ANST - SCA Urban Legend (was: Another Funny Story From Alina's Sister)

[Paul Mitchell]

Galen of Bristol here!

Timothy A. McDaniel wrote:
> 
> > Don't be too quick to put all these stories down as "myths."
> 
> It's true that Urban Legend != myth.  Some actually
> happened.  E.g., the length of a CD was chosen to be long
> enough to hold Beethoven's 9th.  There are chicken cannons,
> used to test aircraft.  There was a lawn chair baloonist who
> went to 16K feet.
> 
> Some were false when they started, but there may have been
> imitators since who specifically wanted to imitate the
> story.
> 
> Nevertheless, I'm suspicious of the truth of most ULs.  Most
> are unattributed or vaguely attributed (Friend Of A Friend
> is so common as to have spawned the acronym FOAF).  Further,
> some stories vary.  I'm pretty sure that older versions of
> the pants-out-of-the-train story didn't have the Ithaca
> detail.
> 
> --
> Tim McDaniel.   

Long ago, when Don Robert Simon Fraser was Baron of Bryn 
Gwlad, he, Lord Johann von Graustein (who was later
Robbie's successor as Baron), and I were sitting around
in the loft at Maggie Mae's on 6th Street in Austin after
a baronial meeting, and Johann and I agreed that with
all the old apocryphal stories about "the-guy-who's-
wearing-a-mail-shirt-under-his-clothes-when-he's-mugged"
story, and the "motorcycle-gang-attacks-the-SCA story"
and the "SCA-knight-drives-off-break-in-using-real-
sword story" (that last one is true, it happen to 
the late Sir John the Plain of Shearn, of Stargate),
or the "Mistress-Stella-chases-two-burglars-out-of-
her-house-with-a-broken-off-broomstick story" ...
-- well, we thought the swashbucklers needed a story
like that about one of their own.  So we made up a story
about our Baron, Don Robbie, in which he was walking
down Sixth Street in Austin one evening, and was beset
by five young punks demanding his wallet and watch.
Moving quickly, Robbie breaks the antenna off a nearby
VW beetle and using it like a foil, sets the bandits
to rout.

Johann and I agreed that we would each tell the story
just as I've told you all here on this list, as fiction
that we _made up_ out of whole cloth.  We were both
quite certain that the story would go around and come
back to us as fact.  I further predicted that the name
would be changed to Don Tivar.

We made this story up in '86 or '87, and within a
year later someone swore to me that it was true
that Don Tivar had chased away muggers using the
antenna of a Volkswagen!  A friend of his had it
firsthand from Tivar himself!  He refused to believe
me that Johann and I had made the story up out of
whole cloth, with _no_ basis in fact whatsoever.
I hear it from time to time, and I've seen it on
the Rialto twice.

And every now and then, I tell someone the story,
just like I've told you, as fiction, and every
so often, I hear it again, always as fact.

- Galen of Bristol
officially an oldtimer
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