us, but not one that conveyed that he was joking. Fortunately we were called away about then.
The rest of the night was fairly uneventful, so we decided to give them another chance and play at the annual winter solstice event in Salt Lake. We met the other musicians from Salt Lake who were nice if not a bit eccentric. The leader was a middle-aged woman who had hauled out her mini-harpsichord for the event. She seemed rather good-natured and demure even if her bodice pushed her up so high and her top cut down so low that we wondered if she even had nipples. But there must have been a memo explaining the dress for the evening as renaissance serving wench, because she wasn’t the only one who was displaying white pasty pushed-up “goods”.
As the night wore on, the alcohol was flowing more and more freely and people were acting more and more wild. Unfortunately the creepy male cross-dressers showed up about the same time that Karin’s dad did to pick us up. Before we got to him these historically costumed transvestites (if not worse) had already started hitting on him (he was an easy target in his normal clothes).
Karin was forbidden to come back to the MCRA or even our very tame college group for almost twenty months.
While I stayed involved with my university medieval group through my undergraduate and graduate years, I was a bit wary of the MCRA. I went to other MCRA events with friends from my college group, and although they didn’t met the epic proportions of that solstice, it still seemed like an excuse to get drunk and wear as little clothing as possible (supposedly as middle-eastern dancers). Even the other Mormons who were there were usually divorced or single middle-aged men who must have also felt ill-at-ease with the prevailing culture, but still took the opportunity to hit on the sweet young things from Provo.
Since I met my husband Matt through our association with the medieval club on campus, we have a number of friends in the medieval circuit. Our good friends in this vain, the Shannons Thora and Lydia are picture in their tent on the left), told us they wanted to go the War, the second largest event in the MCRA and held in Arizona. Matt used to go to War when he has in high school and at community college and he was interested in going again. I was still wary of the MCRA, but since my family lives in Arizona and we would be camping with friends, I thought it might be fun.
We both needed new garb, Matt for fencing, me for camping. We enlisted the help of the expert seamstresses Gretchen and Kathy. Matt is some sort of sewing prodigy because he was finished way before I was (even though I started first). Then he got his mother’s 1950s Pfaff sewing machine working, drafted a pattern for a shirt and sewed it before I was done with my dress. It was very discouraging for me but after days of blood, sweat and tears and a lot of patience from Kathy, mine was done the day we left (except for the hand-sewn button-holes).
We finally rolled into camp in Florence at dawn after a long night-drive. We stopped at the registration booth to pay our fees and get our parking permit. The volunteers there were happy and friendly. This was a shocker since at the other MRCA event I had been to, none of the volunteers were happy or friendly. Instead of looking at our normal clothes in disgust making tsking noises or sizing us up trying to decide if were Mormon or not, these volunteers just treated us like they were normal and we were normal. As we drove off to find our camp. the sun had just started spread its rays across the assortment of pavilions, Viking/Anglo-Saxon a-frame tents and regular old modern tents. It was an awesome sight and I had a good feeling that we would have a good time.
And we did for the most part. We had such a good time that in a homemade root beer stupor I even let Matt buy a sword (under the agreement that we wouldn’t eat out the rest of the semester, which we’ve only broken twice (for my birthday and a celebration with the Shannons)). Matt fenced at war and did pretty well except when we has killed in “friendly fire” by one of the girls in our group. And when we spent the night with my parents in Mesa, my mom and Aunt Sandra had a good time playing with Matt’s fencing gear and new sword.

There were plenty of details having to do with the whole trip that I wasn’t happy about, but since I’m trying to keep this from being a ranting blog I won’t go into it.* Maybe because I left camp everyday and came back so I didn’t have time to get too cranky, but I had a good time. I learned that when they aren’t Utahns, the members of the MCRA are normal people. Yes some of them come to get drunk and wear chainmail bikinis and enjoy a weekend of debauchery, but everybody. Most of them are happy that other people like it too. Just like people who go to bars in everywhere but UC, they’re just looking for a social outlet to do something creative with friends. While I don’t plan on becoming a member of the MCRA, I appreciate them more now that I’ve seen the non-Utah version, the non-I-hate-Mormons-so-I’ll-act-as-non-Mormon-as-possible group. I can see why they appealed so much to Matt in high school especially the Arizona ones who get together in the hundreds at Encanto Park in Phoenix to hold fencing practice. Matt can go as he wants/can to the MRCA and I feel better about just showing up every-now-and-again to Christmas and Easter as it were.


*I will include the saga of the tent, since its one of the only pictures that got taken at war. My parents told me we could use (and eventually have) their camping stuff (ATTN PARENTS: I still want the camping stuff, I’m serious, don’t give the tent to DI, I want it and the other camping stuff! please please please!) This was fortuitous because too many people from the medieval club wanted to come and Travis, the president, told too many of them that they could come. We had originally planned on carpooling with the Shannons, but we ended up having to take our own car plus two people. With all of their stuff there was no room for us to bring own camping gear, or much beyond our clothes, really.
We borrowed a wonderful forty-year-old cabin-style tent from my mom. It was a perfect fit for us and our stuff, since we had to park a mile away from the campsite (we could however load/unload). The only problem was that Matt likes backpacking and likes his backpacking tent that sleeps two and is made out of nothing and goes up in a single flick of the wrist. And he has really bad luck putting up cabin tents. When we got the tent to set it up he was pretty unhappy and cranky. He cursed the tent and me as we put it up. I cursed him, because it was a tent from my family and since they were essentially financing this little adventure and being generous with their camping stuff. The next day after we’d both gotten some rest after our night drive, he apologized to me for being unhappy and said it really was mostly because cabin-tents always get the better of him and the lack of sleep. I explained that the tent was forty-years old, making it the most ancient tent there, that it fit us and our tent much better than his would in the circumstances, and that it had belonged to Uncle Ed before it belonged to my mom. That got him, since he had to admit I was right. Plus the extra blow of Uncle Ed, a reserved lawyer, experienced camper, gunsmith hobbyist, and sharer of mustache-wax put the lid on the complaining. When it came time to pack up, Matt even admitted it was a good tent. So in the end all was well, and I look forward to using this tent again.