Ye Olde Renaissance Fayre

On Saturday of Labor Day weekend, Jessica and I attended the Maryland Renaissance Festival, located in rustic Crownsville, just a hobbit's jog from beautiful Annapolis. This was actually my fifth visit to a Renaissance festival, having attended the Sterling, NY festival on a number of occasions with a prior girlfriend, whose family seemed to thrive on my ritualistic humiliation at the hands of street performers wearing ornate felt pajamas.

You see, the whole idea of the Renaissance fair is to transport you to a faraway place and time, when there was a lack of dining utensils and such a surplus of y's that they were haphazardly inserted into otherwise normal phrases like "playce and tyme." As you wander from stage to stage featuring Elizabethan dumb shows, lute-and-lyre concertos and proto-vaudevillian comedy acts, you are commonly accosted by paid employees whose duty it is to badger you in the parlance of old English. If you really wish to immerse yourself in the culture, they offer extensive costume rental facilities so you can proudly display to the world your inner wench or lumberjack. There are carnival-style games and instructive demonstrations and a multitude of artisan-vendors who stress the importance of old-fashioned craftsmanship while also embracing the 20th-century concept of inflation. It's kind of fun. But that didn't stop me from making the obligatory observations:

• The anachronisms were everywhere. This is to be expected, of course, but the juxtapositions of past and present were more dramatic than I had remembered. When Jessica and I first presented our tickets at the gate, we were greeted with a formal "Good day, my lady, my lord," in a lilting English accent. In the very next moment, I heard her caw to her friends, "Hey, are you and Tyler going to the mall tonight?" Some of the refreshment stands offered non-fat steamed lattes. I saw at least three street performers walk by, in character, as they punched text messages into their cell phones.
  
  And yet, some things are timeless. Not only was one comedy act, Hack and Slash, a carbon copy of the Don Juan and Miguel show I remembered so well, it seemed like they were using the same jokes. I think one of their punchlines referred to Judge Lance Ito.
  
  
• The "joust" portion of the afternoon always draws a big crowd, and I can never figure out why. First of all, it takes about 20 minutes of formal political introductions before the actual jousting gets started; it's like watching the first half-hour of the MLB All Star Game. When they finally get to the jousting, it never looks real. The actors, wearing functionally deficient helmets and weighed down by 50 pounds of chain mail and armor in at least 80-degree heat, are just acting out their carefully choreographed routine and trying not to die. And if anything happened that was actually interesting, the resulting carnage would be so violently gruesome that the patrons would all be vomiting up their smoked turkey legs.
  
  
• I suppose you expect me to make fun of the fair's patrons. I am resisting the urge to do so. After all, mocking these fanciful souls would be like shooting dorks in a barrel. And anyway, I am probably not as far removed from those people as I would like to think. After all, there was a time when I, too, conceived of elaborate costumes, envied unusual accessories like beer steins and walking sticks, and lived with my parents.
  
  One thing these renaissance enthusiasts definitely have going for themselves is truly astonishing levels of cleavage. I speak primarily of the costumed women, whose old-fashioned bodices served as some sort of medieval Wonderbra, just barely covering their nipples and contorting their anatomy into a personal serving tray. And there was no self-consciousness about it, either; these ladies were proudly flaunting their pasty-white stuff like it was Prom Night at Hogwarts.

The whole thing reminded me of prom night, really. It's a weird combination of self-consciousness and self-expression, a chance to get together with like-minded peers and get funky. Sure, it can be ostentatious and phony, but it can also be a lot of fun. In fact, it's even better than prom night, because it's more inclusive, less expensive and at the end of the day you feel a whole lot better about yourself.