Renaissance Faire

In today’s For Better or For Worse, I could just see Lynn Johnston’s mind at work. “I want a cute, little strip that will be on the refrigerator of every person with aphasia.” “Aphasia” and “confuse ya” don’t even really rhyme. Over on the FOOBiverse’s Journal, I put together a series of alternate punchlines, all of which actual rhyme. On April’s Real Blog, all I had time to do this morning was to dash off a Michael Patterson post showing him to be touched my Grandpa Jim’s sentiment and to snark the idea that Michael would leave Grandpa Jim and Iris without a big send-off.

Then the rest of the day was the Renaissance Faire. My first encounter with this sort of thing was back in the late 1980s, when I was quite young and quite single. Renaissance Faires attract a whole breed of women who like speaking in fake British accents and wearing long dresses that show quite a bit of cleavage. I am sure you can see the appeal for a young single man. There is nothing quite so enticing about a woman as a bad, fake, British accent.

In Texas, it was called Scarborough Faire and ran out of Waxahachie, Texas and was invariably hot, sweaty, and miserable. Then in 1987, I lived in Colorado briefly and went to a Renaissance Faire there and I suddenly realized that the same performers who were in Texas, also performed in Colorado. Now I live in Arizona and guess what? The same performers in Arizona are the ones I saw in Texas, and they seem to have no problem admitting that they have made a living doing Renaissance Faires for over 20 years.

Past times when I went to the Renaissance Faire, my children wanted to spend most of their time riding the human-powered rides or participating in the games of chance. These things appealed to them, but they also cost lots of money, particularly the games of chance. This year, however, I printed off the list of free programs and asked them to choose which ones they wanted to see. Then we just went from show to show of the ones they both wanted to see, and participated in just a few rides and games of chance to satisfy them. Not being completely out of money until close to the end of the Faire is much more appealing to a father than to have that occur sometime around noon. I would say this was easily the most successful Faire I have been to with the kids, and part of that is the fact they are old enough to want to see some of the shows.

Tomorrow’s strip: Michael Patterson’s motivations for continuously nominating more and more relatives to whom he can give Valentine’s Day gifts is a mystery, particularly when the Sobinskis enter the picture. However, once I saw the phallic grabbing of the vase by the saleslady relative to Mike’s crotch, it all became clear to me.