[MR] Your suggestions please ==> Newcomers Thread

[sca_bard at yahoo.com]

When I was new (1994), authenticity was not a big issue for me.  I liked events that had the right ambiance, but that ambiance was something formed partly out of fact, partly out of Hollywood, and partly out of imagination.  With more time in, I've learned more and find modern intrusions - even fantastical, medievaloid ones - more jarring.  But as a newcomer, this was not a concern of mine.

I joined as part of a college club.  We weren't even an official SCA college, just an extracurricular group at the state university.  We functioned almost like a newcomer's household - the eldest of us were perhaps a grad student or two who'd been in the SCA *gasp* five or six *years.*  We planned on-campus events, worked on A&S projects together, drove each other to fabric stores and events, camped together and volunteered in the kitchen or as servers together.  It gave us a collection of faces that we knew (from weekly - yes, weekly!) on-campus meetings and people to talk to at whatever event we went to.  

We didn't have especially strong ties with the barony (although various club presidents and seneschals tried to change that through the years), probably because our members tended to disperse to the four winds upon graduation.  But here and there, personal ties were formed, and at least one of our members ended up squired to a local super-duke.  Although I moved away for my own grad school stint, and stayed away, I became active in Atlantia and am now Storvik's exchequer.

For what it's worth, it was harder for me to get active in Atlantia, on my own, than it was to first dive in up East.  While I have all the self-confidence in the world when it comes to taking on a job or performing, just 'hanging out and meeting people' was hard to do - and that's when I already had a closet full of garb, my own feast gear, and a working knowledge of the customs and lingo.

I don't know if it would work with far-flung adults with busy lives, but a Newcomer's Guild *comprised of newcomers* (3-4 years and out!) with perhaps one baronial "faculty advisor" might perform a similar function.  Or people might feel like it's a ghetto, I don't know.  It may not be feasible to reconstruct a college experience outside of college.

 - Teleri the Well-Prepared

--- On Thu, 10/14/10, atlantia-request at seahorse.atlantia.sca.org <atlantia-request at seahorse.atlantia.sca.org> wrote:

I would like to hear some of your suggestions on how we can work together 
to?create the middleages in a better way.? What can we do now to make our events 
seem more like they would have if they had truly been held in period.? ?

Think back to when you were new to our Society.? What was it that made you come back time after time?
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