[Sca-cooks] SCA-Cooks pot luck at Pennsic

[Bronwynmgn at aol.com]

In a message dated 1/24/2004 3:02:33 AM Eastern Standard Time, 
StefanliRous at austin.rr.com writes:

<<Another part of the notice said that the A&S tents would not be 
available for such activities this year. Apparently they had some 
problems with this last year.>>

I checked with the A&S folks for Pennsic about this.  They said there is no 
problem with scheduled meetings being held in the tents, such as email list 
get-togethers.  They are cracking down on impromptu use of the tents for parties. 
 I quote from the email sent to me by Chai'usun, who is in charge of class 
scheduling: 
"evening roundtables or discussions still fall under the heading of 
"classes," and that meetings, royal courts, or similar public gatherings will also be 
allowed.  What we will not do any more is allow private individuals or 
households to use A&S tents for parties, no matter how sedate."

In fact, I wrote to Sir Edward, Chai'usun, and Dame Catriona with comments on 
the changes, shortly after they were posted.  Sir Edward simply referred me 
to the other two.  Chai'usun explained their reasoning to me, using statistics 
from previous years.  I've paraphrased them below:
- Over one quarter of the teachers who ask for limited classes never pick up 
their sign-up lists to know who signed up and who didn't, so presumably they 
actually take anyone who shows up and waiting in line to sign up was 
meaningless.
- Over half the classes that had sign-ups didn't fill up the available 
spaces; since there was still space left in those classes, again, waiting in line 
really didn't have an effect.
 - Of those people who did take attendance from their sign-up lists, one 
third of the people who had signed up never showed up.  There are probably people 
who saw the list was full and didn't go to the class, when they could probably 
have gotten in if they'd been there.  

In any case, she said that last year, only 17% of the classes (170 out of 
1000) were set up as limited classes, so it really doesn't affect very many 
classes, but sign-ups used the most volunteer hours at A&S point.  So logically, I 
can see their point...

Dame Catriona, oddly enough since this is not her normal demeanor, simply 
said they thought long and hard about this and if I want to know more about how 
A&S works, I should volunteer for them.  I can't read that as anything but 
"since you haven't worked here, you don't know what you're talking about".  As I 
said, that is NOT what I expected from her, and my husband, who knows her 
better than I, was also very surprised.  I can only assume that she was already 
tired of hearing complaints about changes before they'd been tried.

Brangwayna