8 hours ago, Porthos said:The Southern season that ended last month was, for me, the season from hell, not only because of the demands of faire but rather all of life making too many demands on me. Unfortunately, faire is the only item on the list of things I have to be responsible for that I could stop doing. I don't talk much about my 12-step recovery here but the level of stress and pain in my life was upped so much that it put my recovery in jeopardy but I was not in a position to walk away. So, I am taking the 2018 Southern season off. I have been in the kitchen there for 15 years and I need a long break to help me get back to a healthy place. Since the other stressers are still in my life, most notably helping with my dying FIL, I expect getting back to where I need to be mentally will take a long while. I want to be back for the 2019 season.
However, I am not completely abandoning my guild. My equipment will still be there to be used. All of the cooking gear you see in the pictures, along with the 3-burner camp stove and large event grill, are mine. I am not mad at the guild, I just need space, so the equipment will go out. Also, I will continue to do the feast shopping, which I already do during the week, and deliver it during the week. What I won't be doing is being anywhere near the faire on the weekends.
Because I have not had someone come behind me whom I could mentor, I have been writing a thorough set of documents for how the feast works, and how the kitchen makes that happen. There are a myriad of little things that have to come together to make it happen.
My daughter who was going to take over the kitchen management had a major change in her life between accepting to take it over last year and this past season starting up. She went from being unemployed to being employed full-time + mandatory overtime on a shift that doesn't start until 12:30 p.m. That job, along with being the mother of an active 3 y/o son, left her without the necessary time and energy to take over.
The Faire has always put a lot of stress on workers behind the scenes and it is a shame that the managers don't want to spend the money on more trained help. It was the same back in the early '70s when I had my booth there (at the Hope Ranch in Thousand Oaks). One of the cooks was a woman who had been recruited from a hotel and prior had been a cook in the Army so she had a lot of experience. I often met with her and we talked about our Army days. One of the organizers kept asking for extra meals for "VIP guests" that she was hosting, usually at the last minute, then "borrowing" one or two of the kitchen helpers to set up her table and serve her guests.
I thought that was totally out of order but I was just a lowly vendor. I showed up one day to set up my booth and learned that Lou had quit. One straw too many.
This reminded me that I found a stack of SCA publications from the '70s and '80s. Tournaments Illuminated and Crown Prints. I have been thumbing through them and remembering friends I haven't seen for decades and wondering if they are still living.
