has been involved in the filk community since 1994. She is a tireless worker.
She has served on the Concertino concom multiple times, including organizing kids’ programming in 2006 and producing the Concertino program book in 2009. She ran Kids’ Programming at Noreascon 4, and planned multiple filk Concerts for the kids there. She has also used her position at Arisia’s “Fast Track” and Boskone’s “Dragon’s Lair” to schedule kids’ concerts, which introduce filk to another generation.
She has been seen printing artwork on t-shirts, running registration, setting up tables, and reorganizing filk rooms that don’t have enough chairs or lack a handicapped accessible aisle.
On the east coast, Persis is practically synonymous with Interfilk auctions. She is constantly seen making bid sheets, laying out tables, and working with the hotel staff or the con committee to make sure that there will be adequate room to display all the items people have donated. Besides inventorying, organizing, and displaying all the items, she also frequently spends her convention babysitting the Interfilk table so that things don’t go awry. She will organize the auction, quietly and efficiently find an auctioneer, organize a flying squad of wenches, make sure that sold items go to the successful bidder, and sit in back to crunch the numbers, despite being dressed to the nines to wench in a corset and skirt. Frequently she sits at the computer well into the night, making sure that the convention and Interfilk have their correct totals and that all purchases are paid for and goods provided before she shuts down for the night.
She has assisted with setting up and running sound, and recording filk, at many conventions over the years, and makes sure that recording equipment gets out to conventions as necessary and comes back to support listening afterwards. In addition to her visible duties, Persis maintains one of the largest archives of raw filk recordings in the country in her own home. She keeps track of its contents so that they can be lent out to others for cataloguing, or to produce commercial recordings. And she is the business manager for Love Song Productions.
Persis is a formidable hostess. Not only does she host house filks, but freely offers bed space to convention guests and passing filkers. She entertains all with generosity and her very fine cooking. She tries hard to be an ambassador for filk, and a friend to all filkers new and old.
For these contributions to filk music and the filk community, Persis Thorndike is inducted into the Filk Hall of Fame this twenty-first day of April, Two thousand and twelve.
Photo Credit: Dave Weingart