[MR] A story

[Terri Morgan]

I was reading the latest thread (as I should, since I was involved) and the
discussion reminded me of something I experienced at Sapphire Joust last
weekend.

I was sitting under our baronial pavilion by the list field when a young man
came up to the front of it. He was wearing cargo pants and a white tee
shirt. I vaguely recognised him as the same young man I'd earlier seen
wearing a full set of chainmail over the same clothes. He wanted to know if
we were the group from around Portsmouth, VA. I said we were, and how could
we help him? 

It turns out that he had heard about / read about the SCA online and had
driven up to Sapphire Joust to see what we did. It was his first event. "Oh
wow! Really?! How cool!" was the gist of the responses from the folks in the
pavilion, after which we told him about where and when we meet when not at
events. Amid the general discussion, he mentioned that he liked to make
chainmail so when Syr Otto came back to the pavilion, I hastened to
introduce the young man to him so they could talk about that (Otto has
taught mail-making at a few of our A&S nights). The young man left us to run
to his car for his maille (how DO you spell that?). He was from the same
Command (he was active-duty) base as Baron Mungoe, so one of our members
hastened down to camp to tell Mungoe, who was cooking dinner for the camp,
about the guy and to see if Mungoe could come up to meet him. An invitation
to come visit camp and meet Mungoe was quickly returned and the young man
set off. He stopped by later on, as he was heading for home, to say "hi"
again and to let us know that we might not see much of him, as his wife
wasn't interested in the SCA, but he would certainly try to come out again. 

Had he met the rude "you're doing it wrong" kind of people at Sapphire, we
certainly would have never been able to meet him. *Someone* talked to him
and directed him to our pavilion.

I propose that we see many more "good experience" entries, at least, in the
SCA, than we do bad ones. 

Hrothny