Lughnasa Waning Artemis Moon
Whew. After 4 hours wandering around the precincts of the Renaissance Fair Kate and I threw ourselves on the bed and took a two-hour nap. Geez. Feels like I worked hard all day.
The Renaissance Festival has a large role playing contingent. Some get paid to enact certain character types from a real or imagined medieval period, others volunteer by showing up in costume and reveling along with the others. One guy played the fool, running, smirking, smacking the tree leaves and pointing up at them as if they represented great wisdom. Another, in a kilt, stood on a bench and preached the virtues of drinking beer in the morning while remarking to the passing women: You’re sooo beautiful. You’re mother’s beautiful (to a kid in a stroller). One of the more remarkable roles I witnessed outside the potter’s shop where we bought some new pieces.
“A place to sit! A place to sit!” A man in his late twenties, perhaps early thirties, had a board attached to his back, a hat in the dirt with a few dollars in it and put his back in the air while on all fours, offering all comers a place to sit down. “Show off your wife!”
A rope walker and fire-juggler had the crowds attention at one spot; while in another, folks lined up to be put in the stocks. Later in the day, just as we were leaving, there was to be a royal wedding. “Is this a big deal?” I asked Kevin Caufield, the potter. “We’ve never had one before.” he said.
Several shops sold swords, daggers and knives. Real swords, daggers and knives. In one place’s case $2,200 and up real swords! Not to mention halberds, pikes, spears, broad axes, maces and other hand to hand combat paraphernalia.
The pottery shops’s quality varied dramatically. They were the only ones I examined with care. It looked like mugs and cups sold the best, mugs with dragons, flagons embossed with all manner of symbols, including, improbably to me, the logo of the brotherhood of international electrical workers. Many of the ceramics suffered from overly cute decoration, flowers and vines and such. Some were poorly crafted. There were, though, many fine pieces, too, most often not in the particular things we sought: salad plates and bowls.
Food was plentiful: barons of beef, turkey drumsticks, ears of corn, gyros, pop-overs, candy on a stick, beer, wine, lemonade, cream puffs and gourmet pizza to mention only a few.
Shop keepers invariably greeted us as m’lady and m’lord.
As I imagine there is among re-enactors of various kinds from the civil war to the society for creative anachronism, there is a yearning here to leave, for a while, the confines of 3rd millennial civilization for a time when men wore codpieces and women were wenches, when disputes got settled without guns and bombs and when social roles had more constraints.
When I work in the fantasy genres in which I write, the same yearning comes over me, a desire to inhabit another world, another place and time for a while. Only the most dogged or the most neurotic or the most blinkered hunker down in the day-to-day and never leave it. We all need an escape hatch, a place to let this world go for awhile. I believe religion serves that purpose for many, fiction for others, movies, too and then there are these fairs, throwbacks to the celebrations of rural people gathering in one locale to exchange goods and services, to hear a few stories, drink a little, perhaps sing a bit and laugh. Does it sound like the state fair? You bet it does.
