SC - Servers eating free

[Laura C. Minnick]

Whew! I got really worried when I read that heading!

"My" Bull was actually based upon Master Dyfan's Pennsic stag that bled red
wine---he gave me some how-to's. Mine bled as well as pooped. Here's the
story:

I was creating a soteltie for Endless Hill's First Baron at his
investiture, My Brother Tigranes, and wanted something special. His persona
was Zaroastrian ( something I found out after the fact--serenditpity at work
fer sure), and they have a creation myth where a celestial bull is wounded
with an arrow, and the bull bled from a chest wound out there in the sky,
and his blood became the world and everything in it. Tigranes's device
features a huge bull. I had researched some Persian architecture and found
several examples in museums of column pediments showing reclining bulls
(legs folded underneath them), and that's what I made my Bull to
resemble---it was more of a bull calf than a bull, but it was lifesized. I
found one such bull that was wearing a sort of livery (a tabard or table
runner type thing)
from the forehad to the tail, so I made a similar one to cover my paper
mache' bull (built on a chicken wire frame). He had a cross-bow bolt in the
chest which corked the tube that ran to the rubber stopper replacing the
spigot of the wine-in-a-box,
supported at a slightly higher elevation than the arrow by a welded metal
frame, inside
the bull. I built a slide in the bull's posterior with a trap door whose
handle was the tail. I then made a recipe for cow plop cookies
(chocolate-chocolate chip---that's an actual cookie recipe from Taste Of
Home Magazine), and inserted them manually (go ahead and laugh), keeping the
trap door shut with a bit of sticky tape afterwards, and hiding it partially
with the tail of the tabard.

The bull was finished with granite spray to look like the original
architecture. Master Dyfan's original was covered in sugar paste, but I was
working in an unheated garage in January and wasn't going to risk the
freezing and cracking issue. I also knew that not all sotelties or warners
were totally edible, so I figured a granite bull was OK.

The worst part of the whole story is that no one got a photo. The Baron took
the bull home, but mice got at it, and he had to throw it out.

Presentation was a hoot, though. We all made little horns to wear on our
heads, in the kitchen, and we trooped out and Moo'd as the bull came out.
One of our friends even went so far as to buy a pair of long-horn horns and
attach them to a headband. We had a blast, alleviating some of the solemnity
of the evening. Plus, he was my brother. I _HAD_ to play a practical joke.
It's required. I wanted to remind him he was still one of us, after all,
even tho he wore a new hat, and if anyone was entitled to serve BS, it was
me, the founding Seneschal of the Barony, on what was a *really* rocky
road to that point.

And you should have seen the ladies jump and squeal as the first few cookies
bounced and rolled under their feet. I'm bad, I know, but I had so many
visions of that Taillevant Live Frog soteltie in my mind, and this was the
closest I could get to it without offending anyone or killing any animals.

Tigranes was so pleased that he took some adjustable silver rings he was
going to gift, and gifted them as nose-rings rather than finger rings. And a
good time was had by all. Espescially me. I'm still laughing as I type this.

Cheers

Aoife


Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2001 16:17:42 -0400
From: Philip & Susan Troy <troy at asan.com>
Subject: Re: SC - Weird but cool kitchen gadgets

"Decker, Terry D." wrote:
>
> I believe it was Aoife who had the bull that dumped chocolate chip
cookies.
> The subtletie which bled wine was a hart made by someone else which Aoife
> described.

That's probably Master Dyffan ap Iago, now in Ansteorra, I hear.

Adamantius
- - --
Phil & Susan Troy

troy at asan.com