FIRST PUBLISHED IN SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, AUGUST 5, 2005
'Tis noon and the village is buzzing. Word on the street here is that Queen Elizabeth is hunting in the countryside nearby, soon to make a rare appearance.
The peasant women cluster around the washing well and slap dirty linens against slabs of stone as they gossip with passing musicians. The tapster fills his patrons' pints of ale and glasses of mead at the Mermaid Tavern on Potwobblers Way. And farm folk seek reprieve from the searing 95-degree midsummer heat under a sprawling oak.
The year could be 1575, in a hamlet outside Stratford-upon-Avon, England. Actually we're in Stafford, a county park outside Novato, and it's 2005.
For six weekends every summer, the Heart of the Forest Renaissance Faire recreates a "lusty Elizabethan country fair" in a meadow alongside Stafford Lake, replete with period food, period actors in period clothes talking with period dialects (known as BFA, or Basic Faire Accent, taught to would-be participants three weeks before the event).
For most of the 2,500 average daily visitors, the fair is a throwback in time, which is exactly the point. Great pains are taken to create a seamless environment devoid of modern-day reminders.Woodchips and straw line a path that meanders through the midsummer market site, past booths with merchants hawking handmade crafts, food stalls, games and stages where Elizabethan theater is performed. Jousters fight, jesters frolic, minstrels sing and mayhem ensues.
But for participants, this fair is more than mere entertainment. Many of them first came as visitors but were compelled to return year after year as actors. Now they're part of a subculture with its own distinct language, rituals and code of conduct.
"Rennies" (a term for a participant used in some Renaissance fair circles across the country) share something with Trekkies, the quirky fans of "Star Trek" who wear uniforms, form communities and meet regularly at conventions. Both play with time -- one venturing into the future, the other into the past -- and and both satisfy people who don't quite identify with mainstream pop culture.
Organizers say that what partly draws people to the fair is a deep, unconscious, even primal connection to our pre-modern, agrarian roots and the days of seasonal festivities.
"The fair is like time traveling safely," says a peasant woman in her mid- 70s, wearing a flower-decorated straw hat atop braided pigtails. "You know you can get back."
The peasant is Phyllis Patterson, who conceived and created the original Renaissance Faire in Los Angeles in 1963, and later at China Camp in Marin County in 1967.
Patterson had been teaching summer theater history workshops to children in Laurel Canyon in Los Angeles in the early '60s. Among the kids, a popular facet was a form of "guerrilla" theater from the medieval period that featured traveling actors in mobile carts performing in village markets. Patterson decided to recreate an entire medieval market that these traveling actors would have encountered -- where "all the fair's a stage."
She wanted the fair to be a benefit for the nascent listener-sponsored Pacifica Radio and met with members of the station's board to pitch the idea. One of the board members, a hardheaded ACLU lawyer embroiled in contemporary civil rights issues, didn't want to have anything to do with a "Middle Ages" fair, believing -- incorrectly -- that the period didn't engage the concept of civil rights. Patterson relented, and put forward the idea on the spot of recreating the Golden Age of the Renaissance instead -- basically, bumping up the setting a century or two, a more memorable time for theater, anyway.
And the rest is, well, history.
Patterson's fair spawned a national movement. There are now at least 115 Renaissance fairs in North America, mostly independently owned and operated. Alhough her idea has taken off, Patterson questions the historical authenticity of most of these fairs.
"They should probably get their own name for what it is and not just use 'Renaissance' as a buzzword when they're not any different from a Disney-like theme park," Patterson says. "I'm not pleased to have inspired very bad versions."
Dozens of Web sites and newsgroups, such as renfaire.com and alt.faires.renaissance, have cropped up in the virtual age, binding enthusiasts around the country into tightly knit communities outside of fair dates. Participants in the Marin fair attach themselves to guilds -- specialized performance troupes -- and stay in touch throughout the year.
Knife maker and potter Jon Schulps has been touring Renaissance fairs for 35 years. Schulps, stationed in a hand-built booth at the foot of Potters Row, is something of a Renaissance man himself. After studying architectural design at UCLA in the early '60s, he was drafted by the Minnesota Vikings and played as an offensive tackle before being drafted again, by the Marines, and sent to Vietnam.
When he returned, he found he wasn't interested in playing pro football anymore, so he poured energy into his craft. A friend turned him on to Patterson's fair in 1969. After some initial skepticism ("I didn't know if I could get along with those people, but then I saw that it wasn't a bunch of crazed-out hippies"), he made it a steady outlet to sell his wares.
Schulps has crafted period knives for Hollywood blockbuster movies such as "Braveheart," but his cash cow has always been Renaissance fairs.
"It reconnects me with artists," he says. "We help each other out."
Patterson's son Kevin agrees. He was practically born into the fair, and now at 45 directs the Marin and Lake Tahoe Heart of the Forest Faires, along with the Dickens Christmas Fair in December, which transforms Daly City's Cow Palace into a wintry London cityscape.
"People find there's this sense of community, safety and comfort," he says. "I can walk up to a stranger here and say 'Good morrow, sir!' unlike in downtown San Francisco. We're like an extended family that gets together for more than just Thanksgiving," he says, standing near a vendor selling huge turkey drumsticks.
"There's a certain level of geekiness attached to this," says Paul Jennings, a part-time receptionist at LucasArts in San Rafael who plays Sir Walter Raleigh, complete with a steel helmet, homemade blue velvet outfit and leather boots. He sweats heavily under the blazing sun.
"Like any other sort of fringe activity, you find that people are attracted to it because there's something that it fulfills that their daily life doesn't," Jennings says.
"One of my personal favorite moments in life was when a buddy of mine and I were working in the joust," Jennings says. "We finished up one really hot day, went over to the Rosie Stag, a little on-site period tavern, clapped our swords on the table, ordered up a pitcher of ale, whipped out our period pipes and tobacco, and just sat there relaxing for the next hour waiting for the next joust. Moments like that, you feel like you've transcended into what (life) might have been at that time."
As the afternoon marches on, a group of militiamen wielding halberds -- long poles tipped with an ax head, all the better for hooking someone off their horse -- strolls down Potters Lane. In modern times, they might be called Secret Service agents, but their reconnaissance here provides the keen observer with the first clue that Her Majesty is approaching the village.
"I'm an escapist, and this is fantasy," says Bill Hewitt, a handyman and sci-fi movie fan from Martinez. During a 19-year tenure, which started when he began taking his daughter to fencing lessons at the fair when it was still at Blackpoint, he has worked his way up the ranks of the queen's guard. His daughter has since moved on.
"There is too much drama in real life, so this is a bit of an escape," Hewitt says.For many, that escape is toward a creative outlet their professional lives lack. The majority of participants seem to work in information technology.
"In the very beginning, all the members of the Queen's Court worked as programmers for Apple Computer," says Patterson, "and the peasants were data processors."For others, the fair provides a venue to leave behind, if only for some hours, the expectations modern society places on them.
"I like being a peasant very much because I can grovel in the streets to my heart's content. I can be dirty; I can be crude," says a Sebastopol homemaker named Kathy Woeltjen, who adds, "me fair name is Abigail."
"We eat in the street as peasants," she says as she spins wool. "We sit in the dirt. We sometimes have food fights -- these are not things that I would normally be doing as a middle-aged American woman. It's a license to play."
In the culture of fair, that also means the chance to act out anachronistic social norms.
"Chivalry can be great fun, whether you just want to be a little nice to someone or if you want to be a knight," says Patrick Franz, a period actor from Los Angeles who plays Touchstone the Fool and confesses that he has a crush going for the Mistress of Misrule. "It's a chance to treat women like ladies, to take your darling's hand and kiss it, and people don't look at you funny."
The women seem to welcome the change. "You have to make a paradigm shift, " says Aurie Bradley of Kensington, who works in real estate when she's not playing the Countess of Warwick, the queen's lady-in- waiting. "You have to say, 'It's OK for a gentleman to open the door for you.' During your (normal) life you have all these responsibilities, so it's nice to have a vacation.
"We have had cases of people who came to play with us who did have a problem with that," she adds. "They were active feminists and could not deal with pretending not to be, and they don't work out.
Some people just can't make that switch," she says, admitting that she has spent hundreds of dollars and countless hours researching the Elizabethan period, making costumes and visiting her character's tomb in England. A cheap hobby? Nay not.
In other words, you can take the Elizabethan out of the person, but you can't quite take the person out of the Elizabethan. "Our jousters will take this as their living: they live with chivalry and honor throughout the year," says Franz. "If they can get out of their character, they can't quite get out of their code (of honor). Everyone makes their own decisions about how much they get into it."
Rydell Downward, who performs the Earl of Leicester, the queen's favored courtier, though rumors of a possible romance abound, admits his lofty status can get to his head.
"I have a large vocabulary, which rather vexes some people in the modern world," he laughs, speaking in impeccable Basic Faire Accent. "And I think people note something in my bearing that is different than most."
Down the street, two peasant friends, saucy from a day spent carousing at the ale stand, stumble down the street holding one another upright. They sing songs and flirt with passing young women. Whether it's an act or not is unclear -- the line is often blurry at the fair.
"One of the things that attracted me to this was that I was 21 and this place is crawling with women, with an ale stand every 30 feet," says Jennings as Sir Walter Raleigh. "I mean, it was a great time."
Cherry Edwards, who works as an architectural designer and seamstress in Santa Barbara, partly so that she can sew medieval-style tents to live in when she's not "in fair," agrees that the fair can be an ideal setting to form -- and save -- relationships.
"I think the healthiest thing for any marriage or partnership," Edwards says, outlining an ideal fair date, "is for the two to say, 'I'll meet you at 1 for lunch,' separate for the duration of the morning, drink whatever they want to drink, and then go get fluffed by all the lovely, poetic things that people say to each other. Then meet for lunch, see a couple of shows together, and have an awesome time."
Cheers of "God save the Queen!" coming from nearby peasants and the beating of drums interrupt her.
Parading down the street with a regal air, flanked by a royal entourage of guardsmen and distinguished members of the court, Queen Elizabeth comes into view. She stops to admire a young girl, who gazes back with wonderment, and then continues.
Says Edwards, "This is the bright spot of my year, a total shot in the arm. You get this wonderful time to play here -- to get fluffed, and flirted with, and complimented. You get to be in this state of being that you can't be any place else."