ESSAYS
CAMPFIRES,
WENCHES AND INTERSTATE TOURISTS
PAGE 4
©
2006 - Please do not remove the copyright from this essay
t
was just past one-thirty when Lauren and I made our first non-ambivalent
decision of the day. We would
grab something to eat and then head over to Bosworth Field where they
were hosting the first of the day’s jousting competitions. On our way down the hill I hit a bump with
the stroller, causing the stroller’s handle hit my cup in just the right
way that it fell out of my hand, spilling beer all over my two-year-old
daughter. Fortunately I had drunk
over three quarters of it within five minutes, thus minimizing the damage. While some of it got in Allison’s hair, most
of the ale ended up either on the ground or on the sweatshirt she was
wearing. It had been getting progressively warmer as
the day went on so it wasn’t such a big deal to strip off Allison’s outer
layer leaving just little bit of sticky residue in her pony-tail, but
otherwise rendering her alcohol-free.
Off a smirking look from Lauren I assured her that I was not
drunk, that it had been a million-to-one shot brought on by trying to
maneuver a stroller, a large backpack, a cup and a steep hill all at once.
In
all seriousness, I don’t drink that much. That would probably come as a shock to anyone
who knew me back in Los Angeles where I was often the one in need of a
designated driver, but these days I generally have neither the time nor
the inclination nor the stomach to drink.
The upshot of all that – besides a healthier liver and trimmer
midsection – is that when I do drink, it doesn’t take a lot for
me to feel the effects. Some people
call that being a lightweight. I
just call it good 
economic
sense. Unfortunately, the three-quarters
of a pint that I actually got into my stomach hadn’t been enough to work
its magic and I could still feel my foul mood gnawing away at me.
Lauren
bought a burrito platter and we grabbed a seat on a large rock next to
a picnic area where she could eat. I hadn’t seen anything that appealed to my appetite, so I sat watching
a group of people at a table across from us. It was a family of what looked like a mom, a dad, a grandmother
and three or four kids – none of them in costume. Sitting with them was a teenaged girl decked out in Renaissance
wear and speaking loudly with a thick put-on English accent, telling some
long and involved story with the utmost fervor.
I don’t recall exactly what the plot of the story was – something
about her mother who was obsessed with goats and her father who got run
over by the Queen’s carriage – but the way she told it, I couldn’t look
away. The girl just kept talking and gesturing and
marking out characters and plot points with small stones. She wasn’t the least bit self-conscious about
the fact that she was obviously playing a role and everybody knew
she was playing a role, not the least bit self-conscious about how long
it was taking to tell her tale to people whose attention spans normally
shut off after only thirty seconds. She
just kept plugging along, every inch the precocious self-absorbed Englishwoman
she was pretending to be. I found
myself smiling, laughing even. This
was what I’d been hoping for in the Renaissance Faire. When she was done her story, the people at the table thanked the
girl for being so entertaining. Never
breaking character she bade them some word of farewell and strutted off.
We
headed over to Bosworth Field and grabbed a seat in the grass.
The bleachers in the amphitheater were already packed.
With another eight or so minutes before the show, I told Lauren
I was going to run out and see if I could find something to eat as well. I ran over to the Boarshead Inn where there was another big yellow
sign offering ALE. I ordered up
another Scottish Ale then went to a booth next door where I bought a panini
sandwich from a very cute teenage wench who looked bored as hell and was
making no effort to stay in character.
Not that I could blame her. Every
half-drunk pirate in the place had probably tried hitting on her, and
putting on a cute and playful accent would only have encouraged the behavior. Even as I was ordering, a middle-aged guy not
in costume was chatting her up and asking the kind of lame uninspired
questions you never ask anybody with any real interest unless you’re trying
to gauge whether or not you should attempt “hitting that.”
I
brought my panini back to Bosworth Field just as the Queen’s entourage
was filing in. Lauren laughed
when she saw my beer and said sincerely, “Good for you.” I ate and drank as the Queen was announced
and the jousters were introduced. I
was pleasantly surprised when the announcer asked everybody to bow their
heads and said a prayer for the safety of the competitors. While the name Jesus was never actually said, the wording of the
prayer was obviously Christian in nature.
As the competition began, both my beers hit me all at once. One second I was completely sober and the next
I had a decent little buzz going on.
For
anybody who has never seen an actual joust live and in person, let me
be the first to tell you it’s a lot less exciting than you’d think.
The first half of the event was a skills competition where the
competitors rode their horses and scored points by whacking watermelons
with their sword, lancing rings from the hands of their squires, and jousting
other inanimate objects. The final
round of the competition was the actual joust, where the two competitors
rode toward each other with lances extended in an effort to knock their
opponent from his horse. Unfortunately
for the spectator, that scenario doesn’t happen all that often.
And it’s quite apparent that anybody who knows better doesn’t really
expect a man to win a joust that way.
Most of the points were awarded just for a rider touching
his opponent. The riders made
several passes. In the movies
they sure do make it seem like those horses charge toward each other at
breakneck speed when really it’s nothing more than a gallop. The riders approached, lances extended, the
crowd bracing itself for the collision and then… tap. The lance would glance off a shield or body of armor and that would
be it. They’d turn around, make
their run again and… tap. Now on the last run, one of the riders did
fall from his horse, but it was obvious to anybody watching that this
was not because of the force with which he was hit.
The rider fell for show because he knew that’s what the people
had come to see. Points were awarded,
a winner was declared and that was it for the jousting competition.
We
headed for the privy because, of course, Lauren had to pee.
While she waited in line, I headed back over to the Boarshead for
another Scottish Ale. I could already feel my buzz starting to dissipate and I wanted
to keep it going awhile longer. The
line for beer was far longer this time, stretching all the way up the
ramp that led down to the tap. Apparently
all the men leaving the joust had 
gotten
the same idea as me. Fortunately for me, however unfortunate for Lauren, all the women
leaving the joust had apparently gotten similar ideas as well and the
line for the ladies room was also a long one.
As I headed back up the ramp, beer in hand, I passed by witchy-looking
woman who was making an announcement about Sybil’s Silly Songs for kids. I asked her where and when. She told me three o’clock at the castle stage
near the jousting field. Okay!
I felt good. Real good.
Better than I’d felt all day actually.
No more ambivalence, I finally had a plan. A good plan. A definite
plan. And a buzz that was coming
back faster than I had anticipated.
Funny
thing that Scottish Ale. The buzz came like waves at high tide, a little bit at first before
it faded away, then a little bit stronger, then a little bit stronger
again. I know it sounds horrible,
and believe me I’m not proud of this, but when you look as how the second
half of our day went compared to the first, it was probably better for
everyone involved that daddy got wee bit drunk at the Renaissance Faire.
I
met Lauren outside the bathroom and told her we were going to see the
silly song lady. “Uhhh-okay,”
she said and off we went. I felt
a little self-conscious sitting at a kiddie show drinking a beer next
to my little girl who smelled like beer. But then that’s the funny thing about beer; just as it starts making
you feel bad about yourself, it gives you the power and absence of mind
to just get over it and have a good time.
Sybil sang her silly songs and generally elicited more of a response
from the grownups in the audience than their kids. Allison watched the show, silent but intrigued, and when Sybil called
all the little kids up on the stage with her, Allison ran up smiling.
She jumped and danced and made funny noises with the rest of the
kids and had a great time. We had a great time. For the first time all day we’d sat through
an entire show without looking over our shoulder, and didn’t worry about
what else we were missing.
I
don’t know why the thought hadn’t occurred to me earlier, but all of a
sudden I realized the reason I hadn’t been enjoying myself all day: we
had been acting like interstate tourists! We had been in such a hurry to see as much
of everything as possible in the shortest amount of time, that we hadn’t
actually taken the time to sit down let any of it in. We were no better than the people who only
venture as far as the highway off-ramp all vacation, then wonder why they
never experience anything wonderful or transcendent.
Five minutes at one show, five minutes walking the streets, five
minutes at another show, always one foot ready to head out the way we’d
come in, always one ear listening for that something else we were surely
missing around the bend. My lack
of enjoyment had nothing to do with the fact that I hadn’t dressed up.
It had nothing to do with the fact that I wasn’t here with a large
group of eccentric friends. It
certainly had nothing to do with anything Lauren was or was not doing. It had everything to do with the fact
that I was adopting all the behaviors of the very people I despised. I might as well have showed up at the Renaissance
Faire dressed as an RV. It took
three Scottish Ales and half a dozen silly songs to make me see the light,
but I changed tack immediately and the rest of our day was, in a word,
awesome.
Even
Allison’s demeanor started to change. Where she had been timid and cranky all morning,
now she was bold and chipper. She
started engaging just about every person in costume she encountered.
Allison’s not a kid who normally just walks up to strangers, but
more than once she would see a pirate or a monk or a princess and just
climb up onto the bench next to them and smile.
I don’t know what Renaissance witch she picked this up from, but
at one point she stood in the middle of the street waving her hands, wiggling
her fingers and shouting some kind of incantation in an apparent attempt
to cast spells on the people walking by – who of course thought this was
absolutely adorable.
We
pulled out the show schedule and headed to a nearby stage where a show
called, “Empty Hats” was about to start. I vaguely remembered reading that name on the Renaissance Faire
website, though I couldn’t remember exactly what it was all about. I thought maybe it was some kind of comedy
show, but the mere fact that the name had stuck in my head probably meant
it was something I’d made a mental note to see.
Turns out it wasn’t a comedy show at all. Empty Hats
is a Celtic band whose music could truly make you believe you’d somehow
stepped into sixteenth century Ireland. I find most modern Celtic artists tend to put
out music designed to evoke a sense of magic and mysticism. Fairies, priests and spectral ladies are frequent
characters in their songs. And
even the songs that don’t star a supernatural character are played and
sung as though some supernatural character were performing them. Warbling flutes, tinkling wind chimes and plunky
guitar chords conjure up images of a dark lake in a Druid forest during
full moon, while the ancient wind whispers through the moss hanging off
the ancient trees. Like Times
Square and The Shire, most modern Celtic music is a heightened reality
of everything people imagine when they think of medieval Ireland.
Rather
than merely conjuring images, Empty Hats actually plays the kinds of songs
Irish people in the Renaissance probably listened to.
Simple songs with stories, pub songs with rhythm, love songs with
humor. The music sounds simple
without belying the obvious talent of each of the band’s musicians.
The quartet was led by “Giacomo” (said: “JOCK-ah-moe”) on guitar
and vocals whose every fiber embodied the long-haired minstrel and jester
from 1575 he proclaimed to be. He
made the audience laugh out loud with his wit and candor then made them
believe every word he sang with his trembling but always on key voice.
There was “Looney Lucy”, a randy old woman on drum and tambourine,
who tore up the stage with a heavy gritty voice.
They had a fiddle player who could rival that kid Charlie Daniels
used to sing about and a backup guitar player who just played it cool
in the background. And man did those guys wail. You couldn’t help but tap along. Even Allison got up on the bench and started
dancing, before deciding she’d rather just climb up and jump off over
and over again. I kicked myself
for waiting until now in the day to start sitting through entire shows
like this.
As
I sat there and the Scottish Ale worked it’s sluggish way farther and
farther into my senses, an idea occurred to me. This would make an awesome story. Not the epic-length essay you’ve been reading,
but a story about Renaissance Faire people. People who make their livelihood working these Faires. People who keep vaudeville alive by roving
from festival to festival, sometimes carting their entire family along
with them. Unlike other forms
of live entertainment in this country, which usually center around some
kind of dubious skill like having a somewhat decent voice, or being relatively
competent at the guitar, or even being part of some quasi-talented ensemble
in an off-Broadway play written by a guy who everybody thinks it edgy
but who’s really just writing down verbatim conversations he had with
his ex-girlfriend… unlike those media, to succeed in vaudeville,
you need to have a very obvious skill and you need to be really…
damn… good at it. It’s not enough that you can kind of juggle.
You need to be so good at juggling that you can juggle sharp flaming
objects while balancing on a rotating log, blindfolded while playing “When
the Saints Come Marching In” on the harmonica – or better yet on a funky-looking
instrument that you invented yourself. If
you aren’t great at what you do in this line of work, you won’t
be doing it for very long, and it will have nothing to do with the state
of the economy. Concussions, severed limbs and third-degree
burns would cut your career short in no time.
The very notion of it all fascinated me. The stories these people must have after how many years on the road.
The things they must have seen and the perspective they must have.
What their parents must have said when their children disclosed
their chosen professions. My mission
for the rest of the day became clear: chat these people up. Start the pre-writing work now.
Unfortunately,
the muse that had given me this idea was also starting to affect my speech,
so I decided it was best to just get some contact info from anybody who
seemed interesting and chat them up later. When the band was done, always in character
they encouraged the audience to come up and buy their music, which was
contained in “magic boxes” which we all recognized as CD’s. I handed over fifteen dollars to Looney Lucy
for their “Greatest
Hats” disc and asked if their website was printed on it somewhere.
She said it was in a sixteenth century conspiratorial whisper.
I winked, thanked her and have been playing that CD over and over
for weeks.
We
sat through several more shows over the course of the afternoon and evening.
Some were great. Some were
lame. But we had fun at both. Somewhere in there I bought and drank my fourth
Scottish Ale. Whenever one of
the shows or performers impressed me with a certain “It factor” I went
up and got brochures or press kits or simply an e-mail address. In no time I already had quite an arsenal of
potential interviews, but there was one person who I wanted to interview
most of all. The girl on the street
who had told the goat story. The
girl who had embodied everything I’d imagined in a Renaissance Faire in
the span of a five-minute charade. At
one point while Lauren was in the bathroom I saw her in a crowd of costumed
ladies who were walking through the streets singing some kind of church
song. I grabbed Allison, got her back in the stroller
and took off in pursuit. The singing
ladies had gone down another street and by the time I turned that corner
they were nowhere to be found. I
walked briskly in the direction they’d gone, weaving through a slow-moving
crowd. They couldn’t have gotten
very far. She couldn’t
have gotten very far. It felt
a bit like that scene in Raiders
of the Lost Ark where Marian is kidnapped and put in a large basket.
Indy runs after her and turns a corner only to find an entire marketplace
full of people carrying similar baskets.
Normally a young girl dressed as she was would stand out, but in
this crowd… I gave up after a
few minutes, but kept looking over my shoulder to see if she would pop
out of an alcove and start up with somebody else.
I
found her quite by accident an hour later. Lauren and I had been schlepping our way up
another steep hill, on our way to a show we realized we probably wouldn’t
make in time, when we decided to stop for some food.
Lauren was starving and I realized I should probably start putting
something else into my belly besides ale.
No way was my panini from lunch going to do the trick of soaking
up the equivalent of eight beers. Lauren
stopped at a window advertising “Pot Pie” and got herself a helping of
the booth’s signature dish. I
lamented for probably the tenth time not being able to find the “goat
girl” when all of a sudden Lauren said, “Oh there she is.”
And
indeed, there she was standing less than ten yards away, chatting up a
small boy in a stroller. I waited
until the conversation was done and walked up to her, hoping the presence
of my wife and child would alleviate any sordidness of what probably seemed
like another drunken patron attempting to hit on her. Finding myself unintentionally, but unavoidably,
mimicking her English accent, I told her as best I could that I was a
writer working on a piece about Renaissance Faire workers and asked if
I could have her email address. She
was more than willing, so I pulled out my cell phone to plug in the information.
She was one of those people with a really long complicated email
address… well long anyway, and trying to punch it in alphanumeric
character by alphanumeric character with one drunken eye squinted shut
made it complicated. I had to save the thing three times before
Lauren assured me that I’d gotten it.
I thanked the goat girl, whose name turned out to be Rebecca,
and left her to go find myself a giant turkey leg, which I ate with gusto,
relishing the taste of salt and the feel of meat in my stomach.
As
you can probably imagine, the rest of the day was a blur.
That fourth beer hit hard and didn’t wear off until sometime in
the middle of the night. The final event of the day was the Finale in
Song at The Shire’s replica of Shakespeare’s
Globe Theater. Here they brought out several of the day’s
acts on stage and paraded potential suitors in front of the blushing but
obviously horny Queen. Or something
like that. All I know is that
the production values were high, the performances gave you goosebumps,
and when tickertape shot out into the crowd at the final note, the whole
theater erupted in applause.
We
made our way back up the hill to the exits, stopping along the way to
let Lauren pee several times. She,
of course, drove us back to the campground, and as I sat in the passenger
seat, quite pleasantly drunk but suddenly aware that I hadn’t had a single
gulp of water all day long, I decided that we needed to come back to this
place next year. But we needed
to do it right. The Renaissance
Faire really did have a lot to offer but we’d approached it all wrong. Next year I intended to do a lot more research
– spend some time on the website, figure out which shows we wanted to
see ahead of time and arrive on site with at least a loose plan for our
day so that we didn’t spend half of it asking indecisive questions of
each other.
