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The second weekend of The Oklahoma Renaissance Faire started with perfect sunny weather, tho it was predicted (correctly) to be windy enought that I chose the lavender wench outfit because it has few pennants attached to be flapping in the breeze. I could have gone on Friday, but that is called Students Day, when the castle is surrounded by school busses, and my experiences of such days at other faires are of vendors tying down everything they don't want to be pillaged and music struggling to be heard thru running and hollering - so I passed on that opportunity. Saturday morning I saw a pregate show that was again a bit different from the ones before, and I got to sneak a peek at some the pages in the book that looked like a Bible that the minister with the Anti- brothel Committee was carrying. It was mostly ribald limericks that he had collected on his computer and printed out.

The morning followed a routine that had been developing over the first two days: Go to Morning Mayhem and the pre-gate show; and when they open the gates first go back to my van and fetch my harp, then get to the maypole in time for the first dance; then go to the castle and stash it in the pile of instruments in the alcove to the side of the stage in the pub, then go to watch Royal Court do a scene parts of which are different every day. (Saturday they went into another alliteration game, this time on C, but somehow that letter didn't come off as funny as P did last week. Sunday there was a whole new skit involving the washer wenches asking for permission to build a bath house, without unwittingly implying that the people around needed it because they were all dirty.)

When court is over and they all go out for the parade, sieze that moment when there still aren't any lines yet in front of the food booths to get lunch, then take the harp back to the maypole again for the second dance. After that, no deeds to do and no promises to keep. (The third dance is done to the accompaniment of Scottish Mayhem's bagpipes, which are somewhat incompatible with my harp not only in volume but in key (B flat).)

This is the extent of the harp playing I've been doing, and I haven't really been too satisfied with the quality of it myself, even tho I have been getting compliments. In my mundane weeks I have been heavily involved in renovating my new old house, spending the days pulling, prying, pressing, shoving, twisting, hitting, rubbing, and brushing - leaving my arm muscles with little energy left for practicing. But this all I intend to be a temporary condition that will not be around next year. Saturday there were three teenage sisters in the Royal Garden Café taking turns playing a full sized symphony orchestra harp. I asked one of them how much it weighed, and she said, "About a hundred pounds. We have someone else to carry it in for us."

I went around dropping in on acts, musical and not, hither and thither. I watched the birds of prey again, and even went to the joust for a while, something I am usually not too much into because it is such a display of machismo. It looks to me like Bob the Juggler and Terry Elton the magician haven't changed one line of their acts since I first saw them four years ago. The Bedlam Bards have the raunchiest bawdy songs show I have witnessed so far, enough to make Axel the Sot start to look PG-13. And I watched Commedia Sans Arte host the Celtic Family Games, where the hammer throw turns into the hamper throw, where kids try to throw clothes into wicker baskets held at a distance; and the caber toss turns into the kipper toss, where they throw little fishies made of wet sponges at rubber chickens hung from a pole. I looked up at the second floor of the Golden Harp to find one table occupied, and I talked with the creator of the clockwork as he was still trying to get it going reliably.

I decided that the best stage in the shire is what they call the Red Ram Tavern, which like the Seafarer's Beergarden at KCRF is far from any alcoholic beverages. Instead it is a wide round space in the Enchanted Boardwalk with benches on its perimeter, under the cool trees and vines, and removed from the noises of streets and stores. Lady Nancy and her hammered dulcimer was whom I beheld there. And some of the problem with the Great Hall of the castle is perhaps that its acoustics are too good. Like in that demonstration they give you when you visit the Mormon Tabernacle and someone whispers at the other side of the room and you hear it clearly, a sound made on one side of the Hall can travel all the way to the other side. If the audience is focused and quiet, a performer can be heard all over the room. If there are people walking and talking, you also hear the whole conglomeration of sounds everywhere, which can make it hard to discern deliberately performed sounds.

At my house at about 8 on Sunday morning I heard thunder and there was a period of heavy rain lasting about 15 minutes, then it settled back to intermittent light rain for the rest of the morning. The weather radio was predicting "chance of thunderstorms 50%, some of which may be severe". I thought about one of my 200 dollar outfits getting muddy, and decided to go in mundanes, which for me was a dress whose hem is just below the knee, and some ankle length shoes. I added a sweater and carried an umbrella. I also elected not to take the harp.

It sprinkled during the pre-gate show, and continued intermittently with a few brief intense spurts until a little after noon, then it remained cloudy until about three in the afternoon when the sun came out to stay. There were no severe thunderstorms. But the rain seemed to be threatening late enough into the afternoon to reduce the crowd on Mother's Day, normally the most heavily attended day of the season, to a scattering of mostly hard-core fairegoers.

Commedia Sans Arte moved their first show of the day to a canopy tent on the other side of the seats for the stage they were normally to be on, and put on a show for three other people besides me. Chris put away his concertina and got out a guitar, and revealed to us talents that they had been hiding from us for all these years. They did a few songs with quality that could make them outstanding among regular musical acts, including a resonant rendition of "Flower of Scotland in three part a capella harmony.

At lunch time on Sunday, I again found the picnic tables covered with debris left over from Saturday. There needs to be a crew coming in on Saturday night to clean not only the picnic tables, but also the privies. The dance that would have been at the maypole, which was now quite muddy, was moved over to the blacktop in front of what I have heard cast members refer to as the B.A.T. (big-ass tent). The BAT was also the venue for the gypsy dancers later on.

I beheld one act I hadn't seen before, the Brothers Dimm. They had a special stage with pit in front of it several paces wide, surrounded by a low mound, and filled with mud that they stepped off the stage to wade thru and fall down into as their act progressed. The people sitting in the front few rows had to occasionally dodge mud being splashed their way. They did a farce based on Peter Pan, and they called two people up from the audience, a man and a woman. The woman they gave a mud spattered bathrobe to wrap herself in and made her Wendy. The man was given a flowery ankle length skirt and a sparkly crown and made into Tinkerbell. (I always feel smugly immune every time I see a man subjected to the common ren fair device of transvestitic humiliation.) But some their best moments were ones I happened upon when they were out on the streets. They were superb at being groveling beggars, especially when interacting with His Majesty.

I saw Smee and Blogg again, who were now introducing some bathroom and kleenex humor to their mix of godawful puns on matters macabre, then went to the Pub Sing, which is another that is not in a pub. (It is under the BAT), and the crowd assembled there sometimes achieves the volume levels that I have heard in Allen Fieldhouse during a Kansas University basketball game. It is usually almost impossible to make out the lyrics to songs being sung, but the musicians aren't really the show in there, it is the audience.

Two more interesting days. Will be back next week.

-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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