Child’s Play. (My take on re-enactment.)

I am just finishing up the wildly entertaining book Man of War, in which writer Charlie Schroeder recounts his slog  through a year of weekend re-enactments* that took him from Roman times up to Viet Nam.

Along the way, he spent weekends participating in the French & Indian War, the Revolutionary War, the Civil War (no way he could have avoided that one), and World War II (not as a noble GI on D-Day, but as a Wehrmacht soldier at Stalingrad).

Having read Confederates in the Attic, having grown up in Sturbridge Village – Plimouth Plantation – Midnight Ride of Paul Revere territory, I was certainly aware of historic re-enactments.  There’s also some type of tenting in the old camp ground event that I’ve seen in my front yard (Boston Common), which I think had to do with the Civil War, but I’m not quite sure. There were no Civil War battles fought in downtown Boston, so it must a been just a muster. And every day I pass by at least one person in Ye Olde Colonial garb giving a tour of Ye Olde Colonial Boston.

There’s something called King Richard’s Faire held around here each year, which I take it revolves around Merry Old England. (Not quite sure why it’s King Richard’s, rather than King Henry’s Faire. Didn’t all the King Richards – the good, lion-hearted one, and the bad hunchback who killed his little nephews – appear a bit earlier in the march of history?)

And, as long as I’m rounding up everything I’ve ever known about re-enactment, I seem to recall a fellow you ran for Congress a couple of years ago whose candidacy was derailed at least in part when pictures of him in a Waffen SS uniform – apparel donned for some re-enactment or other – popped up. (Note to current reenactors who think they might want a future in politics: don’t let anyone take a picture of you in an SS uniform while you’re grinning.)

Anyhow, Schroeder’s book has added immensely to my re-enactment knowledge base.

Thanks to Man of War, I now know that there are several groups devoted to keeping alive the history of the Polish Winged Hussars, including, but not limited to, Suligowski’s Regiment.  And I’m now aware that there are businesses fully devoted to outfitting re-enactors (who desire/demand varying levels of historic accuracy) including, but not limited to an Indian-based outfit, Deepeeka, that helped spur the growth of the re-enactment industry by off-shoring costume production and, thus, making said costumes and related paraphernalia more affordable for the masses. Not to mention that there are sutlers who make their living provisioning Civil War re-enactors by camp-following re-enactment events. (Wonder if there are camp followers of the working-girl variety who also work the circuit?)

I find the whole notion of re-enactment intriguing, and on many levels, I get it. There’s love of history; the desire to rough it (no iPad, no microwaved Lean Cuisines, no air mattress); the camaraderie; the (mostly) male bonding. And given that most of us – gym membership and running shoes aside – live a lard-ass life, it’s no wonder that people want to take on a physical challenge on occasion.

Re-enactment seems to hold a certain charms for men, often ex-military, who want to blow off a bit of testosterone and anger in ways that are safer and less likely to involve prison terms when the guns fire blanks and the swords are swathed in heavy felt. (Some re-enactment specialties seem to attract less of the warrior types than the others. The Revolutionary and French and Indian War buffs, for example, seem more crunchy and granolish – there for the history. Less so, say, with the Viet Nam re-enactors, some of whom want to throttle the necks of those playing the role of gooks.)

Some re-enactors, I’m quite sure, are attracted/sympathetic to lost causes, and, for a variety of reasons, want to fight old battles. And some of these folks, for all their devotion to purity and authenticity (of the ‘we’ll only eat hardtack using ingredients and ovens available in 1861’ variety), have a somewhat peculiar desire to recast history to meet their political agenda.

Personally, while I don’t sympathize with it, I understand why Confederate re-enactors would want to view the Civil War through a prism that had more to do with the noble cause of states’ rights than the ignoble cause of slavery. But how do you rewrite history to make anything the German or Soviet Army did look good? I just don’t get why any Americans would want to put on a Waffen SS and/or a Soviet Army uni to refight a WWII battle of bad guys vs. bad guys, I’ll never know.  I know, I know, the average German or Russian soldier was most likely not a bad guy. But they did have the ill-luck to get drafted into the service of an irredeemably terrible regime.  And, while I will acknowledge that the Soviets did the bulk of the work needed to get rid of the Nazis, but that doesn’t exactly make Stalin a good guy. So, yeah, I think that sometimes the motives of the play-ahs may be a bit warped. If you want to be out in the WWII cold, why not just redo the Battle of the Bulge? Which still, of course, leaves the problem of who wants to play the Panzer Division and why.)

Those who want to swan around in SS uniforms aside, I think that the baseline appeal comes down to the fact that every last one of us has been a re-enactor at some point in life. It’s just that most of us chuck the desire to re-enact when we leave childhood.

Because now that I think of it, I have a long and glorious history as a re-enactor, or pre-enactor, or whatever you want to call it, that ended at about the age of 10.

We may not have gone in for full authenticity, but, really, all you needed to play Mass was a table, a towel, and a roll of Necco wafers.

There was a boulder in the woods near our house that was variously used as a boat (on which we were imperiled refugees), a Conestoga wagon (on which we could act out the most recent episode of Wagon Train ), or, if we just wanted to be boring and play dolls, a house. (This latter activity was more pre-enactment than re-enactment, unless we set it in another period  - think Little House – which we would sometimes do.)

My brother Tom and his friend Kevin were certainly re-enacting a buffalo hunt when my father took them and their Davy Crockett coon-skin caps to Green Hill Park to shoot at the buffalo with their Disney-plastic replicas of Davy’s flintlock rifle, Old Betsy.

In a neighborhood teeming with kids, we had more boys than girls, so I played plenty of “boys games”, including cowboys and Indians and war. (In one episode, I moved Fighting Father Duffy up to World War II and played the chaplain. What a re-enacting goody two-shoes I was. Although I guess if I were that much of a goody two-shoes, I would have played a nurse and not transgendered myself into a priest.)

And while we’re on the subject of goody-two shoes, perhaps my greatest triumph as a re-enactor came when my friend Bernadette and I tried to break up a rock-fight by walking into its midst carrying our rosary-beads on high. This was in emulation of  St. Dominic Savio, the saccharine and consumptive boy saint we were urged to imitate. Among other deeds that earned Dom his canonization, he had allegedly tried to stop some boys from fighting by walking between rival gangs holding a crucifix. He ended up a saint, while we ended up with Bernadette getting pegged in the ankle with a rock. So much for the miraculous ability of piety and sanctity to stop evil in its tracks.

Anyway, now that I think of it, I really do get all this re-enactment madness. Pretending you’re something other than you are is tremendous fun! Who wants to grow up?

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*I’m hyphenating all variations of this word because I find it hard to read them if they’re not. Perhaps it has to do with having grown up as one of “The Een Sisters”. The letter grouping “een” just does not lend itself to two-syllables without the hyphen in there.