Ren Fair: Episode IV

So the first weekend down. Now I am assured that my feet cannot hurt any more the rest of the weekends then they do right now. It's not so bad really. We had a great time, starting with the toast and ending with a great dinner at the brewery. But I am sure you would like to hear about all the details in between!

Well, the day went pretty normally. A visit from Eugene was a pleasant surprise. He may even have a place to work there as it turns out. Adjusting to the environment and physical labor is always a nice mixture of toil and pleasant soreness that a man of my stature feels all too infrequently. I would like to take this moment to recommend a haughty mixture which I find is just the thing in the morning. Hot chai and whiskey. Nothing quite like it. So the day moves on soberly and true, Mike D and I spend our time barking to the crowd as we have fencers a-plenty who are much more skilled than him or I. A good job of it too and collecting a great menu of shticks to use on the crowd. In the end I would say that a good 20% of the customers are drawn in from barking, which is a good deal considering. A pleasant day full of smiles and laughs.

Now we come to the middle part of this six part epic of posts, where I talk about the after party. It is the reason we prance about in the sun and the dust and foul our voices with an odd accent. We lose more money than we make and for what? This, it is the culmination of faire where the geekiest of the geeks come together after hours and show their true colors. I guess some people go for other reasons, but this is me.

We go to the tents, dress in normal clothes (meaning kilts and pirate socks), put our feet up for a bit and tip a bit of uisce beatha (Gaelic for whiskey). Off to grab some dinner, some cider and then we go to watch Broon do a show on the stage. He did some great comic guitar song type stuff and somehow due to our kilts we got incorporated into the show and dubbed "Kiltie". Great show, got a CD.

On the way out a very funny thing happened. Keep in mind I couldn't see all that straight by this time and it is dark. So as we were on our way this female with an outrageously provocative outfit passes me, shaking the ass and all that. It really is a fantastic outfit and I comment on it, "That is great!" Immediately after that, a woman runs up to me and gets in my face and says, "That's my 15-year-old daughter!" Okay, the entire picture is so obvious to me at that very instant. Obviously her mother somehow approved of, nay instigated her wearing this outfit and it wasn't just thrown together, it was the type of outfit where every piece of it matches, down to the shoes and handbag. So basically this woman dressed up her daughter and was parading her around fishing for people to make the wrong comment or the wrong look so she could snap at them. So without hesitation I bellow out the most appropriate response I can think of, "Well then, you shouldn't have made her wear that!" I received no response and the resulting expression was a mixture of shock and shame that I will relish till the day I die.