Rennies

By Sean Wimberly

To me, walking past the walls and into the inner grounds of the Texas Renaissance Festival has always felt like walking through some kind of bizarre time machine. The moment I walk through the gates, I’m transported to some hodge-podge hybrid world where old-fashioned, hand-shaped wooden buildings and oak groves meet with seemingly-random wiring and credit card machines. A strange little forested nook populated with men and women dressed in clothing that was plausibly fashionable over 300 years ago in Europe. And that’s exactly what I’ve come to expect to see at TRF, or the smaller, but more soulful Scarborough Faire in Waxahachie.

I am what you might call a “Rennie”, a somewhat fanatical attendee of renaissance festivals. These festivals, or faires, can be boiled down in description to theme parks for adults, although families and young adults are often found in attendance. These faires attempt to recreate, in a somewhat distorted manner, the kind of atmosphere you might find at a marketplace somewhere around the 1600’s. It’s a bit of a broad estimation on the time period, because if the people running the faires put a serious restriction on the time period, they would lose a lot of customers. Which is just as well, because I find it much more entertaining to watch a Roman Centurion lift his mug to a passing 18^th-century pirate, who in turn salutes a wench who looks like she could have done Shakespeare’s laundry. All of this, of course being filmed by a man in the hard plastic shell of an Imperial Stormtrooper suit of armor.

Normally, however, the attendees who do dress up in costume (or as a shopkeeper sternly corrected me, garb) typically like to stay in a galaxy a little closer to home. It seems that the garb a serial renaissance faire-goer wears is only part of their devotion to the keeping of the renaissance theme. While I’ve never really been able to swing an olde English accent, veteran ren faire attendees have an alternate name, a persona, and an accent prepared. It took me a couple of times walking through the faire, but once I became accustomed to the sights and sounds, I really noticed the hardcore rennies. Here is a giant in plate armor with a sword that would have made William Wallace blush. There is scantily-clad lady on stage belly-dancing to gypsy-inspired music. Gentlemen, this in a particularly dangerous sight to behold should you be at a faire with your girlfriend or wife. Stare too long, and you may have to affix an “ex-“ in front of that. After getting used to the more obvious individuals, I began to see the more subtle characters.

Walking into a tavern, I once saw a group of salty men holding a rousing game of poker. One man appeared to be a crusty old privateer; another seemed to be a town crier with an ostentatiously colored top hat and a fantastic moustache. They were served various beers and ales by a female bartender dressed as a serving wench. I’ve seen folks who would look at home with a mouse-ears cap on at Disneyland wander over to a lady dressed in courtier garb, thinking that she was an employee. They asked her where the nearest restroom was and when the grand parade started. Instead of looking embarrassed or annoyed, she didn’t even break character to inform them, in an accent befitting royalty, that no, she wasn’t employed there. And then she proceeded to answer their questions anyway, since she knew exactly where everything was and when the various events started.

There does seem to be a certain air of camaraderie amongst the festival regulars. As much as I’d like to be considered as one, I am forced to curtail my visits to twice a year. I get to visit each faire once: Scarborough Faire in the Spring, and Texas Renaissance Festival in the autumn. It feels as if the theater kids from many different high schools and generations banded together in the woods and formed their own cliques. I would know, having been a drama nerd throughout high school myself. The pirates are akin to the skater or goth kids, the various knights, barbarians, and warriors are the jocks, and the royalty and gentry are the popular kids. As I noted earlier, while it is a slight taboo, folks do come dressed up as anything but renaissance characters. A recent favorite of mine was a fine gentleman who came in a steampunk outfit, decked in a black woolen rain cloak and charcoal pinstriped vest with a slightly tattered top hat, steel and leather goggles, and (my favorite) a leather gauntlet that had an iPhone integrated into it. Priceless.

As the faire serves primarily as a form of entertaining escapism, it does make an odd kind of sense as to why the different forms of geekiness do not blend well. At the renaissance festival, we are in the only place where we can dress up, talk in an accent, and play make-believe that we’re in a magical fairy-tale world with so many other like-minded individuals. Personally, I’ve always felt like I’ve arrived at home when I step onto the faire grounds. And truthfully, it’s kind of hard to imagine you are in that place when some guy comes dressed as his favorite Naruto character. For me, though, the creativity and ingenuity of those rebellious few always ends up putting a smile on my face.

Every time I go to a renaissance festival, there are moments when I can close my eyes and nearly imagine that the modern world hasn’t happened just yet. That is why I keep coming back to the faires, and that is the allure which draws so many interesting characters out of the woodwork. So long as renaissance festivals keep operating, there will be those beloved oddballs, historians, and Dungeons-and-Dragons geeks who will continue to populate and enliven the faires, and make them that much more interesting for everyone else. And I will always be amongst their ranks, helping to add to that very same element that brings me back every time.