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Tomorrow is 20 years since my wife and I joined our first sword performance group.

I hadn’t actually known it was a sword performance group when we first showed up. I just thought it was a group that did sword fighting. Years before (1981) I had done the whole SCA thing and my friends and I did a lot of that sort of sword fighting. I had thought this was a similar thing.
My biggest memory of it was the sound of the steel swords hitting each other. The SCA used wooden swords. It’s fun, but it doesn’t make the sound. It was that sound of steel on steel that got me to get out of the car and go over and see what they were doing.

The actual sword methods they used were very, very similar to the SCA things I had done before. Same strikes. Same blocks. Many similar moves.
So, the learning curve was not steep.
It wasn’t until the fall when I was given a class in historical sword methods as a birthday present that I learned that and became far more interested in that. And, that was very different.

I had performed various things (violin, singing, acting, public speaking) since I was 7, almost 30 years before this. So, performing wasn’t new and sword fighting wasn’t new. But, mixing them was.

For decades before I had an on line journal, I kept one for myself. This is what was written about that first sword practice 20 years ago:
———-
Sunday we went to a practice of a theatrical sword fight group. (My wife) signed us up for it on the assumption I’d love it. Well, we’ll see. It was OK, but I’m not yet convinced. It is “interesting” using steel instead of wood. We’ll see.
———-

Now, we’ve been running our own group for 18 of those years. We’ve done 375 different performances with our group, and who knows how many different acts and demonstrations in those performances. Plus, I didn’t keep track of the shows we did with that first group we joined.

We’ve done birthday parties for kids where there were only a handful of people watching., 3 being our smallest audience. We’ve done shows at interstate faire that had hundreds of thousands there. (157,841 folks attended the fair. No idea how many actually saw us. No where near that many.)

We’ve done shows in 3 countries (USA, Canada & Germany) and 15 states here in the US.

We’ve done everything from kids shows with pies in people’s faces to lectures at universities on historical sword fighting.

20 years later, I guess we’ve seen.

Imagine what we could have done if I'd been convinced from the start and really applied myself...