They Will Rise Again From the Tundra

Image from Wikimedia Commons

It happened very suddenly. A large pair of artificial breasts shrouded in a loose-fitting shirt of the Renaissance Period slid into view at eye level as I was standing in a circle of my friends. I tilted my head upward to meet the large middle-aged man’s gaze. Thin lines of lavender set his lips apart from the rest of a ruddy, sweaty face, and the curly, black nylon wig he wore hung below his shoulders in little cascades. However, neither of these observations tempered the suffocating closeness of his breasts to my face.

“Oh, you don’t want to go there,” he said waving a loose finger at our map.

I was visibly flustered. “Where do we want to go?”

“You want to go where the fun’s at.”

“Where’s the fun at?”

“The fun’s where you are.” He stood there expectantly for a moment and looked around at us before becoming perturbed at our silence. “It’s a riddle!” he screamed angrily and stomped off with his two friends in what must have been eight or nine-inch high heels.

It was gay pride weekend at the Bristol Renaissance Faire in Kenosha, Wisconsin, a place with an almost mystical sanctity to me since I had not visited the fair since the age of seven when I sat at the feet of an almost portly woman in a green robe who told us stories from the old Arthurian legends. Somewhere in one of my pack-rat cardboard boxes, I still have the storyteller’s stone she gave me all those years ago, a distant relic revived in a memory bereft of the weirdness I experienced upon my return to Bristol. At such a young age, I had perceived the experience as authentic in my ignorance. The visual aid provided by costume must have been enough back then, but in the year 2009 at twenty-five years old, it would, understandably, take a bit more to conjure similar sentiments.

To be fair, I had no expectations of a repeat experience, and any diminished wonder on my part comes simply from cynicism and knowledge of what it means to pass a hat around for money. As a child, I viewed the act of throwing a dollar bill into a sack as a novelty, whereas this time I tended to bounce back and forth from cynically declaring each sideshow a scam to feeling a deep sense of compassion for the performers who clearly were taking every chance to practice their craft for the sake of exposure.

I can only imaging how many out-of-work actors have ended their careers after a summer-long run at Bristol or any other fair (SEE: Feast of the Hunter’s Moon). They are lost in a vast feeding frenzy for artisans of anachronistic arts, and, hell, I would have fed it provided the financial backing. The war horn my friend purchased remained the only material indulgence of the day.

Some people apparently thought that a renaissance fair would be a good place to get kinky as evidenced by men in black spandex sporting fairy wings, goth angels, and no shortage of large riddling transvestites. My offenses in this regard have absolutely nothing to do with the sexuality of these patrons as anyone remotely familiar with my writing or soapbox barroom ranting knows well enough that I am a fervent supporter of gay marriage and equal rights. What I oppose here is the injection of gothic fantasy motifs into an event that should probably attempt to approach authenticity, if only in garb alone. It’s a simple enough request for the most renowned renaissance fair in the region, and a good number of the costumed attendees appeared as if they had learned everything they knew about renaissance fashion from the front of a Trapper Keeper. Obviously, there is no dress code for these things, nor should there be, and who am I to talk? Last I checked, the English Renaissance was marked by the non-existence of Levi jeans.

What really troubled me were the fashion transgressions promoted by some of the exhibitors. A friend recently cautioned me of a disturbing trend in renaissance fair. They are being infiltrated by pirate enthusiasts. I’m not talking about people dressed as seafaring merchants, which would be appropriate, but people proliferating the image of the Tortuga-bound, syphilis-ridden pirate while at renaissance faires. Both Christopher Moody and Edward Teach‘s flags hung proudly at the event, which is transgression enough (both pirated between 60-100 years after the English Renaissance), but when I walked into the pirate boutiques, I saw one set of Captain Jack dreadlocks — a reference to Jack Sparrow played by Johnny Depp in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies — as well as a Pirates banner hung up in a corner.

I love pirates as much as the next scabby wart. Believe me, I do. I even have Moody’s flag hanging in my hallway above the stairs, but that doesn’t mean I’d show up with a parrot on my shoulder at a Revolutionary War reenactment or a Trekkie orgy.

These are nitpicks, though. Who really expects to uphold the wonderment of childhood? Disneyland and renaissance fairs and trips to Six Flags don’t hold that same innocent swell of emotion that they used to, and that’s fine. I loved going back to the Renaissance Faire, and if I’m lucky, I’ll go again next year toting my replica claymore remembering that I’m where the fun is at, and so are you.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 25th, 2009 at 5:40 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.