WOODEN SCIMITAR
By:
August 30, 2025
Cross-posted from Josh Glenn and Rob Walker’s story telling experiment GIVE IT UP. Earlier this month, GIVE IT UP mounted exhibitions of meaningful objects in venues around Kingston, NY… and asked the general public to help persuade the experiment’s participants to let these objects go.
HILOBROW readers, we need your help! After reading the story here, click on the response link below and share your advice with the author…
I grew up a theater kid in a rambling Victorian full of antiques and oddities. My parents were magpies, often dragging my sister and me to interesting places full of curious things, many of which were ultimately for sale. Although none of us can exactly remember when it came into our lives, I’m confident that the large wooden scimitar came into my life via the Madison-Bouckville Antique Fair. My dad confirms that it came from Bouckville, a theater company in the Finger Lakes that folded and liquidated its assets at the fair. There’s a photo of it over my shoulder as the Pirate King in a driveway production (directed by my sister) in the early ’00s, so certainly we got it before then.
The scimitar was used in several of those driveway plays, and several other theater-adjacent shenanigans besides. For a time, it sat in the living room beside a prop elephant gun and the front fender of Greased Lightning, a trio of theatrical memories I thought I’d never forget.
I have carried this large wooden scimitar with me across more than a decade’s worth of New York City apartments. Before that, it sat in my last college dorm and since then, I have slung it over my shoulder and stood on the deck of my house like a pirate captain longing for the sea. It has served as a point of conversation, if not gentle ribbing, from friends new and old.
But slowly, it has moved to the margins of my life. Theater, really, has moved to the margins of my life: I have not acted in a play for the better part of a decade now. The call to perform is still present, still beating in me like a second heart, but at some point the passion waned. Too many callbacks, too few parts; too many late nights, too little money. A pandemic, a job change. Life moves on.
The scimitar has a pleasing weight, once you steady your wrist. It will spin you around if you try to swing it with any kind of force. It is a relic of an earlier time, in so many respects, and while it might not be a more elegant weapon for a more civilized age, it does put a smile on my face.
If you were in Drew’s place, what would you do with the scimitar? Please SUBMIT YOUR PERSUASIVE RESPONSE HERE.
All GIVE IT UP stories can be found here.