Lizapalooza part Deux

Saturday dawns, bright, sunny, warm…in short the antithesis of a Seattle morning in April. Stephanie and I manage to find our way to a Starbucks, which proves surprisingly more of a challenge than one might think given that we are in the Pacific North West and the “Death Star” of Starbucks is within Tractor-beam range. But we manage, and a quad-grande-vanilla-latte never tasted so damned good! So off to the conference site we head. As an aside, I am a bit mystified that a college campus (be it a state school, a community college, or a large ivy league) can exist without an embedded coffee shop of some sort if not an actual outpost of one of the large caffeine purveyors! The parking lot of the college is marked poorly and we make a wrong turn or two, we nearly plow into a group of guys taking motorcycle driving tests in a back parking lot (they were not visible from around the corner, so fortunately Stephanie’s car has good breaks.).
Once in the lecture hall and Dre and Stephanie and I have selected seats close to center and pretty close to front ( I am now flashing back to my Constitutional Law 101 class and my Art History in Review Lectures….and trying to hide the nervous tick these two overtones spark) and take I nthe crowd then. I ma pleased to see a goodly number of people from my home Barony (Madrone…which covers the metro Seattle area) are present. This tells me my secret (well ok not so secret as it has become the open joke within the Barony and Antir) plan to drag first Madrone and ultimately Antir kicking and screaming into late period clothing one farthingale/ doublet at a time if I have to! They wear far too much early medieval/ and Viking/Norse attire up here for my comfort….so we are slowly tempting them one by one out of their frumpy frocks and plopping them into faboo toggs much prettier to behold!
We settle in to the first lecture and that’s when it happens. “Annoying Woman” (from here on to simply be referred to as AW) raises her hand and in a reedy annoying nasalish tone admonishes everyone to please turn their celphones off so as not to bother HER! I immediately wonder if we are going to have a chance to vote her off the island at the lunch break. Now mind you, we are about to talk about Elizabethan Middle Class/ Peasant class working woman’s attire…….AW raises her hand again to ask if Drea has information that speaks specifically to the tradition of ordering a daughter’s wedding dress at the time of her birth!?!?!?

1-this is a GENERAL OVERVIEW discussion
2-that is not really a middle to lower class of society type question
3-this is a GENERAL OVERVIEW discussion
4-the question is asked in a tone that clearly announces to us all “aren’t I wonderful for being a font of such erudite pedantic academic information and curiosities?....the resounding silent answer was an emphatic NO! Clearly legible in the sour expressions of all in the room. I noticed two ladies try to skooch a bit away from her on either side trying not to be tainted in the public calumny fest by proximity to her

**an aesthetic note**-AW is wearing a long caftan sort of frock, whitish in tone, with wonderful late 70’s retro woven banded trim, a skirt slightly longer than the caftan (which is belted in with another chunk of 70’s retro-banded-coarse weave trim….and coincidentally she has opted for an eco-friendly statement on the evil fashion industry that doubles as a throw back to feminism rallying cry by eschewing a bra in favor of letting the belt act as quasi support for her busticles which would otherwise have easily been able to say hi to her waist were it not for the high riding band of trim that effectively blocked their passage southward. Furthering the crackly granola look was a lack of makeup, and long Cher (while she was still with Sunny and still had her actual nose) hair thus completing her fresh off the commune ensemble to perfection

Every particle of AW’s being screams light me on fire and beat it out with a bag of hot nickels! I curb my instincts and do not answer that primal call to action and instead force myself to pay attention to the lecture instead. At a break in the geekfest, as dre has noted, we were subjected to AW’s “apprentice” who is a wiry “people-jerky” woman who looks like she has lived the last century on a widows walk having every iota of excess flash buffeted away by a strong ocean wind so she is a skeleton wrapped in tough leather. She is Bragging about her limberness by demonstrating that she can hoist her leg behind her head while standing up. See, I am of the opinion that no human needs to retain that skill at her age, and even if they do by some strange confluence of circumstances involving yoga, drinking water bottled in near Hanford Nuclear facility in eastern WA, and brief exposure to “Chemical X” of power puff girls fame……we the poor unsuspecting and delicate genteel viewing populace need NEVER know that the skill has hung on that long!
Then comes the corset class. This is exceedingly informative and reshapes a few of my views on the process of creating one of these little gut rearranging confections. The practical session where some of us get to draft out a pattern based on the system that Drea has come up with for interrupting one’s measurements into a simple pattern was a great help too. I was partnered with a woman, who I am sure is a very nice person, but WOW…..I really hope she didn’t drive to the event. Her inability to manage a simple distinction between left and right was dumbfounding, the fact that she was bested by a scotch tape dispenser that didn’t have to put out any effort to effectively have her in the equivalent of a half-nelson trying to figure out how to undo her mistake, and her basic inability to manage simple math all made me desperately hope she is not in possession of a state issued drivers license from any state in the USA! Fortunately I was able to tap the able hands of a woman not actually in the class to do my measurements for me so that the woman next to me who was a muzzle-loaded mind in a 357 caliber world could muddle through her own little problem set and not tax my ability to hold my tongue and comment by forcing me to deal with her!
I took photos of many books I want to buy and made sure to get snaps of their title pages too, I am so going to regret making that wish-list since it represents a sizeable chunk of income if I do manage to lay hands on them! Next comes an evening out with costume Geeks.