Ren Faire

kathleenroberts and I went to the Northern California Renaissance Faire today. Yes, California is so fat. How fat is it? California is so fat that she has multiple Renfaires. OK, that was lame. And oddly, the Northern CA Faire is just east of Gilroy, amout smack dab in the middle of the state.

I thought this one was much better than the Colorado Renaissance Festival. For one thing, there's actually shade here. And they have the common sense not to schedule it in the middle of summer. The actors and such seemed to be much better and everyone seemed to be more in-character. Even the parking attendants were into it. There also seemed to be a higher fraction of the attendees in costume.

There was a wider variety of regional themes here than the typical Ye Olde Englande Extrae 'e'e One Everythynge Fore Noe Apparente Reasone theme you usually see. There were Indian, Middle-eastern, and African themed parts of the Faire and the merchants actually seemed to be arranged according to the regionality of their goods rather than all higglety-pigglety. It portrayed the idea that this was a global traders' market. Not sure I described that very well. Too bad for you.

One of the shows, "Bold and Stupid Men" is word-for-word equivalent to the Dirk and Guido from the old Virginia Renaissance Faire for those of you that remember it. Dirk Perfect and Guido Crescendo are replaced by Bolt Upright and Gianni Vespa, but apart from that the shows are 95% identical. I'm told that the show was performed in CA originally, but I can't confirm that. I've often thought that if Dirk and Guido were to stow away on a ship bound for the New World, you would essentially have The Road to El Dorado.

An unrelated quote: "That sounds kinky and not appropriate for work. Ooh! Popcorn!"