Missy - Suplemental The Party

 Please play this music while reading this post.

We went to my clubs Midsummer Nights Dream Halloween party. We dressed as Elizabethan fairies.

We were either Moth and Mote or Moth and consort of Moth in the traditional mortal consort style.

Here is the program:

# 🌙 **Historic Haven: Midsummer Night’s Dream Halloween Masquerade**

### 🎭 *Saturday, October 31st – An Enchanted Evening of Mischief and Magic*

---

**🕗 8:00 PM – Opening Toast & Feast**  

Welcome all! Raise your glasses to good fortune and protection from mischievous spirits.  

Dinner is served, and enchanted potions (a.k.a. booze) are offered as defense against evil spirits.

---

**🌸 8:05 PM – The Flowers of True Sight**  

Gene begins the *Flowers of True Sight* game — seek truth among illusion and find who wears glamour still.  

Meanwhile, Steven wanders the hall with snapdragons, bestowing sparks of mischief and delight.

---

**💃 8:30 PM – Dancing Under the Moonlight**  

The music begins — join hands, elves and mortals alike, for lively historic dances.

---

**🎭 9:15 PM – The Mechanicals’ Play**  

A brief and comical performance by the “finest” troupe of actors in all of Fairyland.  

Prepare for laughter, chaos, and questionable stagecraft!

---

**🔥 9:30 PM – The Pumpkin Fire Leap**  

Brave souls may test their luck and spirit by leaping over the flaming pumpkins —  

a time-honored charm for courage and good fortune.

---

**🏆 9:45 PM – Costume Awards**  

Prizes bestowed for:  

• Best Costume  

• Sexiest Costume  

• Best Elf  

• Best Ass’s Head  

---

**🎶 10PM – The Bard’s Ballad**  

Steven performs a *serious historical ballad* 

---

✨ *Join us for a night of revelry, magic, and merriment in our enchanted indoor forest!*

This is the event we have been learning all those dances for. It was also the thing I have been crafting up a storm over. 

The projects that I am the most proud of are David’s moth pattern cloak and my matching French Hood pattern. 

It’s not exactly a French Hood but it was as close as a Walmart costume hat and hot glue could go. 

Both of these are much more Tudor than Elizabethan but I was working with older costumes that I was trying to bring forward by several decades. 

On the other hand fairy’s are probably very loose in their timeline fashion choices so maybe it’s more authentic than not, that the costumes were a little old fashioned. 

I tried to bring us up to date with neck ruffs and changing the profiles of the garb. 

Then of course wings and ears from cheap Chinese site dot com. 

I 3d printed and painted and assembled moth masks and antlers and a headband. A nice thing about printing is the ability to resize headbands to a customizable fit.

My husband is a dashing and long suffering kindly date. 

He also applied some mustache wax to go for an Elizabethan men’s grooming style. 

My friend Lucero also loaned us some earrings and rings and necklaces in moth themes. 

We had parent duty for the evening so my main goal was to make sure we made it for the dancing. 

We drove out to Frederick dressed fancy (driving in a hoop skirt is a whole thing) and found parking. 

We scuttled (cold October breeze in an hoop skirt is also a thing!) over to the club and joined the throng. 

It was a throng too. 

We saw many amazing costumes and dodged in and out of hanging greenery and sparkling beverages. 

We took part in 3 chaotic dances that taught me that I should have sewed in the Velcro patches on the cloak and that mask plus glasses plus ears was a dangerous amount of precarious balance. 

Poor David was very much not digging the crowd so we had a drink and left quickly. 

I loved the dancing and the crafting and the Shakespeare of it all. 

 

Missy - Supplemental- Song and Dance

I’m in a choir called The Choral Arts Society of Frederick. We are in the build up for our winter concert. This year we are doing holiday songs and one of those songs is Blow, Blow, thou Winter Wind. 

Blow, Blow, thou Winter Wind is lyrically Shakespeare, from the comedy As You Like It, and the musical arrangement is by the composer Sarah Quartel.

Here is another choir doing the same arrangement we are working on. 

I will say that I think our Tenors and Basses are better but it’s pretty close for the Altos and Sopranos.

It’s been stuck in my head since rehearsal Tuesday night.

In other supplemental Shakespeare encounters, we went to Shakespearean/medieval dance night again yesterday. 

Again we had a ball. There were even more people and our move up hall move down hall started getting cramped. 

We reviewed the Tangle (that conga line like one) and the Maltese Bransel (the violent stomps one) and started learning two new dances. Both were English country dances  

Our first new dance was called Gathering Peascods. Here are people who actually know how to do it demonstrating.  

Our version besides being way more awkward and disoriented was, once again, more violent. 

Our instructor was calling out the moves in a sing song way. The chorus (which aligns with the dancers moving in and out of the center) went “and the men move in and clap, and the women move in and clap, and the men move in and they don’t clap and they all turn around”.

This is very helpful. Our addition was that when the men don’t clap they must have a “fuck you guys” moment. This initially manifested as the men flipping each other off but then quickly degenerated into the men trying to mash each others toes again. 

There was one hilarious moment where we had to dance around two of them rolling about on the floor establishing dominance, or some such. 

We achieved peak medieval/renaissance merrymaking. 

This dance is a pre restoration dance found in the manual The Dancing Master by the composer and publicist John Playford. The first publication of this manual was in 1651 and it went into reprint at least 18 times until at least 1728. 

So it’s a little late for Shakespeare to have seen the manual but, depending on how old the dances were when published, probably not too late for him to have tried them out.

The next dance we started to learn was called Jenny Plucked Pears and it too is from the Playford manual. 

Here is the exact video we watched. 

 

This one is good for a number of reasons, not least is the “thirstiest 60 year old woman in the world”. Watch the video. You will see what our instructor meant. 

We all want to be her at 60. 

Each of the dancing classes has started with a segment on etiquette and historical significance but mostly the focus has been on flirting. For instance palms are very intimate and should never touch your partner (thanks Romeo!).

This dance is apparently a great example of “meat market” dancing when everyone shows off and flirts with everyone else. 

We certainly gave it a go and had one stumbling but flirty run through before our time was up. 

I need to practice my spins… also telling my left from my right. 

A grand time was had by all. 

Here we are doing the Tangle. You can see how packed it was and how tangled. 

 

Missy - Suplemental - Dance

 

I belong to a gamer/maker club here in Frederick. During the cooler seasons of the year they often offer SCA adjacent dance lessons. 

Often those lessons are tied to an end goal of performance at a party. This year for our club Halloween party we are doing A Midsummers Nights Dream as our theme. 

So here we are with a bonus Shakespeare topic: Shakespearean dance. 

I am delighted. I am also not a dancer but I would love to be. I’m going to add a few suplemental entries over the next 6 weeks as I try out new Elizabethan and medieval dances. Some of these, and very likely most of these, were danced during the time of Shakespeare, and were danced by him and his troop and their audiences.

Last night we learned variations on the Bransle (Branle) that mostly looked like a conga line and then a conga line that got twisted up. The pronunciation of Branle is basically the same as brawl.

Here is a video from YouTube of people doing it right.

This was a fantastic ice breaker dance as mostly we shuffled and at the most rousing points we were all laughing hard and pulling each other about. 

Branle is a French origin dance popular from the early 1500s through the 1700s. This one is both Shakespeare  period appropriate and easy. 

After a break for fresh bread and butter (and lots of drinks) we moved on to our 2nd dance of the evening. 

This one, called the Maltese Bransle in the SCA, and also known as the Schiarazula Marazula was fun and a little violent.

I’ve seen a ton of different versions of this one on YouTube today and they all have circle and snap and clap but ours also had spectacular, establish dominance on each others feet, stomping!

Among its most notable aspects, this dance, first recorded in Italy the 1570s,  was recorded by the inquisition as being confused with witches summoning rituals, and the next best anecdote was of the whole thing being a post crusades version of belly dancing.

So there we have it for night one of Shakespeare oriented dancing.

Here we are in all our uncoordinated but enthusiastic glory.

Special thanks to The Haven Guys for the pics and video from last night!