[MR] Authenticity Police?

[Towey, Brian]

Dear Friends and Neighbors,

I have, until now, been daunted by the prospect of sewing miles and miles of
French seams to make a family-sized pavilion.  The high probability of
ending up with a thousand dollars worth of shapeless and leaky canvas was
more than I was prepared to face.

Well!  I have recently discovered what many of you must already know: that
tarpaulins of enormous size (up to 40 x 60 feet!) are now available at
little cost.  What's more, although they are woven polyethylene, they are
not always an obnoxious blue.

The large size makes it possible to create a pavilion that is, as it were,
cut from whole cloth. A single huge piece, with only a few darts to shape
it. 

With careful layout, for example, a 10'x20' oval pavilion could be cut from
a single 25'x25' tarp, with only six seams in the whole project, and nary a
hem.  Total cost, including decoration, well under $100, and finished in an
afternoon.

I realize this may be flame bait, but I have to ask.

Will the Authenticity Police throw me in the stocks if an otherwise-period
pavilion is made of synthetic materials?  Will some sort of  "one drop rule"
banish my half-breed tent to the geodesic ghetto?  Will friends avert their
eyes and decline to enter for fear of being tainted?

In other words, how does the Reasonable Attempt rule apply to campgrounds?

I asked this on another forum and received many stern lectures on the
virtues of canvas and the evils of plywood camp furniture, even when
painted.  So, I would like an opinion from a more general audience.  

Yours,

Charles Fleming
mka Brian Towey