I was active for many years in the Society for Creative Anachronism. My interests were music, dance and costuming. However, the emphasis in the local group was on fighting, more fighting, still more fighting, and a bit of politics. I eventually got very thoroughly burnt-out, and I hadn’t been to an event in years until yesterday.
The Kingdom of Calontir (roughly, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska and Iowa, plus Fayetteville, Arkansas, minus westernmost Nebraska) held its winter coronation at a school within trivial bicycle distance of where I live. So I grabbed my camera and spent a couple of hours there yesterday afternoon taking pictures of all the strange people.
Here are a few of the pictures I took. There are many more in the gallery here. (The photo plugin I’m currently using reduces the size of the image to fit the browser window. To see the pictures full-size, right-click to open the link in a new window.)
People save their best clothes for court in the evening. These costumes can be spectacular (a full-out Tudor glitz should be viewed only with proper eye protection). I didn’t stay for that, so much of the garb that you see in yesterday’s pictures is the SCA equivalent of jeans and t-shirt or work clothes.
Perhaps not completely inappropriate here: the Pre-Raphaelite “Hokey Pokey.”