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pallid_regina asked me for the story about how I came to be involved with swords and fire. It’s a long story that rambles through my life gaining momentum as it goes.

Growing up I had very little interest in swords. My mother bought me a lot of cowboy toys when I was young, even though I wasn’t very interested in that either.
My brother and I would hit each other with sticks, but not pretending to be sword fighting, just fighting.

What I was interested in was Science Fiction: Star Trek, Doctor Who, UFO, Space 1999, The Six Million Dollar Man, The Planet of the Apes, Godzilla. (Although very little super heroes because my mother strongly disliked comics.)
Those were the things I played as a kid. Those were the things I wanted to be involved with when I grew up. If swords showed up in those things, it wasn’t often or critical.
Sure, Kirk, Spock and McCoy got stuck sword fighting gladiators in a 20th century Rome, but they beamed away at the end.

Then, when I was thirteen, a movie came out that changed the way I thought about this.
Lightsabers were now THE weapon of choice. I didn’t want to be on the Enterprise, I wanted to be a Jedi knight.
My brother and I resumed fighting with sticks, but now they were lightsabers and we spent lots of time “refining our technique”.*

But, it was still lightsabers, not swords.

When I started college in 81 I had some friends who joined the SCA. They practiced on the campus quad every Sunday afternoon. The girl I was very hot for at the time used to like to go and watch the guys sword fighting.
So, I became interested in sword fighting. I didn’t know anything about it at that point. But, they were fighting with sticks and I had spent the last four years fighting my brother with sticks. I found the skills to be directly transferable.**

That didn’t last long. As soon as the weather got cold the girl I was after stopped spending Sunday afternoons outdoors. So, I went and got a job in the campus dish room as I needed the money more then I needed whacking people with sticks.

But, those 2 months of SCA teaching were enough for my friends to like it. So, we continued to sword fight each other through the remaining years of college having many duels up and down our apartment corridors.

Through college, that was my involvement with swords.

After I got out of college my (now) wife told me about a renaissance faire (King Richard’s Faire) in the area and asked me if I wanted to go. I didn’t. It sounded weird. It sounded like paying to stand around in the woods while people did boring things. We didn’t go.
The next year, when it came around again, she told me that she really wanted to go. So, we went.

It was a totally magical experience that hooked me immediately. I wanted more. I wanted to be a part of it. I wanted to spend every weekend there. This was when I bought my first swords. I didn’t use them. I didn’t have anyone who wanted to use them with me. But, I bought them.***
They had an apprentice program for people to get involved. I signed up for it. I had been performing one way or another (violin, musicals, singing, and acting) since third grade. So, I qualified for the program without much difficulty.

Then, I got fired from my job. It took me three months to find a new one, and when I did it was in New Hampshire, 4 hours each way from the faire site and the mandatory weekday rehearsals.
I dropped out of the program before the first rehearsal.

I still attended the faire when it was open. But, even when I lost that job and moved back to Massachusetts, I didn’t try and rejoin the program. The faire had changed management, the cast I liked had moved on or died and I wasn’t as hot to be a part of it as I first had been.
My (now) wife and I were planning a medieval wedding at a local castle, and that took the resources that would have gone to it, and was close enough that I didn’t feel I was missing out on anything either.

After we got married, we still went to the faire each year, but that was it. We both felt it was a shadow of what it had been and not worth the effort of trying to join it.

In 2000, one of the volunteers at the museum where my wife worked told her that she was part of a group that used steel swords in sword fights.
My wife encouraged me to join. I declined. My wife encouraged me more. I again declined. My wife insisted. I agreed to go meet these people.

They met at a park only 5 miles from where we lived. The whole drive over I said “I don’t think I want to do this.”
We got there and got out of the car. I heard the sound of steel swords hitting each other.
“I want to try it,” I said.
The folks there seemed willing enough to let me join. They showed me some exercises and moves. All of them were very similar to the SCA stuff I had learned 19 years before that. I picked it up pretty fast.

My second week there they said to me “Our big show is in three weeks, what do you want to do for it?”
“You guys do shows?” I asked.
“Yes, we’re a performance group,” they said.
“Oh, I thought you only practiced sword fighting with them.”
I agreed to do a performance fight with them. It was 4 moves long and I lost in an embarrassing way.
After I performed it in front of the crowd, I had a bunch of people come up to tell me they really liked it.

Then, at the faire, the person who ran that troupe announced he was quitting and dissolving the troupe.****

One of the other troupe members told me that he and his wife were going to start a new troupe continuing the group, just under a different name. My wife thought what I had done was fun, so asked if she could join too. Despite our lack of experience, we were both considered founding members of the new troupe when it formed a month later.
We got very involved with it. My wife set up and ran their web site. I took over managing the administration of the group with insurance, and other items. My wife came up with a game we could use to make money at the faires and did the considerable amount of artwork needed for it.

That fall, for my birthday, a (former) friend bought me a sword lesson at the Higgins Armory Museum a few miles from our house. I’d known of the museum for decades and gone there several times. In school I tried to do one of my student projects there, but they were too full so we went to another museum in town that led to a long series of associations.
They were having one of the people who does historical sword fighting at the Royal Armory in Leeds England come over and teach a class on the two handed sword.
It was totally unlike anything I had done before.***** One class and I knew this was the sword style I wanted to do, not the “fighting with sticks” that everything I had done before that had been.

The rest of the troupe wasn’t interested. They had their style and were happy with it.
I went to more classes. My wife tried the classes. After more then a year, we both ended up joining their study group that was actually researching the historical manuals.
We became some of their demonstrators doing historical sword fights on weekends for museum guests. For several years we did almost every show there.

While that was going on, we were still part of the performance group. My wife and I would use the historical material, but no one else really wanted to.
After a couple of years, the couple that ran that group broke up. It was a messy situation by any standards and the troupe got dragged into the middle of it.

After several months of that, we got fed up enough to quit. But, we still wanted to keep doing the shows, and we had all that historical sword fighting we had wanted to use for a couple of years.
So, we started our own group: Phoenix Swords.

I know, I know “but Frank, what about the fire?”
The fire doesn’t come into the story until this point. I never liked fire. I still don’t. I went camping all of three times as a kid. Fire was not something I wanted to deal with.******

But, we were a brand new group. People from the group we had left were actively bad mouthing us to faire organizers. We had helped to run the old group, but from behind the scenes. So what if we filled out the insurance forms or did the website. Who know that? They knew the people who’d walk up and say “I’m the leader of this group!”
So, if they were told we didn’t know what we were doing, folks believed them.

The old group had already burned out two troupe leaders at that point. Both of them wanted to do fire performance. We thought “they’ll come join us if we let them do fire”.
So, my wife talked with them about it. They agreed. We’d do all the sword shows, they’d do all the fire shows.
That worked for one performance. Then one of them quit performance all together and the other cut back a whole lot to get married and have kids.
We promised fire shows to people.
So, my wife took over the fire show part of Phoenix. She did a massive amount of research and development of acts. She found props to use, fuels to use, styles to use.
Other people in the troupe started saying “hey, I want to do that!”
For quite some time, we kept the fire show a separate part of Phoenix. It had it’s own leaders, that still reported to us, it’s own shows, it’s own procedures.
But, there came a point when all of the sword fighting people, except me, had learned a fire trick or a support role for the fire show.
At that point, we stopped pretending there was any difference between the two groups.
I still had not intended to start performing with fire. But, two of our members had fire swords. Once they needed someone to sub in. I didn’t like what they did with them anyhow, so changed what was done for that show. Folks liked that better and those two left the troupe. We had new swords made and made them part of the regular fire show.
I can sub on several of the other things as well now. But, I’m still not a big fan of the fire.

So, that’s my long winded story about how we got here.
Hope you like it.

*There was one time, while my parents were getting the house sided, that my brother and I were fighting with aluminum tent poles up on the scaffolding along the back of the house. There are times I wonder how I survived that part of my life.
But, when The Phantom Menace came out and they were doing the lightsaber fight on walkways over large drops and stuff, it did make me say “yep, that’s how to do it.”

** Yes, I did just compare SCA fighting to me and my brother hitting each other with sticks in the back yard. Don’t take that as any negative thing about the SCA in general, but more for those specific people on the WPI quad in 1981.

*** One of those two is still used in our shows. The other one broke at a practice two years ago. I’ve been afraid to send it back for repairs as his policy says he can just send me a replacement instead of repair it. I don’t want a new one, I want that one fixed. A friend of mine has started welding and it is on his “to do list”.

**** I had only met him the week before as he didn’t attend any of the practices. Until he made his announcement, I didn’t even know he was the troupe leader.

***** At the time I did not know how incredibly lucky I was to have randomly received Dr. Patri Pugliese as my partner. At the end of the class he said “we have this study group you might like…” I turned him down. I was busy on Tuesdays. I was a moron.

****** My father was an electrical engineer who worked for the power company for 52 years. He tried to get his house built without a fire place, but the builder refused. About every other year my mother would talk him into letting us have a fire in the fireplace at home. But, he’d make my brother and I get the wood, and clean up after so we could see that “electricity was better!”