Feast thank yous

[Sisuile Butler]

Saturday was Dinner and Dancing with the Duchess. It was not supposed to be my feast, but the original feast steward had to step back to a support role with 2.5 weeks to go. But this is why we have emergency deputies, and I was happy to be able to remove the worry about this when that's what she needed. So my first thanks are to Richenza ander Bruke for trusting me with her feast and Deidre for going “hey, do you want to work with Richenza on this feast in 3 months?” and also taking our pivot in stride. As our common SCA dances come from England, France, and Italy, we decided to structure the feast to reflect that. Richenza took the English course and the bread & cheese appetizers, Orlando di Medici took the Italian course, and I had the French course and dessert. Unfortunately, due to some of those real life issues, Richenza had not been able to do as much prior planning as she might have otherwise of the coordination of the three courses and recruitment of resources. So my first text was to our old friend and campmate Ki-Lin to ask if she would be my chief dishwasher. She and Marietta Angelica de Felice Antonio spent almost all day at the sinks, bless them for it. Basil Clarke stepped into Marietta’s spot during cleanup, doing the scrape and pre-wash, which is the most gross part. Csestzvi Erzsebet was my hall steward. A while ago, she told me that she didn't like working in the kitchen at events, but when I said, “eek, this just landed on me,” her first response was, "what do you need me to do?” So I found her a feast job that wasn't a kitchen job. Knowing that the hall was sorted, I could ignore what was happening outside my kitchen as we were serving. And as not-a-cook, her questions as I rubber ducked on our calls made the feast so much better. Iasinya Moscovina and Alethea Eastriding suffered through my precooks and gave me feedback, as well as doing All The Things as my seconds on Saturday, including keeping me alive, fed, medicated, and hydrated. I cannot thank them enough, and they're going to be helping me with leftovers for…a while. Amalberga and Friedrich chose to travel significant distance for this event and Amalberga quickly got drafted to teach knife skills and be my plating deputy. I am so glad both came and I treasure the conversations we had this weekend. Johann came and supported Richenza and made jokes and cleaned and washed dishes and ran errands and was her second and was so critical to the functioning and clean up of that kitchen. Sugawara, Andreiko, Rosina, and Miriban all showed up and worked their asses off all day. Your tremendous efforts were seen and appreciated. And then we get to the people who I didn't know as well, and I forgot to write their names down because I was a doofus. We could not have made this work nearly as well without all the hands in the kitchen, during prep, serving, and clean up. If one of my other kitchen people have names missing from this list, I need them please. We can't do this kind of work without hundreds of personhours of effort, and thank you to everyone on site who helped at all. Site closed at 10, and my team were kicked out at 10:06 so Deirdre and Aaradyn could finish and leave. I'll take that. Off-site, there are three other people without whom I could not have done this: My friends Beatrice and Calamus helped significantly with planning and timing and scaling, especially as the feast went from 180 to 120 5 days out, and listening to me work through the challenges that managing a project of this magnitude brings. And major thanks to my spouse, Rumhann, who schelpped the stuff down the stairs from Carolingia’s 5th floor storage unit with Alethea as their elevator was broken, unloaded it at our house, loaded it into cars Saturday morning, unloaded it Sunday morning, and will load it back up when I coordinate with Gudrun to return it, all for an event he skipped to take care of our dogs. How did I get to be so lucky?

-Sisuile

"Say what you mean. Bear witness. Iterate." Against Entropy, John M. Ford