Yesterday I attended the wedding of Russ Sheldon (Master Dafydd, my shrub) and Valerie West (THL Mathild). This was my first purely mundane event involving a healthy mix of Scadians and non-Scadians alike. Though the weather looked questionable at times, the rain held off and an ok day turned into a wonderful night.
The wedding was held at Russ and Val’s home. They had arranged for a pair of large tents to occupy their front yard (which is about the size of a soccer field). The first, where the ceremony was held, was about 30ft x 60ft. It was connected to the much larger reception tent via a covered walkway, which housed the bar. The ceremony was lovely, touching and fairly short in duration (no hymms were sung. Woohoo!). After they exchanged vows, signed the necessary paperwork, posed for a few pictures and stepped outside to form something of a receiving line, something weird happened…
All of the Scadians stood up, folded up the chairs and started carrying them into the reception tent to be placed where we would be eating. Seeing what was going on, the mundanes started doing the same. The event catering staff were lost. They didn’t know what to make of this. Wedding guests, in their experience, don’t move furniture. Scadians, on the other hand, can clear a hall of tables and chairs faster than your average Class 5 tornado. We are used to it. We lend a hand and help (especially if there is lifting to be done). It’s what we do.
We’re funny like that.
Just another SCA-related blog thing 
Added Note: prior to the wedding, a bunch of us were sitting inside…. the food prep person (lovely woman!) dropped some bowls in the kitchen. 3 of us descended on the room, relieved we finally had a purpose, and took care of clean up. Urraca made the comment “We’re SCAdians… we can’t just sit around at an event!”.
Ha! Too funny.
I have to mention that we were told that the chairs needed to move into the seating area and the bar wouldn’t be opened until that happened. It was like a whirlwind of activity, driven mostly out of concern that the cider would get warm… 🙂
The staff asked that as part of the announcements we ask people to be patient while they (the staff) moved the chairs so that the bar could be opened and they apologized for any delay it might cause. I told them they didn’t have to worry about it. The guests would move the chairs themselves and be glad to finally have a job to do. They said it would be wonderful if we helped them move a few of the chairs. *Sigh*
I tried to warn them, I truly did. I mentioned more than once that many of the people at the wedding were used to being the ones running events and were getting kinda twitchy with nothing to do. The staff just smiled and nodded at me in a rather disbelieving way. After the chairs were moved and set up I came out to find the staff huddled in the outer tent with shell shocked expressions.
I informed them that that all the place settings now had chairs and the extra chairs were on their way back to the outer tent. This led to more fish imitations.
The best part? It all happened without any instructions or explanation from anyone.