But enough about you…

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I found my audience

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Spent last Sunday at the New York Renaissance Faire which might soon be renamed the We Accept Your Longing For Transformation Faire. As I understand it, the Renaissance spanned the 14th to 17th centuries.  But it turns out to have also included the Third Age of Middle Earth and the Shire,  the Edo Period and Star Dates 48916.0 through 53745.7. Everything from Wee Folke to dueling royals, fairies, ninjas and Romulons must have been pretty thick on the ground during this time period, not to mention pirates, belly dancers and tawdry, heavily armed wenches with dirks in their boots and breasts served up like quivering Jello(c) on corset platters.

That might sound sarcastic, but while I’m typing this I have a StarFire Sword catalog open in front of me and I’m weighing the benefit of a new rapier (how much use would I really get out of that if I didn’t also have a doublet?) versus some leather-plate armor (how often would I walk around in it if I didn’t have a rapier??)

The Renaissance Faire is great. It’s like 15thCentury++, all the stuff that should have been there, and would have been there except that nobody had thought up steam punk yet, and the Popes would probably have had all the belly dancers rounded up and brought to Rome for questioning.

(by the way, my own photos of the RF were pretty lame, so all the low-res photos on this page were lifted from an excellent photo site of Renaissance Faire Fairies and pirate maides, royals, nymphs and other Wodelynd Creytures here: http://www.flickriver.com/groups/1212688@N20/pool/interesting/).

But as the post title says, I’ve found my audience.  My writing is all about transformations and the desire for transformation, and the Renaissance Faire is the energy vortex, the Axis Mundi of alternate realities, of people who reject, well, the whole time and situation into which they’ve been born.  Or rather, borne.  That urge, I suppose, can be pretty shallow, but it can also be pretty deep, and you can tell which is the right way to go when you’re walking around the faire.  The guy who bought a sword and some devil’s horns, but is still wearing his Green Bay Packer’s sweatshirt and Sansabelt slacks, is sort of pathetic.  But only because he’s trying to stay halfway in the real world..  The girl in rainbow layers of skirts, with a leather corset and broadsword?  She knows which reality she’s heading toward and it’s not the one that has cubicles and 401Ks.  And the guy who’s gone the full retard (in the parlance of “Tropic Thunder”) with the doublet, hose, rapier, stuffed baby dragon on his shoulder and enough leather to get him a free pass at any Chelsea bar?  He’s cool, man.  He is so so cool.

 

Written by Alan

September 11th, 2012 at 10:48 pm

Posted in Writing