Madame Askew and The Grand Arbiter: The Origin Story

***This is Part Two of a miniseries dedicated to the interview of Madame Askew and The Grand Arbiter.

Previously, Madame Askew (MA) and The Grand Arbiter (TGA) were coming around to telling us how they arrived at their names. Continuing our interview, our fair duo speaks their geeky truths:

MA: I was very lukewarm about it because I am a very…well, Type A is probably a generous way to put it. When I’m hosting events and when I’m putting things together for other people, I want to be the first one on the scene, I want to be earlier than anyone else, so that when they arrive they know what’s going on, they have a person to meet with, people aren’t feeling anxious and wondering where everything is. I just want people to feel welcomed and I feel like if I’m organizing, that’s my job.  I had this experience with wanting to be no less than 15 minutes early but generally [more like] 30 minutes. But I kept arriving 10 minutes early. So technically still early, but I was late in my mind. And so I was always running around, trying to get things set up, and my hat would sort of slip to the side and become askew. And so my friends were like, “oh you’re so askew, you should be like Lady Askew or Miss Askew or Madame Askew!” And I was like, ‘is this what I’m gonna be known for? Being late and out of sorts??’  But then I sat with it and I was like, ‘no actually the sound of the name is great and maybe I need to embrace this’. It’s kind of a fun energy. Discussing the name, one of the things I don’t think about often is that early on Glenn and I thought we would do more villainous portrayals and be like really absurd villains.

TGA: Maybe not villains, but more antagonist.

MA: Yeah, and then I couldn't maintain that. I don’t actually like living in that space. 

The Grand Arbiter / Paul Davis Photography via Madame Askew

TGA: I went on my own journey to come up with my character. It sort of had an arc: started out very simple, got really complicated, and then I turned 30 and then it got way simple. The character had a name, but we’re not going to go into it, cuz we don’t use it. But the title…I wanted it to sort of have an authority figure. …Madame Askew is very goofy/whimsical. And we needed something to sort of balance that out. So The Grand Arbiter is sort of the straight man in the situation which is ironic I know [context: Glenn is a super queer man and has a husband]. So I tend to be really stern and really care about rules, and it gives me this weird thing where people really like the character, but also they want to make sure they’re following the rules properly because they don’t want to make me upset.

It’s a very wild phenomenon. …I was inspired by a singular Magic: The Gathering card cuz I'm a giant geek. …I don’t like the card because the card is so mean in the game…it’s The Grand Arbiter Augustine the Fourth. That was a great title, [I thought] maybe I’ll just borrow the Grand Arbiter part. So it became The Grand Arbiter. The “The” became very important, so it’s Madame Askew and THE Grand Arbiter.

We’re certainly equals in the partnership, but narratively and from an optics perspective, it made more sense to center Jocelynne, for a lot of different reasons. And…there’s a lot of men-centered [aspects] to steampunk, there’s just a lot of dudes up front. And I like being up front, but…in order to make sure they know that Jocelynne and I are equals, we had to put Jocelynne first, because otherwise it’s me and my sidekick, which became a real problem for some of these events that didn’t know us as well, where some people would treat us in some really wild ways. …Jocelynne is the star of the show in my mind…but the real deal is I'm very invested in putting [her] forward because I don't think that she would put herself forward. So it’s really important for me to push her to the front of the stage and make sure that everyone knows that she is Madame Askew. 

MA: Glenn is very intentional about these things, and I don't always think about it. I’m intentional about other sorts of things, so I'm always concerned about… ‘is everything in place, do we have the tea cups, what’s the logistics, is our audience feeling welcomed and included.’ Glenn is also doing a lot to make sure our audience feels part of the experience because we’re really about community and we want to always make sure anyone who comes to our events knows that we really treasure having them there. I’m really focused on that over necessarily the optics of what we look like on stage and Glenn is really good and intentional about that. He’s right, I don't know that I would’ve put myself forward in that way and I’ve always been grateful to have this best friend and life partner who’s so willing to do that. A lot of women do not get that in their lives, so I feel very privileged to have this person in my life. I mean we’re life partners in many ways, but not romantically involved. We’re both gay! We’re not each other’s favorite. But we do share that, and he uplifts me, which I'm keenly aware of and very grateful for. 

TGA: One of the things that I think makes us really unique in the steampunk space is that our events are in general designed to be us as hosts or facilitators and the guests are the stars. They get to be performers. We have what I call the Big 3 competitions that we run, which is Tea Duelling, Splendid Teapot Racing (RC cars shaped to look like teapots that you run through an obstacle course), and Madame Askew’s creation: Compliment Duelling. We have these three major things and the whole framework of these particular events is to make the guests the stars of the show. We regularly give out monikers and nicknames to different competitors, especially if they keep coming back.   

MA: It’s so fun! …We have people come to the stage and maybe they’re very anxious, or they’ve never had an opportunity to be on stage in front of an audience, so we try to make it safe and supportive. We’re pretty wacky; we’re putting the whimsy into steampunk in a big way. And so it can be a wild experience on stage, but we try to make it very safe and we give them this name, and the number of people who take that name and then create a whole character and a whole personal mythos is just one of my favorite things. I’m really always deeply touched that anyone would take this weird nonsense that we did and be like, ‘I love this and I'm going to create something with it’ which I think is really cool.

TGA: What’s wild is we get to see this in real time sometimes. They’ll take advantage of some of the other events that we’ll run online, like sewing classes. And we can see them take the idea and then they work with Jocelynne to bring it to fruition. Which is so special. It’s just the wildest experience…We see them building the thing and then we join them at the event and then we get to make them the star. 

[My next question was to ask them to share a beloved story from their experiences, but Glenn beat me to the punch by rolling into something that he was reminded of in his previous thought.]

TGA: In Arizona we had a bunch of different stages we worked out of. In one of them, the Tea Duels were all in one space, no stage, just chairs and a table in a room—it was smaller. And one of the competitors had gotten to participate, and she had severe autism. So much so that she was incredibly sensitive. So she did ok in that space and was able to win, which meant that she got to go on to the final which was on the big stage [where there would be] 100-200 people in the room clapping and woohooing and yelling. She was so excited to be there and wanted to be there, but she was really struggling with the noise. And so we were whimsically able to shift the entire audience into doing a different behavior, like little snaps or waves [Askew: “—or like a little hiss”] to reduce the sound so she could really have this Finals moment. And it kind of embodied the kind of work that we want to do, which is to take something that’s kind of inaccessible to someone, and not just make them the star, but make it so they feel like they are safe to do whatever they need to do to be creative.

Coming Up: We geek out on The Doctor, fashion, and games!