Sometime during preparation for our son’s birthday party, I figured out that we just aren’t normal. My wife and I were traveling to a Military Ball dressed like this:

These people look normal right?

As we drove the hour to our destination, my wife was balancing a notebook on her lap, checking and crosschecking the characters for our son’s medieval/fantasy birthday party, and ensuring that we weren’t missing any props or costumes or cross references. “So the Ogre has the crystalized Ogre sweat?” she asked, adjusting the strap on her sequined gown.

“Yes, which he’ll give up for a love letter from Seraphina,” I said, checking with one hand to ascertain if my bow tie was straight.

“How will they know to get a love letter from her?”

“He has written one to his Someone Speshul, which they should figure out is her after all her sighing and mooning about.”

“And the gargoyles?” she asked.

“He trades the fairy princess he kidnapped for the gargolye,” I said.

“Right. So who is the guest speaker at the ball tonight?”

We drove on like this intermingling occasional cell phone calls to reality with jotting down prop and costume notes.

At one point as we were going through this and I thought about all the preparation people were doing at home to get ready, I said “We have awesome friends, I mean, what normal people have friends who will dress up in costumes and spend the day pretending to be mythical creatures or people?”

There was a pause, then I realized, “We’re not normal.” I guess I’ve known it most of my life, but I’ve done a pretty good job of pretending. Apparently, all of our friends fit into a category that one of my colleagues affectionately calls “misfits.” (He counts himself in that group, as do I). Herewith are a few sample pictures of the type of friends we have:

Queen Rivien, The Fairy Queen and Questgiver

All of the pictures of Rivien turned out with this halo of mist around them. We think maybe the lens had moisture on it from the humidity that dried out before we took pictures of anyone else. Either that, or it’s real fairy dust.

Seraphina, the Fairy Queen's Alchemist

Seraphina was connected to several quest lines, but my favorite was apparent in this picture. She was pining for a true love to come and take her away. It turned out to be the Ogre Grog…that took the kids some figuring out, though there were any number of clues…

The Cavalier/Pirate Porthos

“You stole that wine from the innkeeper!” “I did not! This wine was a gift to me from the Queen of America…” Awesome roleplaying and incredible but safe fencing in a controlled environment…

Grog the Ogre and his Friend

It was an hour and a half before anyone got back to Grog deep in the woods. He had taken to singing Ogre songs to himself and talking to his friend. If you asked his friend’s name, he’d say “Grog not sure, Ogre names are what sound you like to make. My friend’s name is either AAAAAAAH! or OW MY LEG! or NOOOOOO! or AN OGRE!!, but I don’t think it’s Ogre cause that’s copyrighted.”

So that is the first little batch. If you like them, I will post more. The role-playing was phenomenal. Our friends are AWESOME. Oh, and in answer to the question: “Who has friends like this?” Apparently all of my friends have friends like this. That makes us misfits I assume…

Tags: birthday, cavalier, fairy, ogre, party, roleplaying

This entry was posted on Monday, September 15th, 2008 at 7:48 pm and is filed under The Current Middle Ages. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.