Reading: Iris Murdoch, Under the Net and Nick Hornby, High Fidelity

Moving: nope

21 July 2001: Ren Faire

I have been wanting to go to the Ren Fair ever since I learned there was one in Colorado. Today I went.

Before, I had been to three in the Northeast. My first two were King Richard's Fair in Massachusetts, in 1990 with SSP and the two friends, Jonas and Kerry, who introduced us to this phenomenon. The next year, I was determined to go despite SSPlessness. This was CXJ's and my first date, if date it can be called. We met PLT and his cousin there. And the next summer, the first weekend I was going out with RDC, he and I went to one in New York with ABW and KRW. They were all fun in their ways, the second less than the first or third.

At King Richard's in borrowed costume, I listened to storytellers weave tales. I listened to period music played on a hodgepodge of instruments. I was thwacked hard across the back of the thighs with a toy wooden sword by a seven-year-old boy whom I petrified when I whirled upon him with a shriek of pain and delivered a heated, if short, lecture about what weapons are and how and when to use them. I bought my beloved Tigger pendant, a puzzle box, a little ring.

In New York, I watched Instant Shakespeare. RDC bought me a twisted silver hairpin to encourage me to keep growing my hair (after all, his first, jocular proposal was inspired by my remarking that I'd like to grow my hair to my waist; I refused him). I bought an ear cuff. I pet some goats and a pig. I listened to bagpipes. ABW and KRW and I, though not RDC to be sure, were in costume; I wore the linen dress I had made that summer for Live Adventure, which is another story I've avoided divulging in these pages.

That's basically what I expected in Larkspur.

Am I older? Am I not a medieval geek anymore? Am I more discriminating? Or merely more snobby?

I bought my ticket from a woman whose Cockney accent wavered in the short conversation of our transaction. Waiting by the gate, I smiled at the antics of the jester above, who teased the crowd in a better British accent than the ticket-seller's.

While I wasn't one of the folks in khaki shorts and t-shirts who whisper mockingly about those who in their costumes try to recreate our selective perception of the period, I, in Tevas and cotton shorts overalls and tank top, was the one thinking that if it ever got over 90 degrees in England, no one even then would have suffered the sun wearing black velvet and leather but would have worn linen or thinly woven wool. I was the one setting my teeth when merchants tried to affect accents they could not maintain and responding to them unapologetically in my native Usan English. I was the one biting my lip to stop from snorting at those who tried haltingly to converse using vocabulary and syntax on which they had but a slippery grasp, looking down while I composed myself, looking up again with a polite smile and a "hello" instead of "good morrow." I was the one who didn't blurt out, "Look, are you actually Australian or do you merely have no idea what you're doing?" Because she might have been Australian and thus forgiven. I was the one who didn't snootily point out (aloud) that a macaw is a worse anachronism even than the tobacco some costumed folks were smoking. I was the one whose face turned inside out when someone invited me into their "Ye Olde Whatever Shoppe" and pronounced that Y-looking letter as a Y, which it is not.

I was also the one going from booth to booth in hopes of a ring or earrings in the style I unabashedly prefer to daintier, higher-quality pieces: chunky silver with cabochon stones. The ring I've worn for ten years on my right ring finger I bought from a store in Cambridge. It was the exact ring I bought some years before from the Hoot in Willimantic except that it has a moonstone instead of lapis lazuli. I've always called it my Tolkien ring because of the way the silver is worked. And I love it, but the shank is worn thin and the ring itself looks like it's been hammered. I tried to replace it three years ago, which is why in this picture I'm wearing a ring of three iolites. The center stone fell out of that, though, and I reverted happily to the moonstone. When I had a chance to return to Cambridge store several months ago, I saw a similar ring, but even if it had been set with a stone I wear instead of with onyx, its silverwork was shoddy and weak.

I was also the one who paid fifteen bucks for someone to braid my hair. It's a five-strand braid, which is what made it worthwhile.

---

The theme of this weekend was music, which I looked forward to. On any given day, hearing "Amazing Grace" rendered on bagpipes can make me weep, it's such a haunting, evocative sound, but not today. Also, where was the Shakespeare improv? Nothing of the sort was listed in the playbill for any weekend. At one corner of the loop was a stage upon which vulgarly named characters recited an overrehearsed comedy act that featured, in the minutes I heard, only scatological and sexual jokes that must have been--I hope--over the heads of the younger children in the audience. Perhaps I missed the age-appropriate rating. I don't expect the Second Shepherd's Play, but I did hope for less cheese, less commercialism, more theatre, more pageantry.

Glad I had come and come alone, and equally glad to know I would never wish to go again, I finished going round the loop of shops. Then I saw the last best reason never to go again.

Haitch, don't read the next paragraph.

Seeing camels to ride didn't phase me, though maybe it should have. And, as RDC pointed out, I don't want to ride the camels! (I sat up starkly from sound sleep and announced that to RDC one night.) What put me over the edge and out the gate without regrets was that there were elephants to ride, in a dinky little circle. Three. In the blazing heat. Two on, one off, the spelled one not in any available shade but chained round one foot. And I looked for, but did not see, a big barrel of water or three. One had thrown dirt on its back, since it could neither shower itself nor find any straw or greenery to protect itself from that blazing heat. Furthermore, they were not Indian but African elephants.

As I wandered through, I had wondered if the ability to give myself up to illusion was gone from me or whether the fest had failed to impart any magic. When I saw the elephants I knew.

I'm writing to the company now. I wonder why they didn't have a bear to bait for a truly period touch.

---

Back in Denver, I stopped at the Wild Bird Center to buy my belated bird feeder and bath. The Center is in the same strip mall as a Lifeways Christian Store, and seeing Jenn on Friday night had reminded me of her Jesus Action Figure and that Haitch had wanted such a thing. I drove away with only the bird stuff, not wanting to patronize two businesses in one day I could not support ethically.

And so I got home less than four hours after I left, which made Blake happy. I filled the bird feeder--a column inside a squirrel-proof grilled baffle--and hung it on the nectarine tree; I filled the bird bath and suspended it from the pear tree. Both are visible from Blake's cage by the dining room windows; they are for his amusement as much as for the well-being of my avian neighbors.