Michael, age 42, was first exposed to the Society for Creative Anachronism through his church when he was a boy, and quickly found it was a way to meet girls.

I grew up in Sacramento, California, and the SCA was very visible at the time. They put on demonstrations and shows at arts festivals and big shopping malls, and there were a lot of members of my church who were also members of the SCA. It was a real 60's, 70's counterculture sort of thing, and being Unitarian in the 60's and 70's meant you were exposed to a lot of counterculture attitudes and ideas.

Back then, what hooked me was, I was 15, and I liked the girls! I was very awkward in high school, and I was much more popular in the SCA. A friend of mine, who was one of the founders, once said that it was a great place for geeky guys to go and meet girls who were looking for geeky guys.

Play-acting and dressing up is still a lot of fun. I've always been very theatrical, and the SCA gave me an outlet for theatricality that was unscripted. And there's the community aspect, being with a group of people that you've formed a community around, so they're a big part of your lives. And I still love to fight, more than anything else. And I'm good at it; there are only a few things that I've been good at, and this is one of them.

New York is, in some ways, a city that runs on spectacle. And it's a big spectacle, a crazy spectacle, to see people in armor bashin' on each other. And so, it draws a real crowd. And you get a large variety of people, some who are really interested and think its really cool, and you get some who think it's really stupid, and you get some people who walk right in the middle of a fight and almost get hurt, and you get a lot of tourists who are taking pictures because it's New York and they think its just another crazy part of New York!