This has been irritating me for some time so I thought I'd vent a bit about it. Have you ever had this happen:
You and a bunch of your reenacting buddies are sitting around the campfire talking about various period impressions. At some point, someone says "wouldn't it be great to do an xxxx impression". At that point, like a fool, you add : "Sure, let's organize a unit...it would be cool, neat, etc. and there's a whole lot of good living history, etc., etc., etc...." You get the idea.
So now everyone's really enthusiastic and in the ultimate act of self-abuse, you volunteer to do the heavy lifting in organizing a new unit and everyone agrees and they all pledge to help out, etc. For the next few months, you enthusisastically research uniforms, equipment, weapons, etc. and sources for authentic items. You even go as far as to buy certain items in mass quantify that there are no originals for and you wind up investing a small fortune to the point where all you're eating is candybar lunches and raiding the free food trays at work.
Months pass by, you've completed your work and it's now time for everyone to start work on building their impressions and start planning some events.Now, all of a sudden, everyone is unavailable, there's been family emergencies, the dog needs new braces, a meteor fell on the house, Aliens have abducted them, etc. The excuses are as plentiful as grains of sand. Nobody seems to be available or able to carry on. So there you are- you've built your impression, invested a lot of time and $$$$ and you're basically all dressed up with nowhere to go. In short, you're screwed.
Sure, you can carry on and do various living history gigs but let's face it, it sucks being an "Army of One" and looks kind of stupid. To add insult to injury, your buddies have now discovered some other "great new impression", especially one that's cheap and easy to put together (and it looks it) and not necessarily the most authentic.
Even more interesting, when they see you coming, none of them can look you straight in the eye and you get an ocean of embarassed looks. The lesson here is that there's lots of talking but little walking when time comes to step up to the plate and follow through. It's an unfortunate lesson. What's especially galling is that this happens even in spite of all the painstaking efforts you made to make things easy for people to build an impression and get the correct information
It's the typical thing: people talk the talk but can't walk the walk!
I've been burned a couple of times on this and so I tend to take a more passive role in this area. Recently, a friend of mine and I have been going through a smaller version of the above in regard to maintaining a WWI reenactment unit (we do US infantry circa 1917-18). People are long on talk but we just can't get anyone to get off their ass and actually step up to the plate to help, so we're stuck with all the work.
Oh well... I'll have more on this later.
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