Jeff, age 38, crosses swords on Tuesday nights in the Union Square fight practices, as well as cooking up medieval feasts that feature faux mice appetizers that crunch in the most deliciously realistic way.

I got involved with the Society for Creative Anachronism when I was 16, at a gaming convention. The SCA was giving a demo there. The thing that drug me in was the rapier fighting. I was a huge fan of the Three Musketeers. And one of the guys at this demo that I went to, was a rapier fighter, and so that was my first entree in the the SCA.

Very shortly after that, in the next year or two, I found what is my other great, great love in the SCA, which is medieval and Renaissance cooking. By 20, I was doing sit-down medieval feasts for 150 people. I recently did a feast for 180 people, based on Roman sources. The Romans used to eat dormice: actual mice that they would fatten up and cook and eat. Well, you can't get eating mice these days, so what I did was make sausage and shaped it into mouse shapes, put pine nuts in the middle, and gave it a string tail and peppercorns for eyes. And when you cooked them, they looked like mice, but the best part was, when you bit into them, the pine nuts crunched like bones! People loved them; I always distribute the documentation and the recipes from a feast like that, and I know several people trotted them out for Halloween parties.

A lot of the fun for me about the SCA is in trying my hand at different things; I'm far more interested in trying to make my own armor than just going out and buying it. I have pretty much never bought any of the clothes; I make them, or my wife or my friends do. And I made most of my own armor: I found another member, who sort of knew how to do it, or who was also willing to experiment, and we did it. One of the terms that crops up a lot in the SCA is "experimental archaeology", meaning, we know they did this, so let's try it and see if we can figure out how they did it.