It's a beautiful morning in 17th
century Tuscany, Italy as a breeze blowing in from the sea cools my
brow as I sit and listen to a drunken pirate sitting on a barrel sing
a song of love lost...
The scene is shattered like a dropped
bottle of rum as a deafening roar drowns out the heartfelt shanty,
but it is not the roar of a leviathan seeking revenge on unwary
sailors, it's the unmuffled exhaust of a Harley Davidson motorcycle
cruising down Main Street, not 100 feet away.
The unwelcome interruption slams me
back into Lower Lake, California in the year 2014. A mother in jeans
and high heels along with her young son in a Teenage Mutant Ninja
Turtle T-Shirt momentarily block my view of the pirate, who despite
the interruption continues strumming on his guitar and singing away
with more feeling and emotion than you'll hear from any of today's
recording artists.
As the motorcycle continues on it's
way and the mother and son pass, the shopkeep directly across from me
steps out from his stand and joins the pirate for the second verse. I
am whisked back into Tuscany and immersed once again in the local
flavour.
It's a beautiful moment not found
anywhere else but a Renaissance Faire.
While most people in this country
celebrated the Memorial Day weekend with friends and family gathered
around 'ye olde barbeque', I spent mine amongst Pirates, Knights,
Ogres, Queens, and Noblemen amongst a great many more interesting
characters.
To many 'Mundanes', or us 'regular
people', the Ren Faire is a fun place to spend a day, buying all
manner of trinkets, drinking a beer or two, or maybe even eating a
turkey leg. To most of us Mundanes, the people who attend these
Faires in 'Garb' (Don't call them costumes!) are just enjoying a
silly hobby. Just something to do on the weekend just like they are,
but this Ren Faire being my second and my being fortunate enough to
get an inside view on it, I can tell you 'hobby' is the worst
description you can cast on it. It's almost an insult.
For a great many of the attendees,
performers, artisans, and vendors, it is a way of life, plain and
simple. For most, this isn't just something to do for kicks, it's
their entire livelihood. It's how they pay their bills in the 'real
world'. If you see a man selling handmade leather goods or a lady
plying her beautiful handmade jewelry, chances are that this is their
sole source of income. These master craftsmen (craftspeople?)
aren't in it for the money, as their sales can vastly change from
Faire to Faire it's not exactly a stable source of income. Some even
don't really charge for their services, such as face painting or
telling you your fairy name. They simply provide fun things for the
children to do. These folks rely solely on donations. I know of one
that was just hoping to cover transportation costs.
Like I said. For the love.
All of them do it for the love of the
whole experience, an experience each of them greatly contribute to.
They dress in period garb, speak in period speech, in effect fully
becoming a character out of history or fantasy. And during my time
amongst them, I've rarely seen them 'break character', and never in
front of the Mundanes. You just can't find a wholly immersive
experience anywhere else like you can at a Ren Faire.
The performers or 'actors' play an
equally large role in everything, many of them just walk around and
interact with each other and the Mundanes and behave just as their
characters would. Pirates will sometimes be hired by nobility to
settle debts, and argue about the price afterward. A young squire
will abscond with his beloved that has been betrothed to another, and
be chased down through the streets beloved in hand, trying to escape
the clutches of a furious Baron. Sometimes criminals are dragged
through the streets in stocks to be humiliated by the masses. You
really never know what's going to randomly happen at any given
moment.
Sometimes the experience can even
spill out into the 'real world', as witnessed in a ceremony where a
local young man was officially 'Knighted' with all the bells and
whistles before he was sent off overseas to serve his country as a
medic.
Never before have I seen such a sense
of brotherhood, of camaraderie, of family.
It's a family I'm proud to be a part
of, if just for a weekend or two a year.
On a side note, be nice to Bob from
Accounting, he just might be a battleaxe wielding Ogre in disguise.
