Your first Vous or renactment

[Robin]

I would like to hear some experices (stories) of your very first event,that you were a particapent in. Funny , sad, the works and how did you end up at that event. (you don't have to tell how long ago it was LOL) :thanks:

 

[Maestro]

I'll let you know my story in about 10 days when I'm back from the EPR! Should be a pretty interesting week with my wife & two kids at our first rondezvous!
:haha: :cry: :haha: :cry:

 

[Greg Walden]

Well, I tell ya, it was a long time ago - September 1973. Reenactment of the Battle of Munfordville, KY, I was 17 years old. I got interested in reenactments from a man next door who had been in the centennial events, and he let me borrow his rig and Zouave and I went to Munfordville. Just walked up to the first unit I saw and marched with those boys for 20 years!

Wasn't I the worst farb you ever seen? :grey:

Greg

 

[donk]

It was about 10 years ago. My brother had just built me my first muzzle loader, a 40 cal. long rifle in a birdseye maple stock. I had 3 planks of the birdseye maple and he traded me the work for one of the planks and he made me promise him That I would start rendezvousing with him once in a while. Our local rendezvous came around so I thought I would give it a try. I bought a pair of cordaroy pants and made myselfe a voyager shirt. I stayed in my brothers store tent (an old Boy Scout wall tent that leaked like a sive)with about 3 or 4 other guys. The store tent was dubed "Red's Flop House" It
rained most of the week end but by the end I was hooked. The following year my brother sold me his 14 ft pyramid tent and the whole family came out and enjoyed the fun. Those early rendezvous are some of the greatest memorys I have with my brother. Now that he is gone it sometimes doesn't seem quite right with out him but we still always seem to have a good time anyway. That's the way he would have wanted it.

 

My first Vous was Haddam in Connecticut. I helping out a friend who was a sutler there. His personna was a Russian sutler. We were portraying Jewish brothers. "Please, please! Come in! We trade shiney new things for old dirty green dollars!" Had that tent packed wall to wall with people. Traders from up and down the row were looking to see what was happening.

 

[bnail]

My first Event was at Crompton's fort in Clio Mi. I was a young high schooler freshly recruited into the 13th Penna Reg.
It rained All bloody weekend, and us young bucks were hunkered down in coleman tents most of the time. The rain, instead of laying a pall over the event, heightened the atmosphere. There we were, cold, out of place among the older particapants and feeling very foriegn. The woodsmoke blended with the wet hay and filled the air with a rich aroma of, what I can only imagine, colonial garrison duty was like. Smoke from the campfires combined with the overcast day and the constant drizzle providing a somber visage that, to this day, seems an almost black and white memory. The tents filled the parade ground and the subtle patter of the rain on the ground and surrounding trees was a soundtrack that became a wonderful mood piece in my mind whenever I recall that event.
Dinner was a communal stew cooked over the fire in the block house; it was served with bread, but no spoons.
I've been hooked ever since. :thumbsup:

 

[cj5luke]

Guess I can share mine... I must have been about 10, maybe 12, my Dad had been doing CW since he was kid when the 100th events rolled around. By the time I came along he was part of the 1st Minnesota and would take off to do stuff with them all the time. We lived in WI so I didn't get to see much of the 1st. He fell in with the local 8th Wisconsin as well but the 1st was the big one.

Well, one summer we all (the whole family) went to a living history "recruiting" event at a small town in southern MN. It was great, the town welcomed the 1st with open arms, there were a bunch of guys... I was a kid so I remember a full company but looking back I doubt it was that much. One afternoon they decided that they need some Rebs to chase around, so they dug out enough gear to arm about 8 guys and I got to tag along. Needless to say the little scrapper got captured with one or two others. They "tied" our hands behind our backs and marched us down a little hill (half the town was on the crest watching) and made us drop to our knees a touch out from the base and the troops formed right at the bottom. So there I was, wearing clothes that were scrounged up for me and wouldn't ya know, on my knees but kind of leaning back with my hands behind my back, the crotch of the trousers split right up and my underwear was their for the world to see! I was so embarassed I got up and ran... but I did have the smarts to fall when they shot! Damn Rebs running for it.....

 

[Cruzatte]

Well, lemme see--it was away back in 19 and aught 86, I reckon, when me 'n' the boys in the string band was a-playin' a show for the opening of the new building that was to house the Kansas State Hisotorical Museum, in Topeka. I remember it well. We launched into some rip-roarin' sort of hoedown, and just as I finished my banjo solo, I looks up, and whaddya think I sees but a company of Yankee cavalry on matching bay horses drillin'. Says I to myself "Self, I gotta talk to them fellas. Their horses look mighty pretty." (Always was one to go mooney-eyed over good lookin' horse flesh.)

Well sir, we got done with the show, and I did go up and introduce myself. They said they were the 4th U.S. Missouri Vol. Cavalry, Co. C, otherwise known to history as "The Fr

 

[TANSTAAFL]

The old NAPR rondys of 70's, wild and wooly days (and nights) indeed. Things have sure tamed down since, sort of akin to H. Williams Jr's, "All My Rowdy Friends Have Settled Down."

 

[loophole]

It was the first Southeastern, held at a Ga. State park near Helen, about 35 years ago. The most enduring memory was my friend, Wild Bill Holcombe, who got between two Ga. boys passing around a jug of shine one evenin and ended up double toking the jug all night. The next morning I was awakened before dawn by a sound like I imagine a small cow would make trying to give birth to an elephant--a horrible combination of bellowing, gagging, snorting, and heaving, with what sounded like a prayer in the more quiet intervals, comming from a grove of Russian olive trees behind our camp. This kept up while I got a fire going and boiled coffee. Ol'e Bill staggered back into camp, his face a putrid shade of jaundiced yellow/green, and moaned: "good lord, boys, I've been puking up better liquor than I usually drink."
They had another Southeastern there a few years later, and I noticed an area almost 10 feet in diameter in the Russian olive trees where the ground was still black and nothing was growing. . . .