Prolific Purveyors of Steampunk Whimsy: Madame Askew and The Grand Arbiter

***This is the introduction and first part of a miniseries dedicated to my interview with Madame Askew and The Grand Arbiter.

Through the magic and glory that is Capitol Hill queer life, I happened to meet a wonderfully nerdy fellow named Glenn via a mutual acquaintance. During our chat, I discovered he was half of a performing duo versed in steampunk spaces. Ever the nerd myself involved in a myriad of geeky realms, I was instantly intrigued. How does one perform steampunk? What’s so special about the genre, and how are they bringing something new to the niche? The answers may surprise and titillate you. I present to you: Madame Askew and The Grand Arbiter.

Mary (me): Who are you, and who deigned to give you such imaginative titles?

Madame Askew (MA): The joy of being queer performers is that we just seized the titles for ourselves. 

The Grand Arbiter (TGA): I’m The Grand Arbiter, Glenn. I portray and embody The Grand Arbiter at all times in my life, but I only use the title on stage or on video. This is of course my compatriot, my equal, the love of my heart, the other half of my brain, Madame Askew.

MA: Hello hello! My name is Jocelynne Simone and I portray my original character, Madame Askew, when we’re performing together. We do a host of things including host events. We do a lot of virtual stuff. But we started our career together as best friends, performing live, and hosting interactive events at conventions and panels, and then we got more into emceeing and things. But we were sort of getting into steampunk a long time ago. 13 years! We just had our anniversary, and we were so into the steampunk idea and Glenn was like, “But we should make it more fun and more interesting,” and so we developed these characters together over the course of just performing together. 

The Grand Arbiter (Glenn) and Madame Askew (Jocelynne) / Courtesy of Madame Askew

TGA: So there were a number of events that we did for the first time…most of our events that we call our ‘initial things’ like Tea Duelling—which is like one of our bread and butter performances, we offer it to anyone who wants to do it—but when we first started Tea Duelling as a concept, we were just interested in being part of the community and making art …we wanted to make cool costumes and hang out. And the character component was part of it, but it wasn’t quite as centralized. Our biggest and first event, which was quite successful, entirely on the back of Jocelynne…we had a Dickens Tea, our first big social gathering. We had these hangouts where we were building costumes with other people and we had other hangouts where we were talking steampunk, and this was like ‘we’re gonna have a big Steampunk party.’ Jocelynne really wanted to have Tea Duelling, which is a steampunk event, really coming out of Britain, the creators—

MA: Doctor Jeff and Tinker of England, they started doing it at the Whitby—the sort of steampunk festival hosted in England—they came up with this wacky game and I had read about it in a fanzine… and was like, “I found the rules on their website they said anybody can do this thing, I’d sort of read the rules and I think I understand them”; though the very first time we did it I lied to myself (I did NOT understand them the first time), but by the time we got to Dickens Tea we’d sort of mastered the rules, we understood the nature of the game and we were like, ‘We’re gonna make this the heart of this event and have this big Tea Duelling tourney during this tea party.’

TGA: [In the beginning] It wasn’t quite as formalized as it would later become. It was sort of like we knew what we were doing now, but it was my first experience to it, cuz we didn’t do everything together yet. We had just become friends when we first started talking about steampunk stuff. We had become friends sort of randomly through kismet; we had just started hanging out all the time. And so when I first started seeing us doing Tea Duelling, I was…inspired to do color commentary. There’s lots of dead air while we’re waiting for something to happen. As a deeply anxious person born to be on stage but forced to work in an office building, I have a deep need to fill the air on stage with things. So I started doing color commentary then egged Jocelynne into joining me, and then we were like, ‘Well we have to do the color commentary every time.’

[At this point I’m realizing that together they’re automatically answering two of my other questions before I asked, which were “What is Tea Duelling?” and “What prompted you to perform together?” They have a way of volleying a bouncing ball you can’t help but watch like a housecat on the hunt!]

MA:  It was so fun! It was just so fun! So the thing with Tea Duelling is you dunk…your cookie…your tea biscuit into your tea for a count of five. It’s basically like Chicken with a soggy biscuit. And so you could just sit there and seriously watch this biscuit and wait to see whose cracks. But as Glenn says there’s a lot of silence we could not bear. We wanted to make it more of a spectacle and we wanted to make it more whimsical and funnier and bigger. And we were kind of talking about things like Iron Chef and the flamboyance and the way they talked about those things, and especially the main guy who’s the chairman... We just wanted to bring all of that energy to it, and so we did! 

TGA: So…Madame Askew got her name pretty quickly…it happened first. Jocelynne got her moniker because other people had given her a nickname and at first I think you didn’t really like the nickname..? [He turns to Jocelynne for verification.]

…Find out how the Madame responded to The Grand Arbiter’s summation of her name’s origin (and more) in Part Two!