Conbust

[fbhjr]

Saturday morning it was cold, damp and a little bit snowy.
But, we still drove out to ConBust at Smith College in Western Mass.


For the last two years, my wife has performed at this convention with the Higgins Museum. She finally got our name in as Phoenix, so both groups were doing shows there. And, my wife with both groups.
Due to the bad weather, we were performing inside instead of out in front of the building.
It was good to be out of the cold and wet, but I did find inside to be VERY hot. Still, we’ve performed in worse.

At the room we were give, we found that Higgins got top billing, but our name was spelled correctly.


We were given the room next door to share as a dressing room. I found a lot of the ads posted there very interesting. A vast majority of them were for studying somewhere else: in other countries, on ships, at other schools, etc. It seems that if you go to Smith, they try and get you to go somewhere else. That seems strange to me.

I did see one add for a lecture that looked interesting, but it is during my work day.


And, after our show in Florida at the start of the month, it seems like the 7 deadly sins are following us around.


The first show of the day was Higgins doing their Star Wars show.

(It bothers me they don’t start their shows on time.)

OK, their Star Wars show.


They use German longsword and Italian Rapier to simulate lightsabers.
Even if this requires the use of light daggers.


The audience was thrilled.


When they handed out the “practice lightsabers” people did get more interested.
Don, the tall Jedi, does get very into it. He has an instruction sheet that includes things like the “Wampa Ward” and such.

Then was our historical show:

Some people apparently showed up just to see the watermelon get it.




It was the debut of the Tallhoffer bec de corbin that Kara and Dave have been working on.

It went over well.
It makes me happy to have parts of the historical show that are things other than what my wife and I have researched. If we can encourage other people to research some of this stuff, we are doing something right.

We were followed by Higgins Women in historical sword fighting show.

Once you add my wife 50% of the people in the Women in Historical fighting show were actually women...


Higgins and Phoenix joined together to give sword and buckler lessons. The only Phoenix folks were my wife and Jose.



Then we were up teaching “Pirate Sword Fighting”.
We used our two curved weapon styles: Falchion and Dusack.


We let the crowd vote on what they wanted to learn. It was 100% dusack, 0% falchion.
Some people, like me, would think this is due to the fact blue_micha does a significantly better sword fight than Jose. But, I’m told I play favorites. (I guess 100% of our audience does too...)

We had 12 people step forward for lessons at once in a room that wasn’t all that large.


But, we broke them into 6 pairs as spread out as possible and started teaching.



We also showed them some Fiore Dagger. I have no idea if Pirates used that or not, but they might have.


When we were done with that, we had finished our sword shows for the day. So I took the swords out to the car and got the stuff for the movie discussion.
I got yelled at by a squirrel that had a very big cookie in it’s mouth.

It seemed quite worried I was going to take the cookie, but all I took was its photo.

When I got back, the Higgins folks were doing their Girl Genius show.


Zeetha has green hair, not blue. It bothers me that Mark, who can be so picky about other costumes, but not be equally picking about other things.


The Jägermonster was OK I guess.

At least there was a fancy hat.

We did our talk on sword fights in the movies.

It was pretty free form. I’m told that was jarring for some people.

Then we went out to dinner at the Northampton Brewery and had a good time.

By the time we got home, I was very tired.

Comments

[chris-warrior.livejournal.com]

i was going to say - it looks like you had more people for lessons than actually watched the Higgins demo. hrm.