Wearing of med. clothes

[Mary Temple]

At 06:46 PM 02/16/96 -0800, you wrote:
>That's fine.  But when you DO 
>have newbies in the shire/Barony/whatever, what kind of message are you 
>sending them when the "old-timers" are not showing up in garb?  Some get 
>the idea that you really don't care, and we shouldn't be sending that 
>message. The big thing to remember, folks, is that we do this for fun.  
>This is a hobby, as much as some of us would like it to be full time.  
>When our hobby becomes a job, it becomes much less fun (most of the 
>time).  When it becomes "not fun", we quit.  Have a little tolerance, but 
>keep in mind what we're doing.  I invite your responses to this - they 
>should be good.

Well, what it taught this newbie was that it was slightly easier to join.
Before I started going to meetings, or events, I thought I had to have garb
BEFORE I did a thing. And that was very intimidating. I thought it was a
little unfair to expect someone to have garb before they ever did anything.
If someone had told me I had to show up at my first populace meeting IN
GARB, I would never have gone. Same with Dance practice. In fact, I have a
couple of friends who want to join, but are intimidated by this. I keep
trying to tell them it's not so, that it's ok to go to fighter practice
without armor, or dance practice without a "period" dress, but they've got
it into their heads that that's how it MUST be, and no amount of persuasion,
cajoling, or out-right threatening <grin>, will get them to go and find out
otherwise.

Now don't get me wrong, I like the idea of wearing my garb a little more
often, perhaps a few more "in garb" dance practices (hint), but there are
some points where the "Garb" MUST be lax. Otherwise we are going to scare
people away. Yes, if we wear garb to every event, we'll get attention, and
people saying "ooh! This is really cool!", but it's unlikely they'll come to
an event, because "I don't have any SCA-quality garb". 

Two of my friends showed up at the Garbed dance practice. They thought it
was fun, they enjoyed it, had a great time, told me how good we were, and
never went to another SCA function because they "didn't want to have to wear
funny clothes". Another person chose fighter practice specifically bacause
he wouldn't HAVE to wear garb (he didn't have any), and he wanted to get a
"feel" for us before going to any "formal" events, like Candlemas or Queen's.
>
>Thorgrim, a displaced Ansteorran living in Drachenwald
>
(blah, a long post.)

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Mary Temple                              I am the cat who walks by Himself,
NoxCat           <noxcat at eden.com>         and all places are alike to me.
Catriona Rowley                                           - Rudyard Kipling