'Not much' is a lie, though. I'm living too many concurrent lives, with limited discretionary time, which I often spend sleeping. It's the final day of September: just finished with Baseball Season, busy with my day job, Murder Mystery, Mother, writing theatre reviews, and I'm right in the thick of Renaissance Festival Season. RenFest and its associated activities (costume design, building, repair, washing, mime lunch prep, stilt maintenance, ongoing performer training, logistics, equipment management) occupy the majority of my attention.
Though one of my mimes frequently says, "How do you spell 'actor'? W-H-O-R-E," I don't usually feel like a sellout. My niche is weird and tiny. Making people's day in 45 seconds or fewer. Being professionally beautiful. Showing up fabulous. Changing clothes and posing for photographers. Following the Big 3 Rules of Be early, Be gorgeous, Be easy to work with. (Regular folk accept that as 'talent'. Actual talent seems almost optional.)
Because people are visual, I designed us to look terrific from every angle, in every condition, including soaking wet with sweat, rain or both. I designed us to be exquisite individually, in pairs, as a group, with or without patrons in the picture. And the picture is the thing, nowadays. "Pictures or it didn't happen" is almost literally true.
I believe this is what has happened at the Maryland Renaissance Festival. It is "instagrammable" (forgive me if that term has now been replaced by something fresher; I have limited contact with YouthSpeak) to an extreme degree, and content creators adore the opportunity. Outdoors, great lighting, public, costumed event, fanciful food and beverage items, themed weekends, music of all sorts, variety skills stage acts, audience involvement, beautifully handcrafted wearable items from footwear to headgear and all items in between, housewares, craft demonstrations, decorative art, games of skill, dancing, Shakespeare, sideshow acts, a village storyline, participatory activities, beautification services, pretend royalty and a mindbogglingly relaxed dress code. There is a lot of content-able material here.
By Weekend #2, all the tickets for each day of the rest of the 2025 season had been sold. Some will be returned and resold, which happens nowadays because demand demands it, and the platform making it possible exists. Today, we face a rainy weekend, or at least a rainy Saturday. I judge it to be very little more than aggressive mist.
Snippet #1: Young lad with adult women wishes to be divested of his tee shirt. First Woman: "Oh, no, honey, I don't think it's okay to..." Second Woman: "Don't worry about it. Plenty of people walk around here wearing almost nothing." First Woman (looking around briefly): "Oh, but- " I catch her attention with my hand, and, from my stilted position of Inside Front Gate Backdrop Position A, and with both hands give the downwards diagonal wave that indicates, "It's fine. He's fine. Everything's fine," (are you trying it right now?) and in fact Second Woman says, as I do the gesture, "He's fine, it's fine, we're all fine."
Snippet #2: Mome Rath is here! I greet her with great excitement. I don't know where she's been or what she's been doing or why we can't have lunch together sometime but I'm delighted to see her. The mime beside me has no idea who Mome Rath is because I am old and she is less so.
Snippet #3: I sit briefly at the back of Market Stage (in a former iteration, Chess Stage) on one of the Smith-scale flowerpots from which ivy grows. The ivy, presumably, will eventually cover the lattice built above the audience, which already provides some shade. My two stilt mimes come around the corner and spot me on my little perch, and react with expressions indicating adorableness. I discover later that my pinks against the white pot and tendrils of vine around made an especially cute vision. I am unaware whether anyone captured that moment digitally.
Snippet #4: Outside Front Gate, a patron approaches. "You've been here for many seasons, I think." I indicate that this is so. He points to a young man. "He was a little kid last time we were here. We saw you then." I indicate the young man has grown. "Yeah, he's 27 now," says the patron, "but you, you don't age, do you?" I grin and make the 'aw, shucks' face.
The relative brilliance of this post is questionable, but at least I've made one. It's not that I haven't been writing. I haven't been writing here. I've been writing here, and here, and here. Come see me at the Faire, if you can. Those who haunt the Renaissance Festival website may find tickets available. A green check mark is your friend.
England Dan and John Ford Coley, I'd Really Love To See You Tonight; 1976
[This is for later but you can look at it now if you want. It's completely unrelated. You've been warned.]
https://people.math.wisc.edu/~jwrobbin/Higgeldy.txt
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