Thursday, September 29th 2005

by the Writer's Guild of Wunderland

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This weekend we traveled back in time to the year 1775. To put it another way, we went to Colonial Williamsburg!

The occasion was a very special annual event we call Sharon's Day, a family holiday if you will, in which I (and others in the family) get to spend the day (and a bunch of my money) goofing off with my niece Sharon, in honor of the fact that I'm her Godfather. Every year we try to find some new adventure to go on, and this year, the time was right for a trip to Williamsburg.

For those who maybe don't know anything about Williamsburg, it's a living history museum, a complete recreation of an entire town from about 1775, on the site of an actual 18th century town, where actual history took place. Williamsburg features many original buildings, fully restored, intermingled with reconstructed buildings which have been rebuilt as authentically as possible. It's really quite a remarkable place, and I heartily recommend a visit.

Williamsburg is a very important place to my brother Jeff. As a professional historian of note, working on the papers of Thomas Jefferson at Monticello, Jeff's interest in history grew with every visit our family made to Williamsburg while we were growing up. His studies in 18th century history took him to Princeton, where he met his wife-to-be, and they spent their honeymoon in a tavern in Williamsburg. So I'm not exaggerating when I say it was a special thrill to be sharing in the experience, together with Jeff, as his 8 year old children got their first taste ever of Colonial Williamsburg. (Plus it was Kristin's first visit, too!)

We had a grand day together, exploring everything from the Cooper's workshop (where barrels are made, like the one Sharon is testing out above) to the Garden Maze behind the Governor's Palace (where Jeff's "boss" Thomas Jefferson lived for a time, as Governor of Virginia.) We feasted for lunch at the King's Arms Tavern and rounded out the day with a magnificent meal at one of Jeff's very favorite restaurant's ever: Christina Campbell's Tavern.

Dinner at Christina Campbell's was particularly memorable, and not just for the spoonbread or the games of Family Fluxx (near final prototype) with Sharon and Volcano with James. During dinner, Ms. Campbell herself came by to talk to her guests, and we had some jolly good fun hearing her react when James said that they'd traveled by car ("He means carriage") all the way from Charlottesville in a matter of 2 hours. "But of course, that's a journey of several days," she proclaimed. "He must have slept quite a bit along the way!" Of course, everyone at Colonial Williamsburg tries always to stay in character, and we met a variety of interesting people that day.

Well, after dinner, Jeff had the particular pleasure of talking about the details of Christina Campbell's history with the woman portraying her. He's researched and written about her history, and traded recipes for the promise of mailing her his Campbell biography!

I hadn't been to Williamsburg in perhaps 20 years, so it was interesting to see the changes they'd made. As you would hope and expect, things seemed pretty much the same in the historic districts, but wow, the Visitor Center sure has changed! (And even in the historic district there are subtle changes... archeologists are now excavating the site of the town's coffeehouse. Someday, it might be rebuilt and open for business again!)

Also, I really liked the new way of getting from the Visitor Center into the historic area. Time was when you had to get dropped off by a shuttle bus, but now they've got a pedestrian overpass that means you can just walk in. What's especially cool is that the bridge has markers all along it announcing your gradual passage backwards in time. We immediately started calling it the Time Bridge, and it totally enhanced the time travel fantasy of the experience, which follows nicely with last year's trip back to 1536.

And that wasn't the only new experience history had in store for us that day. Here we see Dean Shostak playing an instrument invented by Ben Franklin called the Glass Armonica. Once quite popular, the instrument fell out of favor in the 1830s and there hasn't been one known to exist anywhere until a few years ago when Dean had one built, from scratch, by a scientific glass-blower.

The Glass Armonica works on the same principle as rubbing your fingers on the rim of a glass to make it sing. It's a series of nested glass bowls of various sizes, strung on a rod like a lathe, and the musician plays it by wetting his fingers and rubbing them on the rims. It produces a wonderful, ethereal sound... sort of like a theramin, and yet not quite like anything you've heard.

It was a wonderful concert, including as it did other wonders like a glass violin and huge singing bowls. (We enjoyed it so much, we bought his CD!) One highlight was a song written for the Glass Armonica in an age when none existed and never actually heard on the target instrument by its composer: Aquarium, from Carnival of the Animals. (It's quite a familiar piece, you'd probably recognize it. It was popularized on instruments other than the one which inspired it.)

Returning from 1775, and thinking of the professional role-players we encountered there, has helped spur me into getting a few web pages built which I've been trying to get around to, literally, for years. (I was also motivated to post these pages at last because I'm trying to clean off and pack up the junk on my desk, and I found this stack of photos I'd pulled out to scan.) This week I'm happy to unveil web versions of a pair of autobiographical stories I first self published (via an Empire Publications booklet called Saturn Cafe) in 1988. The first is a story about Camping at Henlopen, with the Boy Scouts, and the second is an article about the state of the art in Live Role Playing at that time (when we were still calling them SIL games) called On Weekends, I'm Somebody Else. To fill in the gaps around the original article, which I'm posting unchanged. I've written a new article, called From SIL to LARP, which includes the complete list of 56 games I was in from 1983 and 1997. (I haven't played in a LARP since the founding of Looney Labs. But you never know when I'll decide to come back out of retirement, especially considering that Alison has starting playing them at conventions.)

In other news, we finally have a PR person! We've officially been looking for someone since the start of the summer, but it sometimes takes a long time to find the right person, even when they're right under your nose. Welcome aboard, Stephanie Clarkson! We visited Stephanie in Toronto last summer, and she's got great enthusiasm (not to mention all the skills we've been looking for in a Publicity Specialist).

For more about Stephanie and what she'll be doing for us, check out her own description in her LiveJournal entry.

We're all excited about having Stephanie on our team... her efforts could make a big difference in our quest for success. Yay!

On the other hand, we're really bummed about a little glitch that showed up in the new printing of Fluxx 3.1. In general, the various minor changes we made came out fine -- the purple box in particular looks great! -- but there's an extraneous "2" on the new Basic Rules! Inside the Draw 1 icon! It's awful! And alas, as with the Lost Pledge in the otherwise great-looking EcoFluxx decks (which we also just got the first samples of), there's nothing we can do but make sure it gets fixed on the next printing. But hey, at least they're almost here... we'd all but run out of Fluxx decks, and we're all really eager to have EcoFluxx!

Thanks for reading, have a great week, and Don't Forget to Play!