Renown

Renown. Word-fame. Reputation. Call it what you like. As a friend of mine likes to say, "Renown is a very funny thing." 

Thanks more to electronic keystrokes than anything else, I appear to have it. All it took was being active on certain forums (forae?), sharing what I knew, researching what I didn't know, jumping into knowledge gaps and posting my ideas and methods on my own website in case someone else wanted to try doing the same thing.

It got me invited to Known World Costuming and Rattan in Calontir in 2005 and Caerthe Twelfth Night in the Outlands shortly after, where I turned into half the kingdom's Japanese grandmother, fixing collars, tying obi or just assuring people they looked fine. It's caused total strangers to run squeeing up to me at interkingdom events crying "Makiwara-sensei!" or people I've only ever met electronically to throw their arms around me or even, conversely, cry "Hey, that's GEORGE!"  It even got me to CostumeCon last year to teach.

It's gratifying. It's humbling. And in some cases it's downright weird.

Last week I was told I was "intimidating." The person who said this (if you're reading this, you know who you are) tried to soft-sell it by saying it was because "you know so much." I don't, really. What I know is a drop in the ocean, I've just sopped up a few things along the way and I'm happy to share. (Admittedly, I have little patience with a couple of people who have a proven track record of being idiots, but mostly I try to be helpful and friendly. Mostly.)

This morning, a Tousando board member apologized for not introducing himself to me at Rising Sun's sake party because I was pouring for crowned heads and he's just a dumb fighter with no notion of how to be "proper" and he was too embarrassed to even try to say hello to me.

Granted, some of this is linked to how I write as Saionji-hime on the board these guys frequent. They have probably formed a mental picture of a high maintenance, propriety-mad court lady who never has a hair out of place, only tolerates a bunch of grubby bushi because it's politically expedient, and goes upside people's heads with the Smackity Fan at the least provocation. The reality splashes through puddles in her best kosode, licks spilt sake off her fingers (you try pouring in near darkness), drops rice on her sleeve, and uses rude words in the presence of the Han.

I told the "dumb" fighter. "Dude, you're Tousando 'family.'" Which he is, by right of civilized discourse and good fellowship on that forum of mostly like-minded maniacs. Then I dropped him a PM in which I confessed my own battles with shyness.

Intimidating. Me. Oy.