St. Cecilia II Part 1 -- Taverns and Playing Classes
St. Cecilia was last weekend. I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. It was well run. I had enough support the day of that I got to teach my classes, take other classes, and perform in the concert without needing to attend to many event steward duties. Or at least, as far as I know nothing broke that pulled me away from what I was doing. It’s possible such messes happened, other people cleaned them up, and I just never heard about it. I can be OK with that.
Taverns
One of the big things we added to the event was a lunch and dinner tavern. I didn’t have these last year because it was a complication I just didn’t want to deal with. In my mind a music event doesn’t have to have period or period-esque food. It needs to have lots of music playing. So long as people have time to eat, that’s what matters. Plus it was the first year for the event. I had enough to do to just make it happen. That said I saw it over and over again on last year’s survey so I wanted to make it happen this year.
Cynnabar is not particularly blessed with cooks, however. The only cook I felt comfortable asking was Arina, and really I would rather she have taken classes than cook. I brought it up to her anyway and she was happy to do the dinner tavern. :) So that just left the lunch tavern. I think for a while I thought maybe aelkiss could run it since, I know he can cook. But we soon scrapped that idea since like he should teach and take classes and help me run the event and stuff.
After some hemming and hawing and complaining expressing my concerns to a certain Laurel and Countess in Ayerton, Mistress Tacit approached me offering to run the lunch tavern. I accepted, ran it past the Barony, and only with the slightest maybe-grumbling about me not finding someone local to do it, they also accepted it.
From my end, it looked like she and Christian had no problem running the tavern. I have had plenty of less than awesome experience running music at non-local events (You need light to play? Why do you have a problem with the fabric sheet we put behind you that soaks up the sound? Amplification?! That’s crazy talk in this building that was build with microphones and speakers in mind... ) I didn’t want her to have that kind of experience here. AFAIK I think her experience was positive. So yay. (Also yay Church having a nice, functional kitchen.)
I thoroughly enjoyed the lunch tavern. In particular I liked the sweet bread with currants. Just what I wanted. I think people didn’t realize how good her cooking was, so there were more servings than people who bought tickets. Also there wasn’t meat, which I saw made people grumble. (Mostly vegetarian person says, “Grawr.”) But that meant we got seconds. And I think dinner sold out so we definitely made enough at the taverns as a whole to at least break-even between the two.
Dinner was tasty too, although I had nerves so I didn’t eat all that much. :( Arina made tons of food. No one went away hungry.
Overall I’m glad we had the taverns. Yes, it was more work for me, but it improved the event because people didn’t have to leave the site and we didn’t have to worry about how the local restaurant would handle a crowd. And the food was really good.
I definitely intend to do taverns again next year. I’m happy with how we handled them. We had tickets at the door, and only as many tickets as we had portions for people. We didn’t run out of food and knew when / if we made the break-even point. The only “problem” was the name. They weren’t really taverns in that you bought meal-ticket at the gate. At the same time it definitely wasn’t a feast. So I dunno.
The main thing I’d change about the taverns is I’d like to have someone else coordinate them. (Find someone to do the tavern, make the proposal, make sure there are volunteers to support the tavern, etc.) My inner control freak wonders if I can trust someone else to do the job well. Oh Trust.
Yay F00ds!
Lots of Music; Lots of Fun
Another suggestion I saw in last year’s survey was that people wanted more time to actually play music with people. Granted, they filled out the surveys before the scheduled group sight reading and sight singing, but is true that I didn’t have any “Lots of Music Lots of Fun” classes during the day. That was on purpose because I personally get a fairly good fill of sight-reading. Sight-reading is an easy thing to arrange at events. You show up with music and people play. Aside from Terpsichore, I get to sight read at just about every event I go to. Not to mention my weekly non-sca recorder group. Aside from Pennsic and KWDMS I don’t get to go to many classes on about early music or about how to be a better performer of early music. But *gasp* not everyone is me. :P
The people who I knew wanted more sight reading were thrilled to have it. So that is happy even if I didn’t go to those classes. I will do something similar next year.
(P.S. Thank you shalmestere for introducing the term “Lots of Music; Lots of Fun” to me. Best term evar.)