Renaissance Festival
Huzzah! While it is now closed for the season, I recently found myself at the local Renaissance Festival with a family member. While the fair is perhaps not famous for its frozen fare, I had a good time, AND ate some ice cream while I was at it!
Ye olde ice cream booth! I ate neither a turkey leg nor “cheesecake on a stick,” but root beer floats caught my uncle’s and my attention. (This is the same uncle who was an accomplice to giving me my first tastes of ice cream in infancy, mind you.) Cheesecake on a stick, uhh, the last time I was at ren fest was singing madrigals with choir in high school (20 years ago, you’re welcome to my mother for throwing that number out there and giving her a shock). Anyhow the choir teacher was obsessed with cheesecake on a stick. idk. that’s about all I remember of her pedagogy so we’ll leave it at that. Observation: the costume closet at my high school twenty years ago was all heavy brocade gowns, very hot, very nice-looking, very lovingly crafted by whoever had donated them. It appeared that most costume gowns I saw this time are polyester off amazon. pros and cons, my friends, pros and cons, but I found the shift very interesting.
It’s a root beer float. Not much to say about the ice cream, but there’s ren fest food to be found to fit any palate! The entertainment was fun, too, and very easy to access. We stumbled across Dr. Dumpe’s fire-eating show, fire jugglers, queer gamer bards, and our favorite act, a local high schools’s drumline. (I was an orchestra kid so I was very impressed with all the choreography - we didn’t do that in strolling strings!) The question, after all this, is: is the Renaissance fair less bawdy than last time I was there (19 years ago), or am I less easily scandalized by cleavage and codpieces? HA! Apparently in the early days the ren fest was all about “authentic” bawdiness but has become more family friendly over time. Maybe 2003 was the midpoint of that progression :)
