Subject: I attended Faire in garb yesterday (long delurk)
(This is being crossposted to alt.fashion.crossdressing, where I am a familiar name. Change your header if you only want to reply to one group.)
This is my first post ever to alt.fairs.renaissance. I have been lurking for a few years, but have never felt I had much to say, not being a vendor or performer or any more of a participant than a once a season patron. But I still read this group because it is one of the most delightfully flame-free groups I have read, and it quite possibly has more posts beginning with OT than any other outside of alt.fashion. (It also has not possibly but definitely the longest sig files in Usenetdom.) I like the way you treat each other and the easy way you share your feelings, and I feel this same vibe interacting with you all in real (Faire) life.
Well, I finally attended Faire in garb yesterday - but not in a way most people do it. As my name implies, I am male, my height is six feet even, and I have a construction workers physique. But today at the Kansas City Faire I finally did what I had been wanting to do for the last four years, and now was at a moment when I had the money to do it, even if it was crazy by all my otherwise normal standards. I went into Heart's Delight and spent $200 and change on a complete peasant class woman's outfit - lavender chemise, aqua blue underskirt, bodice in a delicate pink rose pattern on a blue and teal background, and a muffin cap in a darker lavender.
One of the sales ladies fitted me out right there in the shop, showed me how to lace the bodice, tie the waistband in a rose knot, and tuck up the sides of the chemise to show the underskirt. She asked if I was going to wear it out, and I had watched every other lady customer in that shop go out in their new outfit, and I said yes. This was about 2 in the afternoon, and I strolled around in my new ensemble until the closing cannon at 6:30. I kept it in on during the drive home (if anything had happened and anybody had asked, I would have just said I was at a renaissance festival.).
While being fitted for the bodice, another woman customer in the store asked me if I had boobs, and I answered no, but I've got pectorals. The saleslady went on to add about how there is still a fleshy part to them that can be formed, all in a matter of fact tone like I was not the first male customer she had served. She started out with one that would have barely surrounded me, and I told her I wasn't so much interested in a corset, so she got me the next larger size, snug around the bottom, but slack enough to bend and breathe,
I am a totally out cross dresser in the mundane world, and I go about town on normal errands in skirts and dresses, and I had been coming to the KC Faire in mundane drag for a few years. (I've been immune to any comedy act that would drag me onto stage and make me put on pink tutus or such while the rest of the audience jeered.) I was in an ultramodern mundane red tank top and ankle length rayon dress when I first came thru the gate. I was encouraged earlier in the morning by the example of the hammered dulcimer player for Minstrosity, who performed in an Irish woman's outfit with a green bodice and a plaid shawl over his shoulder. (Probably I should say her, I gathered from the liner notes of their CD that this person is transexual and transitioned.) When I walked into the shop, there was never even any discussion of if it was for me. The sales lady pointed out some of her wares, I told her I was going to have to scratch my head for a few minutes, and eventually we got together again.
Well, I had an absolute blast swimming in the reactions of other people as I stepped out, some called me milord, some called me milady, one called me milady sir, some said they didn't quite know what to call me. When I got asked which, I answered, whichever they wanted. I got many of the affectionate and amused smiles from women that I have come to know well after seven years of real world gender bending. I got cries of "gorgeous". One of the first things I encountered was a dancing troupe of women who were inviting people in, and I got to shake my booty and swivel my hips to some drummers who were doing a bit in 7/4 time. It was all stroking heaven.
The temperature was in the high eighties, and now I don't have to ask anyone any more the question I have been advised not to ask on a.f.r., "Are you hot in that?" The answer is yes, but not as much as I had imagined. The materials of both chemise and skirt were gauzy cotton. I discovered a secondary reason for the low necklines exposing the shoulders and the décolletage, it definitely helps with the cooling, baring a particularly sensitive part of the body where some of the main neural thermostats are. The breezes also came in from below in the skirts. (But I still can't see how the noble women can cope in their satins and corduroys.)
I became much more aware of hazards on the ground as I walked about in the almost ground length skirt. I had trouble keeping the sleeves from creeping up into my bodice, and keeping the drawstring around my waist from riding down from the bottom of the bodice (The bodice was actually a bit too short for my longer than average (for women) torso.).
Now there is no doubt in my mind, I'm a rennie. I like the same music, I laugh at the same jokes, I share the same interest in history, and the whole respect for the intellectual that it is based on, that the rennies do. This is a crowd I want to get in with more.
But I am still having trouble determining just what role I can play in this movie. I could dress in many of the male outfits, which in the mundane world would be perceived as dresses with leggings beneath. But I like the women's outfits more, maybe because of the way I have been with female clothes for years, maybe because they are a wee bit more comfortable. I could wear kilts, but I hate scratchy wool; I'd have to wear a non-period nylon slip under one. No, it was just plain more fun in Elizabethan drag today; anything else will be a letdown from now on.
Now maybe I could say I was an actor at the Globe Theater. In Shakespeare's time, all roles, male or female, were performed by men. But I might would have to shave off my beard, and my mundane persona wants to keep it for its gender bending value. So what to be? That is now the question.
-Butterfly Bill
www.grapevine.net/~butterflybill/BB.htm
(prithee be thou not shocked at my short sig)
P.S. Is there on the web an explanation of how to tie the rose knot, preferably with pictures? I only saw it done once, and there are a few parts missing in my memory.
Click to see what the Rennies on a.f.r. wrote in response to this
Click to see KCRF, Act II