I remember when…

[fbhjr]

Pretty soon we leave for Pensacola for the annual Gulf Coast Renaissance faire. This will be the 9th GCRF at which I have performed.
While I like the southern shows, they are high stress for a lot of us. And, I’ve got plenty of memories both good and bad from Pensacola and Mobile.
Some of these are from the same faire. Some of them aren’t. It’s just things that occur to me as I sit here.

1) I remember driving home, taking the wrong highway in the middle of the night and ending up in Kentucky. We were racing to beat a blizzard and the extra time got us caught right in the middle of it as we were going through the mountains of West Virginia and Pennsylvania. I remember going along route 81 in the mountains passing quite a few trucks that had gone off of the edge of the road in the snow. We usually arrive home about 7 Tuesday morning. That’s about the time we got to Scranton PA, which is usually a 4 hour drive home. We got home at 9:30 at night.

2) I remember when our show involved me pretending to be a villain who was trying to take over the kingdom. The man playing the king wandered past our act as it was going on and said to the folks playing his guards “go stop him”. So, they walked onto our stage in the middle of our show. Their leader took out his sword and put it on my neck and ordered me to stop. I just stood there and looked at him. After a short time, he realized what was going on. “You’re doing a show,” he said. He and his people left. He did come up to me later an apologize because “he hadn’t realized I was doing my act.”

3) I remember a few years before that when the same guy playing the king tried more or less the same thing on me. That year he was supposed to be part of our act. We had “kidnapped his daughter”. He pulled his “sword” on me to threaten me in an unscripted improv moment. It was made of plywood. I bit it and spit some out. He went away.

4) I remember the year the guy playing the king didn’t read the script I sent him, so when one of our guys fired the pistol in his direction and his assistant fell to the ground he seemed quite “surprised”.

5) I remember the first year when there was a mixture of rain, sleet and snow. We asked the faire organizer if he still wanted us to do our show as there didn’t seem to be anyone left at the faire. “Go to your stage. If no one is there, pack your stuff and go home,” he told us. We trudged through the mug to find one young boy standing at the side of the ring waiting. “I hope you like this show, kid,” we told him. “Because this one is for you.”

6) I remember one time when I was supposed to come on stage and get between two people doing a fight and fight them both. I started on the far side of the joust field talking with some patrons about the fight we were watching. I managed to convince them I went and intervened in the fight because they told me to do it.

7) I remember one time when we did one sword fight that used an unusual sword move in it (a half sword technique) and someone from the SCA came up to tell me how wrong it was. One of their very large gentlemen in armor came up behind him as he said it.
“Shut up, kid,” the guy in armor told the other one. “This guy’s doing it right.”
“Sorry about him,” he told me after the other guy stalked off. “We get lots of folks who don’t know what they’re talking about.”
I thanked him for his support.

8) I remember taking people from Kansas who had never seen the ocean to the beach at night and them going in even though it was cold and dark.

9) I remember Anton having his shoes stolen because he left them on the lighted sidewalk instead of the dark beach as people went in the water.

10) I remember the hostess of the Irish pub asking me if I knew where the rest of my party was so we could all be seated.
“They won’t be hard to find,” I said. “They’re the ones I can hear leading your customers in sea shanties right now.”

11) I remember many strange things on the roads to and from the shows. Chairs in the middle of the road, SUV’s rolling sideways in front of us, trucks outside our hotel blowing up and melting the bridge they were on and many more.

12) I remember, in reasonable detail, our plots for years 2, 3 &4 when we had detailed scripts and scenes. Honestly, I get confused about the others as the plot is always “they fight each other, who cares why?”

Comments

[mythfish.livejournal.com]

Shooting Don and Anton losing his shoe...these are amongst my favorite memories from down south shows.