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Fort Taylor Pyrate Invasion Nov/Dec 2012 - Key West, FL
Chapter 1st: Thursday night in the fort with the pirates; A bit about the encampment (what the surgeon could see of it, that is) and the people who were insistent upon hugging; Meeting up with one of my fellow twins and Jack Robert's parents, whose characters have different names than he does which is just confusing; Dinner out with the twins and Robertseseses; Of Cannibal Chrispy and his new toy (no, not that one, that's his OLD toy - we don't speak of it in mixed company); An encounter with Rachel/Sarah of Key West and the philosophical Blackheart Charlie; Of Rachel; Heading home to the condo and encountering Gwen/Diane Mueller on the walk back; Of Gwen.
Photo: Jim McGavic
A splendid night shot of the fort filled with tents.
The fort was chock-a-block full of canvas from what I could tell in the moonlight. There was a lovely breeze this evening bringing in cool, fresh air. (This is good for the health according to the period surgical authors. Unless people start getting sick, of course. Then it is bad for the health according to the period surgical authors.)
The Mercury crew was set up near the flagpole on the row of inside tents this year. Our group consisted of William, Captain Jim, madPete, me, and Iron Jon. We intently discussed how my display should be set up for the weekend, although my heart wasn't in it. Tomorrow would sort itself out and I was more concerned with getting dinner since I hadn't really eaten much since breakfast. When I broached the subject of eating, no one was interested. Here I was in garb, thinking about going off to eat by myself. Of course, if you have to do it, Key West is certainly the place.
Naturally, I had to be hugged by a dozen different people and you all know how much I love that. What's worse is that since I've been doing these Journals and nattering on about my Patrick Hand Original™, lots of people know me by name, or at least by hat, although I don't know them by name and certainly not by hat. Oh, I sort of know them and I even recognize that I have in the past written entire sections of a Journal about them, but when it comes to cold recollection of names... well, let's just say I use all my spare memory cells to house information about 17th century surgery.
Photo: Mission's Camera
Mae making Mission look good. (It's not that easy to do.)
I finally got near the exit of the fort, leaving all the rabid huggers behind when I ran into none other than Mae, one of my fellow twins. "Third twin!" she called cheerfully. She was with another girl, whom she identified as Alexis. Alexis is one of the many friends of Brig and Mae who somehow got roped into accompanying them to Key West. (They often bring a spare girl to these events for some reason. I suppose if one of the twins is unable to complete her weekend at the fort, the extra girl can take over her duties.)
Now Brig lives in central Florida and Mae lives on the Georgia coast. I asked Alexis where she hailed from. "Maryland." Maryland? Turns out that they met Alexis through the on-line game version of Lord of the Rings two years ago and had been Facebook friends ever since. This was only the second time they had met in person. The first time they met, they got really drunk together. (This is foreshadowing, by the way.)
As it happened, the twins and their clan were heading out for dinner, Jack, Brig and Keira
(
Photo: Mission
Keira and Alexis
Brig's 4 yo daughter) were waiting in the van for Alexis and Mae, so we headed for the parking lot. On the way, Mae stopped to use the rest room, leaving me with Alexis.
"Where are we going?" I asked her.
"Some Italian place that has a z in it. No one can remember the name."
"Ah, Abbandonza."
"Yes, I think that's it!"
"I can get them to go someplace else. I have influence." I explained confidently.
"More influence than Keira? She wants mac-n-cheese."
"Looks like we're going to Abbandonza." I answered. (No one has that much influence.)
Riding in the back of the bus (Jack has a white bus that's disguised as a van), I sat between Mae and Alexis. Alexis is the type of person who has to wear a seat belt, even when she's in the back. This meant she kept digging around in the seat for it and apologizing to your ship's surgeon for grabbing him. I offered to give directions, but Brig and Jack seemed to want to use the GPS system rather than the Mission Dead Reckoning™ system. As a result, we got there without any wrong turns.
Photo: Mission
It was a nice dinner. We met up with Jack's parents, who haven't been here since 2007. They were even decked out in 2007 Pirates in Paradise T-shirts. "I found them at the bottom of the drawer and thought they'd be appropriate." Jack's mom explained.
In the restaurant, I sat next to Keira, who was playing the game of Life on someone's phone. She kept calling out the color that the arrow pointed to on the virtual Life spinner thingee. "I got married again." 
But who rides in the back?
"Again?" I asked. "Yes," she announced firmly. Where does the second husband peg sit in the virtual Life plastic car? I thought the back was for the kid pegs.
As we were leaving, Mae took several photos of the restaurant, 'so she wouldn't forget the name.' I was slightly wounded. The Mission Dead Reckoning guidance system may be a bit dodgy (and perhaps sometimes moody, quarrelsome, hard-to-use and possibly dysfunctional), but the Mission Key West Restaurant name map is pretty reliable.
Photo: Don Dunbar
Chrispy dramatically fires his Cannibuss
Back in camp, I ran into Chad and Cannibal Chrispy, who was sporting his gigantic new cannon with a rifle butt that Chad had made for him. Chrispy let me hold it. It was only slightly more heavy than my hard case luggage. I quickly returned it to him. I decided that it was not something you wanted to run across the battle field with. It had a beautiful seal cast into the top of it, which Chad assured me he had built into the mold for the gun. A very interesting and stylish piece. Still not something you wanted to run across the battle field with.
Later on, I heard that Chrispy had been trying to come up with a name for it. He rattled off a list of names that sounded, well, uninspired. Someone came up with a name. Chrispy instantly recognized it as being the sort of genius name that only someone who has had far too much to drink can invent: the Cannibuss. The creator of this name - and I confess that I've completely forgotten who it was -explained to me that his idea was to combine Canni-bal Chrispy and Blunder-buss. He also said something about Cannons being a part of the name too, but that doesn't make as much sense.
Chrispy described his gun thusly: "Half cannon, half blunderbuss, Weighing in at 34 lbs.
Photo: Mission's Camera
Becky and her Creator
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she has a 1" bore (100 cal.) her 27" bronze tube was poured by myself and Lawrence Campbell, the knee gun stock and flintlock assembly was created and adapted by Chad Azevedo who also installed the oversize seamless liner that protects my neither region."
I ambled around and talked with several people who said things witty and interesting that I wish I remembered. Things like William regaling us with the story of the auction of Reggie back in 2000 and... nine? During the proceedings William thought the price was too low, so he told me that Reggie would make a fine surgeon's assistant. I (apparently) indignantly shot back, "I know for a fact that this man has no surgical training!" William replied "Neither do you!"
Ha ha, good times. I guess. Yep, don't remember a bit of that. I was drunk as a lord. Or finding Captain - wait, no Commodore - Cutter and asking innocently if he was Deadeye. (I wanted to find Deadeye so's I could thank him for putting Becky's dress back on her. I was sure that dress would be long lost by now. Finding her clothed in the gibbet this year made my heart sing.)
I do remember encountering Rachel, who identified herself to me last year as Sawbones Sarah. (She has since changed to Starboard Sarah, explaining to me that "I didn't want a role [sawbones] I never wanted and I
Photo: Mission
Rachel/Sarah Shoots the Moon
also didn't want something so close to my real life. After all, there is an element of escapism in this, right?" Right!) She and her boyfriend Blackheart Charlie were talking about the full moon. (Yes, it was a night with a full moon. No one should be surprised at this.) Rachel was trying to get a photo of it.
I explained that this rarely worked - I have several times tried to take photos of the moon at this event and never been able to capture it properly. In fact, sometimes I have missed it entirely and wound up with a photo of black nothingness. (Uh huh. Drunk as a lord then, too.) By way of proof, I took a couple of shots while we were standing there, all of came out blurry. Still, she wanted to try it with her tripod, so she went about setting it up.
While she was doing that, I talked with Blackheart Charlie. He explained that in the Northern latitudes, when a storm was coming, the moon would often have a ring four times as big as the moon in diameter around it - like my pictures, only more so. "It's the reflection off the ice crystals," he noted.
Rachel got her tripod set and took several more shots, although they also looked a bit blurry. Her boyfriend rubbed his chin and philosophically noted that some things can only be fully grasped by the human eye. (This is my new excuse for all future journals as to why I don't have pictures of the things I am describing. I will even rub my chin philosophically while writing that.) He also told me she always bought Canons because they were the best camera and could take the most abuse. I regaled him with how in 2010, during the Key West Holiday parade, I had stretched my arms up high to try and get a photo of the parade from that angle and dropped my Canon on the asphalt - yet it survived and is still working today! Rachel took a couple more shots, all with the encampment in the frame - she called the encampment "the Christmas", which I quite liked.
 Photo: Mission One of My Moon Photos - Note: Little or No 'Christmas' |
 Photo: Rachel SiegelOne of Rachel's moon photo - Note: Lots of 'Christmas' |
Photo: Rachel Siegel
I talked further with Rachel and learned that she was a pharmacist in Key West, which seems like a job that would present all sorts of interesting possibilities for meeting strange people or at least people with strange requests. She verified that she had gotten a lot of bizarre comments from people trying to circumvent policies or laws.
This led to a question about how she came to be in Key West, because I find these are often interesting stories. After living in Tampa her whole life, Rachel decided she needed "a 'core-shifter.'"
"I didn't need to just move across town and still have the same life with a slightly
Photo: Rachel Siegel
Rachel Inside the Fort with Dramatic Lighting
different address. I started knowing that my decisions were good when I felt uncomfortable because I knew I was doing something new. I had wanted to move to Key West for a while and was given the courage by a co-worker who asked me 'Why can't you?' when we had the 'What would you do if you could do anything you wanted' discussion."
See? Interesting! From my read, Rachel is a rather fascinating combination of the spontaneous and the planned and organized.
She first became interested in pirates when her grandfather would take her to the Gasparilla Pirate Festival. Upon moving to Key West she explained that she was sitting in "the Smallest Bar in Key West and in walks a pirate to chat me up. After a few Mel Brooks references that assured me he was worth my time, he asked if I had seen the best part of Key West, and though I was a little concerned as to what he meant, he was a noble man and said he wanted to take me sailing. Blackheart Charlie took me sailing and dragged me into reenacting as well."
Photo: Rachel Siegel?
Rachel and Charlie Meet. (This is how you met your mate, right?)
Rachel told me that she enjoys playing shanties and learning about the music and culture of the time. In fact, she and Mad Maeve (whom we'll get to in a future chapter) have allowed themselves to be recruited by yours truly as surgeon's article assistants. They are going to help me decipher the surgical prescriptions for the serious articles I write every month. (This makes your surgeon really happy because he hates doing that.)
She also told me she helped to start a YouTube channel called ShantyMart with the aim of preserving the sea shanty art form. This was started after "realizing there are not a lot of places on the internet you can experience watching a well-versed person perform a shanty."
For her next feat, she intends to sail up the east coast to New England next year with Blackheart Charlie and someone named (curiously enough) 'Wetbeard.' "I am hoping to gain some experience and perspective unlike any other. We've decided to follow music and seafood festivals." Now who wouldn't want to do that?
Having had enough of the fort,
Photo: Don Dunbar
I decided to wander back to my condo. My blood sugar was running low, which was astonishing given the amount of Italian food I had had. On the way down the long, winding road out of the fort, I heard my name being called from behind. I stopped and waited for my pursuer to catch me.
It was Gwen of the Valhalla's Pirates. "Thank God you've got your hat. I can always recognize you by it!" Score another point for the Patrick Hand Original™! I didn't recognize her, so she said she was the girl whose name I always forgot in the Surgeon's Journal last year. (This really does not narrow it down very much.) I explained how I often relied on Facebook and crew websites to fetch me up names.
We then talked about how wonderful Facebook was - thanks to tagging I can often find people's names without having to ask Michael Bagley. (He knows everyone and can remember most of their names.) She told me that she actually had two different Facebook accounts because she wanted to separate her family FB friends from all those cleavage shots. "I've never saw so many pictures of my cleavage as when I started reenacting. So I thought I better separate the pirate and family stuff." Wise advice that we would all do well to follow, to be sure.
Gwen came into piracy from Ren-faires, explaining that "I think I fell in love with pirates because of the Princess Bride. I don't know how many times I watched it but having the pirate be the good guy that you were supposed to be rooting for (and the fact that I thought he was dreamy) was cool to me." She told me that her favorite parts of doing pirate gigs are using the weapons (both guns and swords - the pointier the sword the better, she explained) and traveling around to entertain in places like Key West and Baltimore.
Photo: Diane Mueller's Camera
Diane Posing On a Tree
When she's not playing pirate, Gwen decorates cakes for a living. This sounded like a really interesting job to me so I pressed for details about her favorite cakes. One of them was a penguin cake which she made for a friend. Unfortunately the penguin's hat was too tall for her friend's refrigerator, "so we had to eat the hat before the party even started!" (You've no doubt heard the phrase "taking the cake" but I'll bet you never heard of "taking the cake's hat.")
She also mentioned a cake made to look like a spa at a client's request. "There are just some things I don't understand about certain cakes people order. Really, who wants to eat themselves at a spa? And they were very specific, there had to be candles, towels, bottles of soaps/perfumes and a bottle of wine with a glass. Great, so your drunk, relaxed self won't realize that they're about to be eaten."
Gwen said one of her greatest cake achievements to date was making the Great Adventure roller coaster King Da Ka into a cake for her cousin. "That was an engineering miracle!!" She even made little cars with Gummi Bears in them. Who could not like a roller coaster for Gummi bears? She revealed that "I'm always happy with the cakes I can make my boss say 'Wow' on. He's a 4th generation baker and has been doing cake for longer than I've been alive."
Pirates reenactors are such interesting people, aren't they just?
 Photo: Diane Mueller Penguin Cake (with Hat) |
 Photo: Diane Mueller The "Eat Your Drunk Self" Spa Cake |
 Photo: Diane MuellerThe Roller Coaster Cake w/ Gummi Riders |
When we reached the end of my compound, she headed for Duval to find her crew, who had left before she had managed to get to the fort. I toddled over to my condo with the pull-shade. I love that pull shade.