I will forever recall with fondness an adventure I took upon recently, an adventure back in time, to ye olde better times, a trip to the one and only Maryland Renaissance Festival. Everyone must, at least once a year, travel back in time to this golden period of history and revel in the grove of wonders, the horde of actors, performers and craftspeople have built for you, dear friend.
Prepare thyself for Merriment!
We were at once amused and relieved to be rid of our iron four-wheeled steed in the sea of parking, whereupon we dismounted and approached ye olde entrance. The lines, o they were long! But the weather, she was kind, and did not make moist our backs, but instead kissed us with promises of fried dough and questionably authentic jousting wafting just over the wooden stone wall of the gate. The accents practiced therein, also wafting, have been practiced for so long in this microcosm of incestuous pretending that they have become unrecognizable to any nation under the crown. Forsooth, the Ren Fest is one of a kind in the world!
Inside the gates, we realized with a very urgent immediacy that were were adults and therefore of ye olde Age of Drinking and made haste to ye olde bar pub shed thing. This is a vital step in Merriment and shall not be forsaken by penalty of eternal annoyance! For the peasants who are dryly hawking their cheesecakes on sticks or bags of nuts in the worst “playfully gross” puns you can imagine are numerous and not entertaining. That which is not entertaining must be ignored! With alcohol! There is much to choose from in the Ren Fest. Lagers brewed by the Lord Coors, ales and seasonal bullshit whipped up by Sir Samuel of Adams, ferments of apple prepared by something or other, and fine meades, which are considerably less farmy than the stuff you buy at the store. You may combine items! You may have a combination of ciders and ales and meades which have funny animal names like Snake Bite and Bee Sting! Merriment!
We immediately ate 20 oyster shooters between the two of us and embarked thereupon on a Food Quest, which met us with “pork pockets” somehow related to the Canterbury Tales, after which we made haste to ye olde Privvies, which were numerous and blue plastic and smelled of ye olde body insides! Satiated, I suddenly recalled that I brought ye olde credit cards with me and that my ye olde fanciful shirt did not match my ye olde Dickies jeans and so thereupon did I enter a quaint shoppe! In this shoppe I acquired floomy silken pants which I painfully tried on in every colour under the crown, to the behest of my woefully bodiced sales wench! My indecisiveness certainly did amuse her, especially when I put everything back and just bought something I didn’t even try on because I wanted to leave. The floomy pants are glorious and I recommend wearing nothing under them! Huzzah!
Later, amongst friends, we did witness ye Royal Human Chess Match, which, well, was boring, except that our dear friend and fellow theatrician Eric was amongst the fighters, yet he did lose poorly! Blood was not spilt! Demands of refunds clogged our throats, but these demands were promptly cleared away by lubrication of even more beers and meades and bee bites and snake stings which we consumed copiously!
Breaking off from the pack, Lord Philip of Bones and I were lured by the sound of drum and pipe, and discovered to our amusement a viking-style band performing a rousing rendition of the beloved anthem of our times, the Game of Thrones theme song! However, once this song was ended, the band cast aside their one thing they had going for them and launched into some songs that we didn’t have a fucking clue about, and then pretentiously ignored our demands to hear Game of Thrones once more! Audacity! Merriment!
A little later still, after ye olde Justin and I had re-quenched our curiously spacious blood with more alcohol, we discovered the pony ride! How sinfully delicious! A ride upon ponies! However, the moment turned sour once Justin made the unwise decision not to take me up on my offer, which was that if he were to ride upon the pony whilst singing “Pony” by Ginuwine, and let me film the caper upon my smarte-phone, I would gladly not make him pay me back for the foppish cap for which I had previously lent him one hundred gold. For shame, the lad did not wish to “spend all fucking day in the pony line,” and my dreams were dashed. Huzzah!
And yet, as full of joy and Merriment as the day was, I do not wish to recall the horrible encounter with the Furry. Ye olde Justin insisted we pose for a photographe with the dandy little fox fellow who was in the Human Chess Match, and whilst I did note the irony of a fox in a Human Chess Match I did not make a note of it because I began to suspect that our fox friend was in fact not a real fox but a human in a fox body suit. The suspicion was confirmed by, well, reality, and when I asked the fox person about his or her costume I was answered by the most foul sound which still haunts my frail mind, a series of squeaks that the Furry was making at me, squeaks which brought to mind words like “yiffing” and “drowning in my own vomit” and which caused me to black out and enter a mental space where time stood still and for three hundred years of condensed time in my mind I hurled furiously every fox or similar creature from the face of the earth into the gaping maws of fiery hell, only to quench the world of such a sound of that horrid squeaking, and after a moment of real time I had snapped out of it and headed straight back to ye olde gettin’-fucked-uppery.
Apparently there were shows and stuff but in a debaucherous haze of Merriment we seem to have skimmed right over all of that and met with our goal seven hours later of rolling around upon the hay-laden ground with nary a thought to our whereabouts or monies. A man in tie-dyed tights shook his head disapprovingly at my antics and it was at this moment I knew I no longer belonged in the lande of Merriment and must return hastily to the land of boring Reality! But twas a fun time, wasn’t it? To be drunk back in time! To have eaten of the foods of their time! And nary a finger chopped in twain by a mis-handled broadsword or head-cutter-offing axe! A safe and freewheeling journey through time was had by all! Huzzah!
Check out more festival stories in What Weekly here.
