Bodice Roses, Mac, and Crack: or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Ren Faire

The Maryland Faire even has its own sideshow featuring Frik and Frak (the two headed turtle), a genuine replica of a kunstkammer (or “cabinet of wonders”) featuring vampire-killing kits, and a wide array of baculums. You’ll hear traditional bawdy songs (that never existed in Shakespeare’s time) extolling the joys of “Hot Meat” from the Steak-on-a-Stake stand (passed on in song, a la oral tradition—alive and well!), Genuine Replicas of The British Crown Jewels, sword swallowers, and a culture of performance and behavior that keeps growing over the years. The “rubes” get dazzled, the rose girls get tips, and like the carnival or the sideshow, there are strange bodies, strange feats, and wonderful things on display.

As far as festival culture, where else can you go and dress up like it is Halloween for six weekends of the year? This is a space outside the rest of the year where you can have charming lechery and flirtation in a culture that is usually utterly bewildered by sexuality. Charming lechery is easy when there’s so much focus on bosom-enhancing clothing, a Maypole, and a Drench-a-Wench (or Soak-a-Bloke). There’s room for Faire romances or even Romance Wars, where you woo a beloved (or beloveds) during the season. And there’s a rose girl dressed in blue who has taught me how wonderful it is and how wonderful she is too—but that’s another story. Where else can you have a rose delivered to someone simply because you find them charming?

The Faire creates an alternative atmosphere that, in an increasingly commodified culture, still grows and develops on its own, bringing in the carnival, the orientalist (there will always be belly dancers), and the sci-fi and fantasy-tacky in the guise of historical interest. What’s a more wonderful humbug than that? Once I thought about that, I fell in love. I may not be able to get to Coney Island every weekend, but freak culture is alive and well at the Faire. If you get in now, it can still be mildly shameful and déclassé, but deliciously so. If you brave the nerd jokes, open your horizons and perhaps even think about a puffy shirt, you’ll see an amazing hybrid of oral culture, tribal culture, historical reenactment, and good old-fashioned flimflam that truly exists nowhere else on earth. You can see and participate in festival culture where all bodies are beautiful and if you want, you can still flirt with your fan while drinking a Pepsi (and yes, you can do both).

If you go, you’ll see fae, Goths in high black gear, bikers in leathers, pirates and Templars (very big after The Da Vinci Code), “play-trons,” (those who go for the season dressed up for fun, like myself) plus some living carny tricks and pitches. There may not be milk bottles, but there is axe throwing, sideshow patter including jokes, tarot readers, and if you’re lucky, a sense of infectious glee that will leave you smiling even in the winter. If you’re like me you may even find yourself counting the months until it’s bodice season, humming a few notes of “The Wild Rover” in the dead of winter or thinking that Christmas would be so much better if you could just have sausage on a stick instead of turkey.

This is the strange, not-quite-fashionable-or-cool world of the Faire and I think I’ll stick around. Last year I listened to the story of one of the pottery vendors who goes from Faire to Faire all year, not unlike one of the roustabouts of the traveling carnivals.

Perhaps next year I will hang it all and be at your local Faire wearing a smile and a tightly-laced bodice with a yellow rose in my cleavage, in the folk group, with the people, singing and making merry outside the established social order.

Till then, to borrow a turn of phrase: May all your days be Faire days!

To see more of Jessica Melusine’s Faire Photos, please visit her Flickr page.

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