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Last weekend, Memorial Day weekend, I drove down to Exit 399A on I-35E, about 25 miles south of Dallas and near Waxahatchie, then about a mile west on a country road to behold what everybody still calls Scarborough Faire. Rumors I heard down there told me that the management wants to change the name to Scarborough Renaissance Festival, because "faire" makes people think of something small, and Scarby is not that anymore. (All of their printed literature now refers to it as "Scarborough Faire®, the Renaissance Festival".)

If this connotation with faire truly comes to everybody (which I am personally not really convinced of), truth in advertising would demand this change. It is truly a large faire -- huge would be more appropriate. It is effectively the renfair for D-FW, aka the Metroplex, and just as there is population and lots of money in that big city, so are there huge crowds with lots of money to spend at shops and tip to entertainers at this faire. And just as Dallas can offer places like Nordstrom and Nieman-Marcus, some of the vendors at Scarby offer premium goods at connoisseur's prices. I was walking thru 12 garb stores in a joyous approach-approach conflict trying to make up my mind on a few things. If I were a Hollywood celebrity I could easily have spent 5 grand purchasing everything that struck my fancy. Pendragon and Moresca were among the establishments there, as well as shops offering gypsy silks that made my own outfit look like it came from Wally World.

And just as a metropolis like Dallas can offer world-class theater and music, Scarby had some first class acts that can bring in for themselves copious tips from audiences that fill seating areas for over 100. Three days was not enough to catch all of the acts that were available. The performers had it easy relative to some other faires, they were scheduled for only four half-hour sets a day in the same location, but this made for some sometimes difficult choices for certain time periods.

The site for the faire itself occupies a rectangle of country land that was probably originally grassland, but now has many trees that have been growing for 25 years shading half of it. A grassy parking lot as big as one for a Big 12 football stadium is to the east of it, separated from the faire by a castle wall with crenellated battlements at its top. The faire is about twice as long as it is wide, and it is divided about 1/3 - 2/3 by a creek in a miniature canyon about 20 feet deep with limestone outcroppings, in which they have mostly let the vegetation run wild. It took me about 20 minutes to walk from one corner to its opposite, and it made for some long and fast walks to try to get to another stage in time.

The ticket prices were high compared to other faires I have been to. One day cost almost 19 dollars, and they didn't offer two-day passes. For all three days of Memorial Day weekend it was cheapest to buy a season pass for $46. But once inside I found food prices in many places lower than usual. A turkey leg could be had for $4.75, and there was a place with cappuccinos for $1.25. But cold drinks were $2.50 instead of the more usual two even. The pubs had non-alcoholic stuff like O'Doul's.

The pre-gate show opened with King Henry VIII, Ann Boleyn, Queen Margaret of Scotland and a few other nobles appearing on a causeway over the gates, talking down to the assembled patrons in the courtyard below. (One thing I hope they never do at OKRF is build a gate with a balcony for actors. I think the action is much more intimate and intense with everybody on the same level in the courtyard.) After their arrival, there was some brief swordplay down below. The action didn't seem to be part of any scenario. I found out that at the morning performer's meeting the entertainment director drew some phrases written on little pieces of paper out of a cup and assigned them to performers likewise randomly selected, and at the pregate show they had to make a scene using these phrases. This resulted in something different every day. They also picked kids in mundanes from the audience and involved them in their performance, to lots of a-a-aws and giggling faces. The opening cannon was a real cannon, that produced a deafening boom.

After the gate opened I broke out the harp, which Bruce the Bruce had requested I bring, and joined him and two other bands in a jig and reel jam with dancers from the cast in front and a large audience gathered around us. The tempos were fast enough to be lively, but still relaxed and not breakneck, and I had the first of three of the best times I have ever had at an opening gate jam.

The weather report that morning on the motel TV was for "scattered thunderstorms". It was still dry thruout the pregate show and the jam, and I followed Bruce a little ways to play for a Country Dance, but just as we were starting to play, it started spitting, and I quickly fled to the first roof I could find. The rain intensified, then let up for a little, and I got my harp to a storage area Bruce had pointed out to me, and then went out to my van to fetch my umbrella. It continued to rain with few letups for the rest of the day, and the TV that evening said that that area received over an inch and a half for the day. Some of the lanes were covered with fine gravel, but others became treacherously muddy, and I had to watch my feet carefully as I walked.

Most of the stage acts were washed out, others who could performed under vendor's roofs, and I didn't get to see a true picture of the entertainment that first day. But that didn't stop me from exploring all the shops, which could take a while. I wandered across a bridge to the smaller of the two sections and it was 2:00 before I recrossed over to the larger side, since most of the garb stores were close together in sort of a garment district.

I walked into one garberie and was pleasantly surprised to see Big Mama, the 6' 8" tall transsexual Brunhilde whom I had talked to and gotten so much encouragement from back at KCRF in 2001. She was still spending part of the year driving a towboat on the Mississippi, but she had gotten out of hawking mechanical birds and was now traveling and selling clothes at renfairs. She said that it looked like I had lost some weight, and was looking a lot better, and I told her about the house and all the exercise I had been getting.

I asked her the same question I ask at every faire: do you have any long bodices? -- and she sent me across the lane to a friend of hers, a Nubian beauty of a black woman, who in turn sent me to "Morescas". I went in there and asked the question, and for a change heard "yes". They had some with cloth flaps along the bottom that came all the way down to my hips. I had been hoping to find one in some kind of flowery pink, like the one I already have, but their colors were mostly earthy tones of rust and brown. But they did have some that were completely black. I hesitated to buy at first, but by the next day I decided that black would go with anything and it was commonly worn by many women at faire.

I also went back to Big Mama and got a pink chemise with overlaying layers, and a lace slip to place between them, giving me the tart look somewhere between Madame Red and the ladies of Queen Anne's Lace. Monday I donned my new outfit, and went back to Big Mama for "adjustments" as she had requested I do. She told me where to put the slip, showed me some of the ways the dress could be knotted and draped, and adjusted the bodice for me. This bodice has stainless steel boning all around, and when I lace it up it constricts my chest as a bodice is designed to do (unlike my other one which has just two pieces of plastic down the front). I found the right balance between shapeliness and breathing comfort after several tries, but I still had some trouble when I was having to walk fast. The prices in the gypsy stores were commensurate with their quality, over 200 for a complete outfit, and I finally decided to just get a head scarf that was also in a good color for a veil to go with the Guinevere dress.

There were a few brave souls among the performers out on their stages the first day in the rain, and my attention was caught by the smoothly delivered spoonerisms of Zilch, the Tory Steller (Terry Foy). He would phrake tases and lurn the tetters around, sometimes resulting in naughty words slipping thru, and rattle them out with the speed of normal speech, all of which came out very incongruous and funny.

In a pub that didn't really have a roof, only a netted tarp for shade when the sun's out, I came upon Christophe, the Insulter. He let people pay him to have the victim of their choice insulted. Usually there would be groups of friends all drinking together, and one would be put up to it by a few of the others (and then that person might pick another to retaliate). He would ask the victim to come up front and stand there while he was insulted. He was a fluent improviser who could come up with comparisons and metaphors delivered with the force of a fine Shakespearean actor, and with that playwright's vocabulary and imagery. He is one of the most extraordinary word mixers I have ever heard. The victims stood there laughing even more than the rest of the audience.

I watched what is quite possibly the highest paid entertainer on the renfair circuit. The more you paid him, the longer and grandiloquent an insult he would deliver. That day in the rain he was getting amounts like 25 and 35 dollars, and those brought four or five minutes worth. At the end of the show, he and an assistant went among the audience for a hat pass, with the promise that the more they collected, the better the insult would be to the final victim. They hollered out the totals as they went, and finally got $210, which brought a ten minute barrage of descriptions of body parts, especially sexual organs, with frequent references to vermin and diseases.

On Monday afternoon I watched him with the sun shining thru the net, and several men together dressed in pirate outfits pooled their money and give him $180, which got them 10 minutes of malifluence. Later another of that group gave him a 100 dollar bill. At the beginning of the show an 18 year old girl had given him 5 dollars, and she was later put up by one of her friends for 25, but the Insulter saved her for the end. At hat pass they collected $310 (he mentioned during the course of it that his record was 510), and she got a deluge of invectives that left most satisfied that they had gotten their money's worth.

During that show in the rain, I estimate that he made at least 300 dollars for 25 minutes of work, and at that other show, which was his last of the faire on an afternoon where a lot of his audience had been "refreshing themselves" for a while, he probably cleared 600.

Another place I saw large mounts of money being given by an audience was on Monday afternoon at a show by the Motley Players III. This is a group of actors who do improvisational comedy much like Commedia Sans Arte, and they used the same devices of asking for audience members to come up with words in categories that would be used to start off scenes. But I think relatively little attention was being paid to the acting because they allowed the audience to throw water filled balloons at them while they walked around the stage.

An offstage assistant brought three washtubs a yard in diameter and an equally large ice chest, all filled with balloons that had been filled with water to the size of an orange or grapefruit and knotted shut. They sold them two for a dollar, and thruout the show kids and parents were coming back with armloads of them. I was sitting in the front row at first, and had to move because some of the balloons were leaking as they sailed over my head. I don't know if they did that for every one of their acts, but they emptied all of the tubs of what had to have been more than two hundred balloons.

So I observed that one of the sure ways to renaissance riches is to provide an ultimately harmless way to give vent to sadism, and charge individually for the opportunities. Forget about music or selling pretty things. Give 'em a way to get back at their "friends".

The second day dawned cloudy, and there were a few brief showers during the day, but conditions remained mostly dry enough for all the stage acts to go on as intended. I was detained several times thru the day while walking past by the sound of Queen Anne's Lace, the six women singing a capella in angelic harmonies. (Their stage was in the garment district across from Pendragon and one of the classy Gypsies.) Sunday morning it was "Guide Us O Thou Great Jehovah" leading into a set of hymns, that included a jazzed up version of "Amazing Grace", one of the few ways I can stand listening to that song. Later on I heard the Corsairs for the first time, a pirate act of four men singing in tight four part harmony. One of my dreams now is to hear them combining with QAL.

I saw an excellent mime, Mikael the Mime, and Hey Nunnie Nunnie, two women in white habits giving glee to what must have been a lot of recovering Catholics in the audience. But both of these last two acts did the same routine at each of their shows, which in my opinion leaves them below excellence. Someone *really* good can do several different shows and wing it if necessary.

Electronic amplification was in several places, used mostly by speaking performers with clip-on wireless mikes. The speakers were always shrouded in cloth. The narrator of the birds of prey show was backed up by symphony orchestra music.

The harp spent the day in the keep after being played in both the gate jam and the country dance, even tho there were some more opportunities later in the day. I wanted to see many people and places I hadn't seen before, and the size of the site made transporting it back and forth in the still muddy conditions consuming of more time than I wanted to give. I also started to feel like a hammered dulcimer player at KCRF, as there were several other people sitting by the side of the lane with harps, most notably a young woman named Sarah Mullen who could tear thru jigs as fast as a fiddler.

The human chess match was on a raised lawn surrounded by railroad ties, with the white squares sprayed on the leaves. I was told that they had done it the previous day in the rain, and the squares only remained around the edges; the middle was mud. The fighting was mostly serious, most of the duels with swords, and the only time I saw the comedy of OKRF was when two went at each other with cream pies.

The weather Monday was a repeat of Sunday, looking like it might rain all day but not doing it. There were even some extended periods of sunshine. The crowd seemed Norman-esque. It was Memorial Day, and I heard an announcement inviting all veterans to gather in a place and then march at the head of the mid-day parade.

I never turn down an opportunity to march with veterans while dressed en femme, so I showed up at the Scots Camp across from the Falconry Stage at noon like they said. I went inside the little house there and asked what to do, and the man inside asked me if I wanted to sign my name and branch of service on a little piece of paper for a lottery to award the privilege of bearing the flag for my branch ,which would have been Navy. (There were lots of other squids there.) He didn't ask for any ID or proof, everybody was taken at their word.

Back outside, some women were going around with rolls of three inch wide light yellow gift wrapping ribbon. One scissored off a piece, draped it over my shoulder, then brought the ends down to my opposite hip and stapled the ends together, Sam Brown style. I either didn't win the lottery or wasn't there when my name was called, because I got engrossed on the other side of the house by the cannoneer enlisting a five man artillery battery out of patrons in mundanes and then training them to clean, load, pack, and fire.

Soon there were yellow ribbons walking everywhere, on women as well as men, on young as well as old. I even was thinking incongruous a yellow ribbon draped around an elaborate farthingaled noble gown worn by a middle aged woman. We marched out in an approximate formation away from the Scots Camp. Along the way we were cheered and applauded and said "thank you" to over and over. We went all the way to a bridge over the creek which we crossed and then were led thru a swinging section of the outer wall to a backstage enclosure where the cast assembles for the regular parade. We were detained there for about a half an hour, and I heard some "hurry up and wait" jokes as I managed to slither into a place at a table under the only tent there.

We were finally asked to form up in a column of five, most all did, and I got up and went out into the sun. His Majesty was going around shaking everyone's hand and saying, "Thanks for serving." I decided I wanted to take up the rear, so I stayed back in the part where the recruits with foot problems marched in their tennies instead of their boondockers, back at NTC SDiego. I mostly stayed at right shoulder umbrellas until the sun made me have to deploy it.

At the front of the parade an anachronistic starred and striped banner preceded the five service standard bearers marching abreast, and behind them several people walked on each side holding a larger banner of the same design held sideways. Behind them were at least 150 besashed ones, enough for two companies. Then we walked the whole parade route that snaked thru the large site, and by this time the sun was shining strongly thru the humid air. We were greeted by bearers of pitchers of water at several spots along the way. I was really having to study how to breathe heavily in the bodice as we neared the end. At the end we were led into another backstage enclosure, and we heard a few speeches and words of praise and appreciation by several cast members before the assembly finally broke up.

After the parade I looked for a place to get something to eat (there were seldom really humongous lines in front of the food places), and found a fajita burrito, which I accompanied with an O'Doul's. I first thought that wasn't such a wise combination, because I was starting to feel slightly queasy in the stomach. Then the feeling lingered for a few hours, and I started keeping track of the direction to the nearest privy. (All were flushies.) For a moment I was starting to get scared that I would have an attack of the stomach flu out there in the boondocks of Waxahatchie. But it never really got uncontrollably strong, and I soldiered on to get to finally see the Motley III and then Christophe for the second time.

By the time Christophe was done, I finally decided that I was exhausted, mentally, physically, and emotionally, from three intense days, and decided to pull the face curtain and eject, even tho there were still two women singing bawdy songs following Christophe and a closing gate ceremony that Bruce had recommended I not miss. I was finally moved to prayer as I got into my van to make the 20 mile trip back up 35 to the motel I had found in Lancaster. S/He obliged, and I went immediately to sleep after I got to the bed. In the middle of the night I got up and puked some of the water that I had thought I had to drink earlier that evening, so I think it wasn't the food, I got some kind of gastrointestinal bug. I was able to keep breakfast down the next morning after getting thru Dallas, and I made it back home where more sleep and my immune system took care of the rest.

Scarborough Faire/Festival is the big time, and if I were a year-round professional rennie I would covet a place in it. Large audiences, lots of customers, and lots of money are there to be had. Capital and labor seem to get along as well as they do in Muskogee, the actors enjoy themselves as they work. There are some excellent performers there that I know will never want to leave to come to Muskogee instead.

To make it my home faire I would have to live in D-FW, and I need nothing more than the drive from Muskogee, which brings me in on US-75 to a crossover to I-35 right by the skyscrapers of downtown, where at both 7:15 in the morning and 2 in the afternoon I was watching someone's rear bumper at 15 MPH -- to show me why I don't want to live there. I've made the very conscious decision to be a small town hick rather than a city slicker

As the city is to the village, the interaction with the performers is a little more distant and not as intimate as a faire like OKRF. The king is up on top of the wall at opening and closing, and he has to walk over a much larger area during the day. A cast of street actors numbering 129, not much larger than OKRF's, is given the task of interacting with crowds much larger.

But to bend a cliche, it's a nice place to visit... It can be made to be like the vacation in Disney World if you want. It's the place to get all the special things for your wardrobe. I will definitely try to make it back next year.

-Butterfly Bill

"Greetings milord, or is it milady? or, um..."
"So did you lose the bet? No, I won it. He bet me I wouldn't"

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