This story is entirely to disgusting and bizarre not to share so … you’ve been warned!

This past weekend I attended the first annual Civilian Civil War Weekend in Capon Spring, VA.   It is an exceptional event that will be happening again next year!  And they bear no responsibility in the events that follow …

I must first explain that due to some unbelievably bad timing, as soon as I pulled in the parking lot on Tursday evening, I discovered I had gotten my monthly bill, fallen off the roof, or had a visit from Aunt Martha – however you want to put it.  I have never had this experience while dressed in period clothes thankfully, and I hope never to again!  

Really, I am too old for this shit.

Friday night was OK since we were only dressed for a few hours.  Saturday?  Not so much.

I arrived back in my room Saturday afternoon to take care of business.  I found doing that – while wearing a corset and cage crinoline, plus 2 starched petticoats, drawers, and a dress – to be pretty near impossible.  I also discovered that my cage, being a good many years old, had gotten rough around the edges a few places.  While engaged in aforementioned battle, I scraped the back of my hand on a sharp piece of metal in my cage and ended up with a nice gash right below my thumb.  I will spare you pictures of this.

So there I am, thankfully in my room, trapped on the can and bleeding out of both ends like a stuck pig!  I couldn’t get up or try to get undressed without bleeding seeming endless yards of fabric, so I had no choice but to sit there and apply pressure to the cut with toilet paper.  It took 30 minutes, more or less, for the cut to finally stop bleeding.  At which point I started carefully removing garments, still having to stop every few minutes and re-apply pressure as the cut would start bleeding again if I got too vigorous with the undressing.

This took yet another half hour.  By then I was back in normal underwear and had washed off blood from the hem of my dress which got dripped on while I was getting my maimed hand out from under my skirt.  Really I was surprised it wasn’t worse!  I called my husband .  I was ready at that point to chuck everything in the car and just go the hell home.

Fortunately he talked me out of it and suggested I take a nap instead.  Which I did, and by then the cut was more stable and I was able to get dressed for the ball that evening, albeit slowly ,and make my way to the front desk where I got a band aid to ensure that I didn’t bleed on Grandma Anderson’s last pair of clean white kid gloves.  

I missed dinner but that turned out to be no problem since there was plenty of food and drink at the ball.  Turns out it was one of the nicest balls I have been too in a long time!  It had everything you could want:

Food
Alcohol
Water
Alcohol
Lemonade
Alcohol
Caller who could be heard clearly
Alcohol
Logical order to dances so that you are learning new steps gradually
Alcohol
Enough people mixed in who know what they are doing so that as soon as someone gets that WTF look, intervention occurs.

I am very glad I didn’t give in to PTSD and leave early.