Why I Renfest...

I suppose it would be helpful if I put, here, why the six weekends between mid-August and late September are my favorite part of the year, assuming I am mentally and physically capable to walk a mile or so a day.

Back forty years ago now, I was a dorky high school kid who enjoyed Dungeons and Dragons, regretted that I was living in a time where swords, armor, and dragons weren't around, not realizing that my slowness of foot and relatively poor build would positively assure at least one half-competent dragon a morsel.  Assuming, of course, he or she was looking for one.  Because, you know, in High School, there are incredibly important decisions and actions to take.  First of all, you need to decide you're going to continue to survive even though the world does not seem to realize you are as special as you think you are, and you need to deal with a real exposure to what the rest of your life may well be like, unless you grab the power to change it.

And for me, well, I was a somewhat acne-scarred kid - or so I thought, because I washed my face twice a day minimum and still had the pop-up outbreak, certain, I was, because my parents did not buy any of those fancy new anti-acne treatments for me because, well, I never begged them for such things because I was too embarrassed to do so where my sisters could hear and use it against me in another knife to throw at my back.  

For the thing is, when you are raised in a home like mine, you realize that family is, on most days, where you learn how to survive the crap the rest of the world will throw at you, because when your siblings do it, there's real malice and dislike loaded.  Not because they're feeling you're taking all of your parents' attention away from them, but because they fear any loss of attention to anyone else.  And that, I came to see, was a real problem with them, not with me.  I was a good, decent, nice person, I simply lacked some of the real social skills and confidence to project to the people whom I hoped would see it.  

For you see, as the kid who always wore the "husky" clothes, I felt somewhat out of place.  I tended to gravitate to things that allowed me to do that which I loved, but hide mostly behind things.  I enjoyed being a part of the school theater production I was able to participate in when we had a theater, but that was one short year.  The production of You're A Good Man Charlie Brown was really a great deal of fun.  It was wonderful to be a part of a team where every piece mattered.  And I was one of those parts that was never on stage when the audience was in the building, and I really liked that.  I got to help the people with the true talent shine, which allowed me to watch them excel, help them do well, and stay off out of the way.  Sometimes.

One of the things that was really special to me was when I got to work with the school's top-tier singing group.  It was the best kids who were willing to put themselves out in front of the teacher and several other classmates, sing, and complete an audition that showed the teacher and others they were capable.  Then they got together with other similarly talented kids who did the same thing.  I got to watch a few practices where they worked out the musical harmonies, the choreography, and they were the ones that were doing it.  The teacher would suggest ideas, but the kids made them work.

All I did was sit in the back behind a little box that accepted six microphone inputs, and had two fairly large speakers.  I could make two trips from the bus to the back of the venue to get my gear in, unroll the cords, set up the mikes, and then wait for the magic to happen.  And hope that no one stepped in front of a speaker to sing with a microphone.  And if they did, jump on the dials - because sliders were much more expensive, and we'd been fortunate to get a donated system.  It was given to the school for the express use of that group, because that group often traveled around town to the other private Catholic Grade Schools and performed as a recruiting tactic.  We also performed at school fundraisers and other events, and this raised our profile to a point where we were, frankly, reliable entertainment.  That is, they were, I helped, but as it came to the end of my high school career, I had a chat with the teacher who led that group.  

She saw me working on a card that we had to fill out that would, in the end, sum up our high school years by detailing the activities we accomplished as students.  And that was a big deal to me because my dad still had his year books from his time at the same school.  And his write up was relatively short, but as he said, some kids never got involved in anything, they just coasted through.  I suspect there were more than a few times when my folks were somewhat regretting my willingness to say "sure, I'll be there."  

There were the school dances I never went to, but provided technical skills and support for them.  Like my junior year when they needed a spotlight for prom, and it was simply assumed that, when it came to the kids in the junior class who had the necessary experience and willingness to do the lighting and run the spotlight, in that population of two, one was certainly much more likely to be available on prom night.

And don't get me wrong.  The other half of that dynamic duo was, and remains, one of my best friends.  I did not begrudge him his pass on that particular event, I was simply unlikely to stick my neck that far out.  I had done something like that the previous fall, because I said to myself "damnit, I can stand on the sidelines, or I can try to get in the game.  You won't get in the game if you don't ask."  There was this young lady in my class whom I liked.  She had the misfortune of having held conversations with me both in, and outside of classes, so I ... guess I thought she was someone who might think I wasn't a total loser. 

In other words, she had something of poor taste to be nice to a dork.  And so, as I was working to help clean up some of the disaster that had been left behind when the upper floors of one of our school buildings was closed due to age (to be fair, it was over eighty years old, had been used hard, cared for poorly, and it was built on a hill, so ... that was another challenge).  But I was talking to a friend of mine, and I mused, out loud, about asking a very pretty young lady if she would care to go with me to Homecoming.  She was a friend of another young lady whom I'd had something of a crush on, but it hadn't really managed to get anywhere out of the "I have no freaking idea what this might be" before, as so often happens in high school, one of the other kids, most likely someone who was a little bit ahead of me and had identified his feelings for her before I was able to put a finger on mine - and he decided he'd mock me and her together, because we happened to hold a conversation or two.

And as so often happens, the young lady thought there may well be a looming decision which she wanted nothing to do with, so she ran about a thousand miles an hour in the other direction.  We still saw one another in classes, and in the hallways, and in some shared activities.  And we simply did not acknowledge one another.  Me because I didn't want to force any sort of relationship on someone who was not comfortable with it, and I think her because, well, she had better things to do.  A number of years later, we held a number of adult conversations, even about those events, and we acknowledged that things had worked out for the best.  We were able to be friends.  

But to close the circle, this other young lady was friends with the one I had been mocked with, and I thought that, as I was something of an "upperclassman" now, being in the upper half of the school, my odds of being able to date someone of the opposite sex might have slightly improved.  And of course, they hadn't.  I asked the young lady the day I intended to ask her, and she said she already had plans.  Those plans, it turned out, had been hatched the night before because the young fellow whom I'd shared my idea with had decided if the young lady was free, he might as well find out if she might be interested.  And she told him sure, she'd go.

So I was down to a third option.  My first thought had been a young lady whom I'd known for a fair few months, we'd had some classes together, but as high school back in the late 1970s and early 1980s went, one absolutely needed to be plugged into the general information that circulated the buildings.  Because my high school was spread out over four buildings, not counting the other campus some kids went to an hour or two a day for certain classes my school could not offer.

And I was so woefully disconnected I did not know this sixteen year old girl was dating a nineteen year old boy from another school and she was pretty thrilled with him.  And I learned from that terrific crash and burn request if she wished to attend a movie with me that not only was she not interested, she shared that story with one of the young ladies in my class who was not only highly tied into the information exchange, but one of the major movers.  And so, after one gigantic el-dorko phone call, I was the chief subject of the week's "are you kidding me" rumor, because I was so stupid as to ask a young lady who was already so far out of my league and committed to another relationship I was walking radioactive toxins.  

So after that half-life was reduced from a multi-life sentence (so I believed when I got the returns from the information exchange from several directions, including one of my sisters) to a few months, I thought "I should really try again."  

And when my first choice for junior homecoming crashed and burned, I thought "well, I could ruin this friendship."  And I turned to the young lady of the same age as me, and asked her if she might be interested in going, as friends, to the dance.  And she demurred.  And I ... well, I was mortified.  

And I crawled into my cave, terribly embarrassed, and stuck to the other activities and things I had going on for two days, when she found me after classes had ended, and told me that she had reconsidered, and would love to go to dinner and attend the dance with me.  And I had two weeks.  Gulp.

And so I crawled on my belly when my sisters were not around to my parents, and asked if someone could give me a ride out to pick up this young lady and bring her to a restaurant?  In my pre-planning and later panicked re-planning, I had found a group of my friends who were planning on attending the dance and were willing to ... triple-date.  And our plans involved reaching a restaurant out of the way, a very nice one, for dinner, and then we would car-pool to the dance.

And that's when the wheels came off the pickup.  Er, that is, one of my friends had a king-cab pickup, and we were planning on using that vehicle to get from the restaurant to the dance.  This meant we'd drive roughly about eighteen miles from the out-in-the-country-near-a-small-town restaurant to one of the local college campuses for the dance.  And with the pickup unavailable, one of the other guys was able to get the loan of his mother's vehicle.  A two-door sub-compact vehicle which was ... well, after the gas crises of the 1970s, definitely compact.  It would have been a real squish for four of us.  Six was absolutely a no-go, because it had only five seatbelts.  Fortunately, we kind of managed to talk one another into it.  But that was a whole other story.

Because, in the few days between when arrangements were made and the date of the dance, I learned that my friend, my date for the evening, had been brow-beaten by another young lady who had happened to overhear our initial conversation, and she had taken it unto herself to talk my friend into agreeing to attend the event with me.

Which, when you're a young man thinking you're not totally that big a disaster has pretty much the same effect a slight electric shock does to a giant gasbag.  You tend to go up in flames.  And I damned near did, until one of the fellows who was going to attend the event and be inconvenienced by me horning into the subcompact vehicle with him explained to me simply that she would not have changed her mind if she did not want to.

And so I dropped the shamed deal, though I did tend to avoid the girl who did the shaming for the rest of the year, which was only a challenge as her mother was one of my favorite teachers, and we had a class together.  Fortunately, we all faced the same direction, there were no in-class discussions, so it wasn't that bad.  But it was tense enough on those rare occasions we encountered eachother.

But to bring this all to something of a close, my first trip to the Renaissance Festival was during that same fall.  I was a junior in High Schoolm, a D&D Dork who enjoyed sword-and-sorcery fantasy novels, and, well, was about as socially adept as your average high school kid.  I had furthered my high school ignominy/isolation by completing, but not yet receiving, my Eagle Scout award.  It didn't have the cachet which it does today, back then, the question "you're still in Cub Scouts?" was often asked.  Not since I was eleven, I'd typically reply, but the distinction was lost on most of my peers.  But to be fair, in a high school which was, and still is, one of the more elite of the area, a whopping two of us existed in that high school class.  I knew of others who attended other high schools in the area, but there were only two of us in my high school.  Then again, to be utterly fair, the much larger high school a great deal closer to my own home had the grand sum of zero in the same class age as mine, but I do happen to know that because I know I was the only one to earn that award in my Troop, which was the only Troop in that small town, and there weren't any for four years before me, and none for three years after.  To be fair to those saying Eagle Scouts are supposed to lead, I did what I could for the following two years after I received mine, but my job wasn't to grease the skids, nor was it to make it tougher for the next guys.  My job was to be an example to let them know it can be done, you don't need to be superman - which I thought because the two fellows who got theirs that I saw before me were three years older, and a heck of a lot more accomplished than I felt I was.

But that's enough about being isolated.  Attending the Minnesota Renaissance Festival in 1979 was a real eye-opening experience for so many reasons.  First of all, the grounds are mostly filled with adults.  Let's face it - we paid something like $10 to get in that first year, which was pretty considerable.  I mean, let's remember that back in 1980 or so the minimum wage was $3.25 an hour.  And I remember the following winter, I'd gotten a job as a bagger/cart wrangler at a local retailer, I figured out that my net at that time was $2.63 an hour.  The other 62¢ went to the government.  Some of it did come back, but it wasn't in my weekly paycheck.  So I would have had to work about four hours - a standard shift - to earn that money.  And yeah, I was a kid.  I wasn't feeding myself, I was just blowing money.

But I was in the company of adults.  I wasn't some ostracized dork, because even back then, "cosplay" didn't yet have a name, but people did it.  They wore costumes, they spoke with fake accents and in a far more open and ... well, bawdy manner than any adults I ever knew to that point.  

So it was eye opening and heart warming.  And the grounds were filled with merchants selling things I did not know still existed.  Many potters who made mugs, vases, and other items.  I still remember the feeling I got when I walked into one stained-glass booth and saw this overwhelming portrait of a castle, on a hill, over a lake, in stained glass.  I stopped with my mouth open and I still remember the shivers.  That vendor is no longer on the grounds, but there are other stained glass booths.  Today, my fourth trip of the year, I encountered a piece of mixed-media stained glass where the artist creates these lead/pewter figures and epoxies them to her stained glass.  The one that stole my breath was a sort of a wizard figure, his long beard and one hand pressed through the blue stained glass, and if you looked with the light behind it, you could see an outline of his figure, as if he was trapped behind a wall of mist, trying to break out.  The woman who was working the shop knew the artisan - one of several that provided their product to the booth, several others who all take turns working there, and the artist had experienced a dream which was what caused her to make this particular piece.

And I got to speak to a man whose wife makes beautiful goblets and glasses for lights - you place them in the cup, and the beautiful stained glass shines.  I met a man who makes pens, much like I do, though his also include actual turquoise as the pen media - yes, stone, turned on a lathe.  And countless potters and even a number of sword makers and other woodworkers.  

And it occurred to me that there are few places in the world today where you can buy from the craftsperson their work.  Yes, crafts-person, I said, because the last stop of the day was a place that sold laser-engraved items.  And while you snicker, the booth was named Dragon Fire Engraving.  If there's a better medieval way to describe what she does, I am at a complete loss to come up with it.

But she had some really wonderful items that were fantastic.  And I appreciate that.  

And I got to send a woman who was not all that experienced with the fair to another vendor who does fantastic leather work.  My last three wallets - the last thirty years worth - came from there.  My last half-dozen long-lasting belts also came from there.  I did buy a few cheap ones from other major retailers - and watched them shred and fall apart in months.  The belts I bought at Renfest are still in great shape.  After daily use in most cases. 

So yes, I do attend the Renaissance festival for my own enjoyment.  It gives me a mental image, a mental happy place to go to in my head when I need the break.  But I also get to see some wonderful products, most of them not day-to-day living requirements, but they give me images in my head I can hold on to when I need that sort of sanity.  So it's all for mental well-being.  And I consider it a valid and excellent use of a little of my overtime pay.  So I got that going for me.