Renaissance

Confession: Secretly, I want to be a Rennie. Or maybe, more accurately, I want to have been a Rennie.

A "Rennie" is someone who participates in Renaissance festivals, also known colloquially as "faires" or "shows." There are scores around the country -- two big ones of longstanding in Texas -- and they are, in aggregate, an absolutely fascinating subculture.

I'm not certain I have the chronology right, but I think it goes something like this: in the 1970s, a California educator put on a weekend-long "market" festival with an emphasis on artisanship. It was sort of an outgrowth of back-to-basics hippie self-sufficiency, a reaction to the plasticization (in the sense that Ruben Blades uses the word "plastic" in his song of the same name) of late-20th-century American culture.

Over time, Ren faires grew to offer period costumes and performances, vendors offering an amazing array of arts and crafts and demonstrations of everything from soap-making to blacksmithing to glass-blowing.

At a Renaissance festival, visitors are likely to see everything from jousting demonstrations to pub wenches to mud beggars to virtuoso performances on the hammer(ed) dulcimer. It's modern-day vaudeville, with knife-throwing, puppetry, juggling and comedy routines that sometimes reach a level of sophistication and polish seen nowhere else. The Flaming Idiots got their start at Ren faires.

Historical accuracy apparently is not a strict requirement. There's a good deal of schlock, and more than a few anachronisms, mixed in with the art and period pieces.

Visitors will also see lots and lots of costumes; some are period (14th-17th c.) costumes, faithfully reproduced and worn. Others are complete flights of fancy, or -- more accurately -- fantasy. Like the gentleman in bright blue leather armor and Justin roper boots I saw opening weekend at Scarborough.

The phenomenon has given birth to its own jargon, as true subcultures must; my 8-year-old son is, for now, a "playtron." A patron who comes in costume. It's not a stretch for a boy who is, predictably, enamored of knights and castles, swords and wizardry. The Lord of the Rings and the Harry Potter movies weren't blockbusters for nothing.

I was vaguely aware of the Texas Renaissance Festival and Scarborough Faire. More than vaguely, truthfully; I had a secret yearning to go and see and participate.

Two developments recently have made this possible.

The first, of course, is Patrick's interest. Where else is he going to be able to spend a day in his knight costume and test his jousting skills on the quintane? Where else will he be addressed, dozens of times throughout the day, as "m'lord?"

At Scarborough last weekend he was recruited, on the street, by an enterprising Borgia who offered him 50 gold florins to kill Oliver Cromwell. It was a genius strategy, I thought: after all, who would suspect an innocently smiling, tow-headed 4-foot assassin? Even if he does go by "Sir Patrick the Sinister." (At the risk of giving away his advantage in swordplay, it's because he's left-handed.)

Patrick experienced a Renaissance festival -- TRF near Houston -- before I did. In the end, though, his interest could simply be another of those things parents tolerate to humor their kids.

My other entree into the Ren world is in some ways more significant.

Renaissance is a vital part of Tamara's enchanting story. For more than a decade, she "did the circuit," a series of shows that kept her on the road and engaged in an earthy, hippie art and performance culture six months out of the year.

Today she has a highly responsible and remunerative position with a successful Austin software company. She's come to treasure things like indoor plumbing, air conditioning and -- lately -- down comforters. She's happy to have health insurance and a 401(k).

In some respects Tamara is pretty typical of the other Rennies I've met: bright, well-read, highly creative ... most of these folks could make a go at just about anything they turned their hands to. The shows do for them what Austin does for musicians: allows them to make a living doing what they love best in a world that too often values "counters" over "makers."

It was a big leap for Tamara, to leave the Ren world and pursue a "straight" job. Her best friends -- people she has known and loved for two decades, in some cases -- are, many of them, still on the road. A few have opted for a more settled existence. The lucky ones, in my view, manage to keep one foot in each place.

Tam has done that by working hard to maintain those relationships, making herself useful in small ways on show weekends and being very, very careful not to violate the many unwritten rules of the tribe.

Some of those rules, I think, have to do with how much access is given to outsiders, how far they are allowed to penetrate that culture.

I am an outsider. I have a straight job, have only ever held straight jobs. I don't own a costume. I am not an artist, or even a particularly competent craftsman. My last dramatic effort was a run as Ensign Pulver in a UIL One-Act Play production of "Mister Roberts."

Bringing me along as she bridges the gap between her two worlds carries risks for her, not the least of which is loss of credibility and ostracization from her tribe. For me the risk is rejection, embarassment -- the kind a foreigner feels when mistaking an idiom or violating a taboo, being responsible for somehow separating her from a part of her life that is still very important to her.

As Tamara has revealed to me, bit by bit, more of her story and given me more insights into the Ren world, I've wondered at how honestly curious I am and how easily accepting I have been of the whole fantastic hippy-pagan-gypsy-crafting lifestyle.

But as I've traded story for story, and my memory was jogged by things she said, I've finally come to see it as No Big Surprise.

Some of my earliest best memories are of helping my grandma in her shop in Rockport. A retirement enterprise for my grandparents, it was something of a typical tourist trap -- full of sea shells and postcards and (this being before China's cheap-labor hegemony) imports from Mexico.

Alongside the rusty cutlasses and faux armor and serape-draped stuffed frogs, there was some genuine craft: lampshades created from thinly-sliced, translucent stone; paper weights and toilet seats and bric-a-brac preserving anything of interest -- shells, gems, fossils ... rattlesnake rattles? -- in heavy plastic resin.

Grandma made jewelry, and between her and my Grandpa there wasn't a rock or gem in sight that didn't receive at least a couple paragraphs of exposition. Grandpa was a water-witcher and a mushroom expert, could readily find and sort the tasty from the merely edible, the hallucinoginic from the lethal. A curious skill, now that I think of it, but one he shared with more than a few Rennies, if Ray St. Louis is to be believed.

Fantasy was so much a part of my life that I just assumed everyone had read Tolkien's trilogy three times by the time they were 15, and knew who Reepicheep and Aslan were.

My first great romance was with a beautiful, free-spirited woman who didn't particularly care for shaving under her arms but knew a whole lot about writing poetry, baking bread, milking cows and making cheese. I was blessed to have the opportunity to do all of that and more over long summer and holiday breaks at her family's farm in southwestern Wisconsin.

Even before that, and continuing on for years, I worked my way into my own tribe, a loose family of seafaring sorts -- long-distance cruisers, gunkholers, boat-builders. In my part of the world they, too, had a circuit: Texas Gulf Coast, the Mexican Caribbean, the Abacos, Bermuda, the Chesapeake ... it wasn't at all unusual to run into members of my hometown sailing club (and tellingly, it was the "sailing" club, not the "yacht" club) in Annapolis, or to meet a friend of a friend on Maryland's Eastern Shore, or see a familiar boat awaiting transit in Panama.

In Oxford, Md., a tidewater town founded during the historical Renaissance some four centuries ago, I was dropped-off to repair a boat and then deliver it back across the bay to Solomon's Island. I walked into my favorite watering hole there and asked the bartender where I could reprovision. He gave me directions, then threw me the keys to his truck.

Like Rennies, sailors help each other out, no questions asked. They are independent sorts, but loyal to the tribe; reluctant to be bound to the straight world of 9-5 drudgery, jealously protective of their freedom to pick up and go at a moment's notice.

Like other subcultures, the sailing -- especially cruising -- lifestyle comes with its own costumes, jargon and set of unwritten rules. Landlubbers, stinkpotters and wannabes stick out like sore thumbs.

But among the fraternity of cruising sailors, one can gain admittance by building skills and experience. Unknown drop-ins from over the horizon are welcomed if they can talk the talk and walk the (rolling) walk. Cred is awarded for miles under the keel and storms weathered.

Rennies are sometimes derided by the straight world as "those weird, hippie people;" sailors as "boat bums."

I seem to be drawn to both clans of dropouts from the mainstream.

Tamara asked me not long ago what I would like to see happen, with regard to bridging, with her, the gap between the straight world and the Ren world. I thought about it, and finally told her that -- best-case scenario, I'd like to be adopted by the tribe. At the very least, grudgingly accepted as a harmless interloper.

I'm not sure how to do that -- not sure, even, that it's anything I can somehow achieve on my own. It's important to me, though, because it speaks to some natural affinity; also, because it's important to Tam.

Patrick offered a clue to what might be one path. After we returned from a long day at Scarborough last weekend, we sat down to build catapults from a box of woodcrafting supplies Tamara had ordered weeks earlier.

We glued and rubber-banded various combinations of tongue depressors, clothespins and other parts together -- whose will hurl something farther, higher?

Later, when I was out of the room, my son turned to Tamara and asked thoughtfully: "So ... how many of these would we have to build to fill a booth?"