Pennsic 51

So we’ve been home for Pennsic a little over a week, but Herself tested positive for Covid right after we got home, so we’ve been quarantining, and my head wasn’t in the right space to post yet.

Yes, there was a lot of Covid going around at Pennsic, much closer at hand for us than previous years. From opening weekend to middle weekend to packout, it was taking down good friends of ours left and right. Ultimately it got a good chunk of our camp. How it keeps missing me I’ll never know, but I don’t want to jinx it. Current mood:

(This is your warning. This post going to get deep, it is going to get personal, and it is going to go on until I’ve expressed what I need to express. This is not a curated “who do I need to thank?” post. Those have their place and there’s nothing wrong with that. But I said a few months ago that if I got back to posting, this blog was going to be me sharing what I want to share. I meant it.)

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So yes, Pennsic was a spreader event. Moving on. Maybe you heard that it was incredibly hot on the days we didn’t get torrential rain? Yeah, we had that too. So it was definitely not without its challenges, generally speaking.

My main challenge the first week was depression, which the weather definitely didn’t help. I did have fun–so many of my favorite people were at the war, and I got to some of the bardic circles that have a place in my heart (including our own Chocolate Bardic, which was once again highly successful). But the dopamine hits just kept fading really quickly, leaving me wondering why I was there. At Pennsic. In the performance community. In the SCA at all. I’m really grateful for the support of my wife and my good friends, particularly Silence de Cherbourg, Faye de Trees, and my McGuire’s Marauders campmates. Not sure how I would have made it through without them. (Didn’t say I wasn’t going to thank anyone.)

It became clear to me over the week that I was letting people live rent free in my head. People whose criticism, direct or anonymous, has stung, as well as people that I had lost as friends through my own mistakes. It also became clear that the actual people I encountered at Pennsic were nothing like the voices in my head. When I made the time to connect with people and let them know how much I missed them, they responded with warmth, regard, and caring. As I opened up a bit more and asked for the support I needed, I started to lay down the weight of the depression. Once that shifted, I found myself smiling again because I was there and these were people and places I cherished, despite all the challenges.

The other weight I carried all through Pennsic was preparing for my concert Wednesday night of war week. As I mentioned in my last post, I had decided that this concert and next year’s were the last I had planned for the Pennsic performance stage. People have been asking me about that. The simple truth is, I’m not a touring musician, so I’m not performing year round and keeping myself in top form. I’m just a hobbyist who had a vision and got a little obsessed with fulfilling it. That means every year, I have to start getting my voice in shape for Pennsic, and put together an hour long set list I can perform confidently. My catalog isn’t massive, but at this point it’s more than I can keep in my head without regular practice. (Yes there are other ways to assemble a concert. Hush now, I’m telling this story.)

In choosing to do two final concerts, I opted to make this year’s a look back, and share the story of how I started this journey and where it had taken me. That meant the set list was primarily composed of songs from Hidden Gold, which haven’t been in my regular rotation the last few years. It’s not that I dislike them, but for all that I may just be a tourist of a musician, a lot of performers get a little weary of their “older stuff” over time, and prefer to focus on their more recent material, which is more relevant to the person they are now. Next year, I will get to do that, sharing out the music from Hold the Door Open after I complete and release that album. But this year, if I wanted to be solid on these older songs, I needed to be performing them regularly. I needed to run them, re-read the lyrics, and get comfortable singing them again.

I was more than a little concerned, as I expressed in “Homecoming”, that I am not who I was. The prospect of getting to open for Marian of Heatherdale once again, while exciting, was actually a little intimidating. I’d been doing my voice exercises, but not that regularly. I’d barely picked up my lute guitar more than a few times in the last year. I had consciously not chosen to find a bunch of collaborators to sing with or accompany me, which I generally enjoy doing, but which then consumes a lot of my Pennsic with rehearsals. This year, I was going to just get up on stage and sing, by myself, for an hour.

Was I setting myself up to fail? Were people going to turn out at 7 pm to see me perform? (Last year at Pennsic 50, the 7 pm audience, if I’m honest, had been kinda sparse. It can be hard to push through for 55 minutes if I don’t feel like I’m getting energy back from a fully engaged audience. Maybe that sounds like sour grapes or entitlement, but I found it a little draining at the time.)

Was it just time for me to accept that February 2020, when I carried the day to become royal bard right before Covid shut the SCA down, was as good as it was going to get? Had I been chasing a pointless dream born of insecurity and ego all this time?

Yeah, okay, maybe that was the rest of what my depression was about.

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I did have a few opportunities to warm myself up and do a gut check over the course of the war. Efenwealt Wystle, the beloved and welcoming bard from Atlantia, usually hosts a “soirée” midwar in the area behind his shop. I’d never been, but Silence asked me to be her plus-one this year, and, well, yes please.

I had a moment of intimidation when we got there and I saw who some of the guests were. In addition to Efenwealt and his talented family, I saw Marian of Heatherdale, Ruaidhri an Cu, Vincenzo di Bartolomeo da Brescia of the wonderful dulcimer, my friend Sabine de Kerbriant… and Garraed Galbraith and Truly Carmichael, one of the legendary couples of the bardic world, who had not been to Pennsic in many a year. Those are just the ones that pop into mind reflecting back on it.

I leaned over and whispered to Silence something about “the continental shelf of the ocean I had no idea I was wading into” when I started doing this bard thing. She just smiled. These were her people: Garraed, Truly, Marian and Vincenzo had been her campmates for years.

It was a glorious evening of conversation and performances, as Efenwealt would invite whoever felt the call to share something. After a few performers, I offered up “Tam Lin of the Elves”, one of the pieces I knew I needed to get back to form on. Silence sang the Elf Queen with me.

It went over fine and was clearly enjoyed. I wasn’t an imposter or an interloper in this space, plus-one or not. This was a space for friends and strangers alike. It was a place for bards, and there was space for me here.

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There were other nights like that which helped me reconnect to my confidence. Duchess Caoilfhionn, a dear friend and sometime collaborator, invited me back to her bardic performance space at VDK camp on middle Sunday night. It turned out her daughter Courtney, one of my very favorite young people in the Society, wanted to perform “Hidden Gold” with my consent, which I gladly gave. Courtney and I have been friends over our shared love of music since I met her as four-year-old moppet with curly red hair and giant blue eyes. At sixteen, she had gone to the trouble of fighting her own anxieties and learning one of my pieces to perform for this audience. She knew the thing cold, and she sang that song with her whole chest. (Okay, yeah, my music means something to some people. I’m not misting up, you’re misting up.)

Back in this East Kingdom crowd once more, I thought about what I wanted to perform. And I let the lightness of my heart be my guide. My depression had finally lifted, and I wanted to make people laugh, even if it meant showing my whole ass. (Especially if it meant showing my whole ass.) I hadn’t had the chance to make an EK crowd laugh in a long time. I gave them my rendition of “Putting it Together”. I heard my friend Grim the Skald bust a gut the moment I sang “Be nice, Drake.” (He was impressed at the stones it took to filk Sondheim, but he also thought I had done it justice.)

This was getting easier. Northshield’s bardic circle was also a joy. There is an incredibly talented crop of young bards coming into this game that I’m thrilled to see. And I was finding my groove again, and in really good voice. By Wednesday night, I finally believed I was ready, and that the people who came were not going to be disappointed.

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They weren’t. I wasn’t either. It was a solid crowd, the house was maybe half full by the end of my second or third piece. (It was going to be full by the end of the set, because I was opening for Marian.) I remembered how good the acoustics were in this tent. And that all you have to do to be a bard in the SCA is get up and perform.

I smiled, bringing my voice up and down as the songs called for it, connecting to the audience. My family, my good friends, people I’d encountered along the war who remembered my music or attended one of my classes, were there. Oh my gosh, Marian was there. People were quietly singing along on the verses, and joining in with gusto on the choruses. They know my songs.

I may have gotten pitchy here or there. (We recorded one or two of the songs–I know I got pitchy a couple times.) I pulled “Can she excuse my wrongs” out because I was tracking the time and realized I was running ahead of schedule, and a quick period piece might be fun. I went completely blank on the lyrics halfway through the second verse, tried to find it, couldn’t, and just grinned and took a bow.

It didn’t matter. That’s how live performance works. It was still one of my best concerts. If this is the end of my Pennsic concert career, I was finishing strong. I was satisfied. I took my bow, and turned to leave the stage.

“Drake Oranwood!”

I stopped, and turned. Marian of Heatherdale had stood up. She began to step up to the stage, telling the audience how she had been watching me over the years we’ve known each other. I can’t remember all of what she said, but I was there when she said it, and that is enough. Words about watching me hone my craft, learn about myself, and speak my truth. At some point I have to look up what the “five virtues of a bard” are, but she named them at the time and said I embodied them. Or words to that effect—I was still standing there gobsmacked.

“In my kingdom of Ealdormere, we have a tradition. When we wish to recognize a bard, we give them a ring.” And twelve years after the first time I sang to her (just the two of us sitting in front of Efenwealt’s shop), she once again presented a ring to me. But now she was doing it in front of a packed house, who cheered and applauded as she pulled me into a tight embrace.

In the Mankind Project, there’s a saying. “You don’t need jam on your toast to live. But it tastes real good when you get it.”

Marian of Heatherdale put jam on my toast in that moment, as only she is able to do, in front of gods and everybody.

I didn’t need it. But I still have the glow from it.

So yeah. It was a complicated Pennsic. And mine definitely ended a high note. This is a beautiful community, and I see it growing all around me. I’m sorry if I lose sight of it sometimes.