Skippy Knits!: Fort Ward

While many of you were basking in your post-Valentine's weekend, we were already well into our president's day celebrations, beginning with my new favorite president's day tradition: the revolutionary re-enactment a Fort Ward park! You may remember that we went last year (and blogged about it here).

We won the battle this year (I forget who won last year, but really, I know who won the war, which is what counts.)

Apparently if you were a musician with the British army, you got an especially flamboyant uniform. This tradition has continued with British musicians down to the present day, as can be seen n the case of Elton John.

Not all Hessians are from Hesse, so really, "hessian" is a politically incorrect term. You should probably call them Germanic Mercenaries, but since the actual Germanic Mercinaries didn't speak English, t probably didn't matter. Besides, after totally dropping the ball in Trenton, they're lucky they're still fighting.

There is some aspect of the male genetic code that drives a strong urge to find and wave sticks. Adult men seem to be able to control this and channel it into social acceptable activities like playing baseball, shooting pool, and fishing. Small boys, however, cannot be in contact with a grassy area without feeling the uncontrollable desire to locate a stick to wave. The ideal stick should vaguely resemble both a gun and a sword, it should be hefty enough to bruise the knees of all adults within a four-foot range, and, ideally, be long enough to poke your mother in the eye with. Sadly today there were many small boys about, and the stick pickings were slim.

It is not generally known the extent to which yellow caution tape provided necessary crowd-control during the revolution. It was a smoky war (part of the fun of the reenactment is in getting a sense of just how loud and smoky it really was, in addition to actually seeing the occasional misfire, and watching all the jockeying for position that a battle involved), so without caution tape untold multitudes of farmers would accidentally have stumbled into the midst of a skirmish.

I know nothing about revolutionary-era artillery, but these guys sure look like sailors manning a small ship's gun. It must have been heavy, because whenever the highlanders got close, they abandoned this gun and stood safely behind the picnic table, whereas both the Brits and the patriots hauled their large cannon back and forth as their position changed.