When I was fourteen, I got a job at a Renaissance Faire. It’s tempting to say it was the best job I ever had, but really it was just my first and the most aggressively formative.
Every Saturday and Sunday morning in August and September, I’d cinch myself into a purple velvet bodice worn over a gauzy, off-the-shoulder dress. Given my closet’s limited options, Doc Martens felt like the most appropriate footwear. My mom would drop me off in front of the big wooden gates where I’d flash my employee badge and head past vendors hanging floral wreaths and setting out fairy statuettes in neat rows. After a short walk, I’d get to the gazebo-like booth where I would spend the day selling necklaces that looked like little dragon claws, rings with intricate designs symbolizing fidelity and strength, and pewter talismans that promised love and luck. I worked there for three sticky summers.
Like its relatives around the country, my Ren Faire drew mobs of patrons who roamed around guzzling beer and gnawing on giant turkey drumsticks. They made out on the so-called “kissing bridge” and lined up to hurl axes and knives at wooden targets, while being heckled by costumed women with dangerously wobbly cleavage. The Faire was a favorite weekend outing for families with little kids, who could be counted on to buy the gender-appropriate souvenirs that were its stock in trade: wooden swords and knight’s helmets for the little boys; those glittery, satin-covered princess hats—the ones that look like big upside-down ice cream cones—for the girls. Along with a strong Goth contingent, the Faire also attracted middle-aged women hunting for sacred gemstones and unicorn lawn ornaments, guys decked out in motorcycle gear, a few Hasidic families from the nearby ultra-Orthodox community and, usually, one confused guy in a Starfleet uniform.
Obviously, it was an eclectic version of the Renaissance, and an indulgent one—with room for both melodramatic acts of chivalry and bawdy jokes about pickles. In keeping with the spirit of this supposedly simpler and more innocent time (and with help from the “drynks” dispensed in any number of open-air taverns), people relaxed their inhibitions, pushing against boundaries and hoping to find them flexible. I got my hand kissed a lot, by guys with long hair and a flair for the dramatic. And I quickly recognized the hazards of calling someone “my lord” while wearing a contraption that hikes your boobs up close to your chin.
In the best moments, it was possible to forget I was in high school. In other more ordinary ones, I learned how to make change, call in credit card charges and size people’s ring fingers. I ate mozzarella sticks for lunch every day—sold alongside funnel cake and other county fair staples, and also gestures at more authentic fare, like “steak on a stake.” I started out as a drama club nerd, committed to the vague British accent encouraged by Faire management, but I let it slip as the weeks and then summers went by and I got bored. My boss was a super nice lady who, in her normal life during the week, was a lifer with UPS. When things were slow she’d wave me off to go watch the juggling act that went on at the stage next to our shop. One morning I came in to find her stricken; Princess Diana had been killed in a car wreck, she’d just heard it on the news.
In between sales I did the predictable thing and fell in love, hard and misguided, at least once a season. Jarrett was a painter with bright blue eyes and a crooked nose who spent weekends in the campgrounds behind the fair, living in a yellow school bus his silversmith dad had converted into the ultimate in bohemian motor homes. James was a heavily tattooed army reservist whose plans to move to Ireland had been derailed by the sudden death of his father back home in New Jersey. Andrew sold giant twisty candles across the dirt path from my shop. I could stand there and spy on him as he stood at the counter, his big hands laid flat on its surface as he stared into the distance, never looking my way. It was all too easy to fall hard in that place—what should have been little crushes were instead picturesque set pieces, romance for the ages.
Most people who flocked to the “Renaissance” being performed on these 65 acres in upstate-ish New York didn’t really care about history or accuracy. It was just a nice place to buy handcrafted pottery, take in a joust and have their fortune told. A scrappy, blessedly local Disneyland. There was, though, a conspicuous group that took the escapism more seriously. Impeccably costumed, they bought season passes that promised a summer full of chances to pretend they were living in their ideal era. I half-admired them for it—their commitment, and their certainty about where they belonged. But I also cringed as they wandered past weighed down by velvet robes, bodies straining against corset strings, drinking mead out of jeweled pewter chalices and fanning themselves against the heat. Before I knew quite why, their dedication to this abstracted age felt like something to distance myself from, or even pity.
Because we made up the scenery that enabled these fantasies, my coworkers and I felt licensed to stand in judgment of them. Our interactions with patrons were a shaky balance of deference and sarcasm. Showing up each day before the gates opened to the public, and staying after they’d cleared out and the fryers were turned off, trash swept up and cash counted, we were in little danger of being seduced or surprised. That’s how we wanted it (or claimed to). But the Faire was a playground for us, too—an enabling sort of place where people who thought of themselves as freaks or outlaws could show off their tattoos, flirt and make money and not feel like sell-outs.
I didn’t know then how special this was. After my time at the Faire, I went on to have jobs that felt more relentless and less revealing. I made lattes at a mall and arranged bouquets of flowers in a tiny shop stuck onto the side of a train station. I worked behind the customer service desk of a big art supply store, and spent nights inventorying colored pencils and skeins of yarn. Later, I sorted invoices and made photocopies for a construction company whose offices were in a suburban basement and had a gas fireplace.
On the surface, these were more ordinary jobs than that first, most vivid one. They were pretty typical stops on the way to becoming a “professional,” a destination that’s supposed to be more carefully chosen or worked toward than the way station that is summer employment. Or at least, stumbled on in a way that will make sense when you look back on it with the presumed wisdom of time and distance. Everything looks different with that kind of distance—maybe especially first jobs, weighed down, in retrospect, with everything we didn’t know yet about the bond between work and ambivalence.
So we pride ourselves on the more unexpected lines on our resumes, the things that raise eyebrows and beg questions. Beyond the usual retail and restaurant jobs, we tell stories about our time as go-go dancers, itinerant dishwashers, assembly line workers, temporary carnies. Sometimes we were these things and sometimes we still are, sometimes they were deliberate choices and sometimes they were necessities. Most of them look better looking back, or at least they make more sense that way. For me, having worked at a Renaissance Faire becomes a lucky thing, something I can’t exactly say I earned or aimed for, but that I still get to claim.
Sometimes I feel like my summers there have something to do with the person I grew up to be and the way I hold tight to the past. In others they just seem like a coincidence, and a curiosity. A Renaissance Faire is built from and for nostalgia, and surely that makes it an especially unreliable source of the same. So my wistfulness for it is a disorienting thing—it can be hard to tell my own half-melted memories from the generic ones and the ones that were staged. And even harder to guess what might be different if I could.
Tags: eryn loeb, formative experiences, high school, ren faires, work
Dammit, this was supposed to make me get over my regret at never having worked at a Ren Faire. Now it has made that longing even stronger.
I would go to any Renaissance Faire that employed the likes of you, fair maiden.
Ok so most Renaissance Fairs are really Medieval, right?
The Renaissance Fair I grew up going to had a lot of 30 minute Shakespeare plays going on, which is time appropriate. And dried flower garlands are timeless, let’s face it.
True. The one I went to this summer seemed a lot more wench/knights/heavy swords based. Mainly like I was stuck in Monty Python’s Holy Grail.
By the way the first thing I saw was a sign for “Royal Thirst Quencher Gatorade” and “Ye Olde Seltzer” and I pretty much lost it.
Did they have one of these?
Haha, no, but no one ever likes to remember that humans have been unremorsefully brutal to each other, e.g all of the references to “plantation-style living” in any new luxury subdivision from MD on south.
Baroque Faire or GTFO.
My friend explained the New York Renaissance Faire to me like this:
“You had jousting presided over by Elizabeth I with the winner deciding whether a Lancaster or York succeeded her, all in front of an approximation of a 13th Century castle and a large battle at the end which included what could only be called an approximation of a viking.”
“What a crappy candle!” *sobs*
“You’ve ruined our vacation.”
Thus endeth my knowledge of Ren Faires. I do like the idea of eating giant hunks of meat medieval style though.
I would LOVE to live during the Renaissance.
Oh my god you guys, I would murder SO MANY Protestants.
Love this. I knew exactly which RenFaire you’re talking about, even before you said where it was. I went every year with my dad. He indulged me after Prince of Thieves kicked off some kind of Robin Hood obsession in me.
A couple years ago, I went back as an adult with my friends. When I was a kid, I was very invested in following the story of Robin Hood leading up to the joust. As an adult, it was way more about the mead and turkey legs.
YES. I also went back a few years ago. It was super weird but the mead and turkey legs helped.
Thanks to The Sandman, every time I think of Renaissance Faires now, I think of the Sunday Mourning issue where an immortal Englishman wanders around an American Renaissance Fair, gets irritable, and says things like:
“We never even noticed the Renaissance. The Renaissance was a load of bloody Italians poncing around claiming to be the golden age of the Greeks come around again. Nobody in England had even heard of the Renaissance until it had been over for centuries.”
“There were a lot of Moors and Africans in Spain and Italy in the old days. Remember Othello? Trust me, if Catherine of Aragon had been in Alabama in the 1950s they’d have made her ride in the back of the bus.”
There’s also this great one about how weird it is and how it’s like if someone deicded to re-enact the Wild West in downtown London.
Anyway, all of these snarky quotes aside, I loved Renaissance Festivals as a teenager, what with the dreamy fairy wings and dried flower garlands (I loved that shit and would sometimes think about wearing one in my own wedding as a teenager) and trying my hand at archery and looking at all manner of leather goods. It was all sincerely and earnestly part and parcel of my high fantasy, Tori Amos-listening youth, even though I never did have the gumption to dress up for it. I still have a stamped bronze pendant with a triskele design on one side and an Om on the other side from the last time I went, over a decade ago.
My husband wants to go this year, since he’s never been before. When I went to college, I shedded a lot of my old, overtly geeky/nerdy HS friends for a lot of reasons, but I’ve picked up more in the past few years. I think I was trying to stretch beyond that version of myself, but now I’m looking forward to revisiting Ren Fest again.
p.s. I was trying to find a panel from the referenced issue to post here, and one of the things I found on tumblr was someone who suggested Sean Bean as their fantasy casting of Hob Gadling because “Sean’s attracted a reputation for all of his characters dying all the time. I thought let’s switch things up and cast him as the man who never dies.” HA
HOB GADLING 4 LYFE. For various values of “life.”
Oh this is a treat. I just went to the Minnesota Ren Fest. It was my first time going to one since I was a kid. I didn’t know whether I’d enjoy it or not, but I kinda loved it. It was so funny how some people dress really authentically Renaissance-y, some dress vaguely old-fashioned plus sexy corsets and plastic rave jewelry, and some just dress like…animals? Star Wars people? Belly dancers? Whatever they feel like?
Once I went to a kind of lame Renaissance Faire in Bran, Transylvania. It’s where they have “Dracula’s” castle. The fire-dancers dropped their sticks of fire a couple times.
I keep meaning to go completely insane, order the entire Pyramid Catalog, and quit my job to go work at a Ren Faire. I was made to stand over a cauldron in a velvet cape, speaking in riddles. One of these days I’ll get to it.
The UU church in my town used to hold a Renaissance Faire every spring, and my favorite part was always the Xena impersonator who would show up every year in a shaggy black wig. She limped around the grounds with a quarterstaff, ululating wildly. It was awesome.
I think there is only one Ren Faire in Ontario, AND I DON’T HAVE A CAR SO I DON’T GET TO GO. I have to settle for following around the Game of Thrones cosplayers at comic conventions.
Oh man, this brings back memories of working the local Faire in college. My boss was a pervert with no boundaries. It was easier to just let him think my friend and I were lesbians so he’d leave us be while we worked. Maybe we should have walked out in a huff, but it was college and it was excellent money for broke college students, haha.
I just went to the PA Ren Faire last weekend. I had such a good time and I didn’t want to leave. I almost bought two daggers and sold all my belongings for a leather warrior woman outfit. I then spent all day Monday Googling: “How to I become a rennie.”
SISTER. My first job was a Ren Faire too! During slow times I was allowed to wander and watch the jousts or join the big singalong at the end of the day. I fell in love with one of the boys in the knife/sword booth and he got fired for allegedly injuring a customer (accidentally!) shortly after I met him…teenage me was devastated.
Ooooh those knife and sword boys were always up to no good! And so they were the best.
I’ve worked at my local Ren Faire since 1994. I’m retiring after this year due to frustration with management (and not a little exhaustion). I have three more weekends to go. I’m starting to feel a bit sentimental. This article was perfectly timed for me.
Hey, Toasties! If you liked this article, you’ll probably love MY FAIRE LADY by Laura Wettersten. It’s a YA Ren Faire romance coming out next summer. 🙂 http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17375024-my-fa…
Your past story seems interesting to me. I will visit the Ren Fairies if I go there. You think your job at ren fairies was the best job of your life? I think the same for my first job. As the first job leaves a long lasting impression on one’s mind.
Your past story seems interesting to me. I will visit the Ren Fairies if I go there. You think your job at ren fairies was the best job of your life? I think the same for my first job. As the first job leaves a long lasting impression on one's mind.