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Yesterday was quite possibly the quintessential fall Sunday. The local foliage is not quite at its peak, the weather was sunny and cool with a gentle wind, and it was the first Sunday in almost a year when I did not have to pack all my cooking equipment into the trunk of my car and spend the afternoon making someone else’s dinner. We’ve been looking forward to a Sunday where we could set off on adventure, and this was it.
Bridget came up with the suggestion to go to King Richard’s Faire several weeks ago, but we hadn’t been able to work it into our plans until yesterday. King Richard’s Faire has been around for a long time (the website says it’s their 26th season), making it one of the first big semi-permanent Renaissance fairs in the country. There are Ren Fairs all over the place now, to the degree that they are as much a geek cliche as Star Trek conventions and Rocky Horror Picture Show screenings. This one is about an hour south of us and runs for about eight weeks, from the beginning of September through most of October. In fact, yesterday was the penultimate Sunday, so you’ve only got one more weekend if you’re inspired to go.
I have no trouble whatsoever admitting to my own geekiness, indeed I embrace and accept it as a part of my true self. But, on the spectrum of geeks, with 1 being people who occasionally watch Star Trek and 10 being people who do body modifications to look like monsters, I am probably no more than a 2 or 3. The Ren Fair crowd, though, probably averages closer to a 5, and if you weeded out the “normals” who are just chaperoning their geek teenagers and such, you might get to a 7. There are some pretty hardcore people at these events, and we saw a lot of them. Not just the people who work the fair, who are required to dress up in doublets and chain mail and such; I’d say easily more than half the paying visitors were decked out in costume.
And those costumes cover quite a gamut. There are people who merely throw together a par of boots, some tights, a big shirt and a velvet hat and call themselves “medieval”, and then there are people with creatively combined hand-made pieces who achieve more of a costume-party quality. But the faithful wear elaborate (and very expensive) replicas of the real deal — honest-to-goodness chain mail and armor pieces on the men, velvet and sateen dresses on the women, and capes everywhere you turn. Plus…boobies! The women’s outfits invariably include acres and acres of quivering, heaving bosoms pushed up by tight bodices and showing off more breast meat than a freezer full of Butterballs.
Though you might expect someone like me to be all about the medieval cosplay, in fact I was never the least bit interested in any of the medieval-slash-fantasy stuff in my geeky teen years. I *hated* the “Lord of the Rings” books (they are boring as shit), didn’t play “Dungeons and Dragons”, and quite frankly never saw the appeal of the medieval era in general. So, in fact, this was the first time I’d ever been to a Ren Fair myself. It took a few minutes once we were inside to be able to distinguish the people who work at the fair from some of the cosplayers, but before long we caught on. As you can see, Charlotte and I got into the spirit of things enough to buy some headgear and we sprang for a nice cape for Charlotte, but drew the line at the $130 adult-sized cape for Bridget.
(In the interest of full disclosure, I will tell you that in my second phase of Star Trek fanhood, in my late 20s, I did attend a handful of Star Trek conventions and I owned a sweatshirt that looked like the red and black tunic that Captain Picard wore on “Star Trek:The Next Generation”. Between the sweatshirt, a pair of black pants, and some black shoes it was a reasonable “costume party” Starfleet uniform, and I wore it to several shows, but even there it paled in comparison to the people decked out as Klingons and Borgs and such.)
Once you get past the costume shtick, there’s not much difference between King Richard’s Faire and any other fall fair. They’ve got some performance stages, vendors selling appropriately-themed craft items (especially costume pieces and related paraphernalia), medieval variations on the booth games (axe throwing, rope ladder climbing, slide-the-flagon) and kiddie rides, and, of course, food. We didn’t initially grok that you had to buy food tickets in order to get food, so we were a bit stunned to see signs at the food kiosks hawking a kiddie-sized drink for “5″ and french fries for “7″. It deflated us quite a bit, in fact, until we saw the line of people buying the tickets, which were 50 cents a piece. Now that “$5.00″ soda was a $2.50 soda.
The food was actually a cut above the usual things one gets at an amusement park, though the items themselves weren’t particularly thematic. “Ye Olde French Fryes” and “Cape of Codde Clam Chowdere” aren’t terribly authentic. The only attempt to go with the flow was the giant turkey legs, which were quite popular. I have had much, much worse and paid much, much more for a hot dog, fries and a drink at other venues.
We spent most of the afternoon wandering around from thing to thing without much of a game plan. We did manage to see one of the jousting tournaments, which was particularly impressive. Nobody gets knocked off their horse for real, but they go at each other with gusto, and a couple of times the wooden lances exploded into shards from the impact. The knights are very authentic looking, with plenty of riding armor, real swords, and convincing characters. I think I enjoyed it more than Bridget and Charlotte, but it was top-notch as far as I was concerned. We also really enjoyed an extremely funny French juggler and a pair of guys who perform an act they call “The Mud Show”.
By the end of the afternoon, we were quite pleased with the experience and agreed that we’d probably do it again next year. We might even dress for the occasion.
I love that faire. Yes, note the e, husband would shoot me.
We’ve gone in the past but it just hasn’t fit our schedule lately.
The best one I have been to was in California when I was 12. My parents brought me to this fair in wine country it was set in a sort of ravine and all I remember was the theater where not only were there boobies, but naked boobies(!), it was California after all. It was also my first exposure to giant turkey legs and mead….mmm mead!
Great picture!