7. the Renaissance Festival

I notice it’s been months since I did an installment on becoming a glass artist.  Likely most my readers now haven’t read any of them so you can catch up here (but you’ll have to read from the bottom up).  The entries are all fairly short.  I’ve been looking for a photo that I know we have, have seen it floating around for years, to illustrate this next installment (originally divided into two), but what with the move and all, I can’t find it anywhere, so I give up.

 In 1976, we started doing the Renaissance Festival, six weekends in a row.  We did this Festival for seven years and it pulled our butts out of the fire more than once.  The way we got into the Renaissance Festival is that a friend of my parents had the drink concession there and he got us in, a really good spot too, number three on the right as you came in.  As a participant, you had to build your own little ‘store’ or booth.    

That first year (the second year for the Fair), it was crude.  We built a little corral out of reed fencing and had a table.  We strung wire across and hung small framed etched glass panels suitable for hanging in your window like a sun catcher.  We met the guy next to us, Wylie Ponder, a very talented fellow Texan who did watercolors and with whom we are still friends.  They had a glass blower there, blowing really crude stuff from cullet he got somewhere.  And they also had demonstrations from the Society for Creative Anachronism.  Let me tell you, those guys were serious about their game.  Didn’t take too well to jokes.  The whole fair itself, in the piney woods,  started out small and crude and it rains a lot in October and so by the end of the 6 weeks it was pretty much a mud hole.  We had to be in costume too.  I hadn’t given up sewing yet so I made ours.  (man, I wish I could find that picture)

It was fun the first few years.  The guy in charge, King George he called himself, strove to make it bigger, better and more authentic every year.  You had to improve your booth every year and people started building actual little houses and store fronts and if you wanted to keep your primo location and not get banished into the back half, it had to look really good, like the wealthy part of town.  We skated by our second year with a barely improved corral and our third year we got our friend Gene of the stained glass to do it with us and the real building started.  Over the years, Marc and Gene built a two story three sided building that we lived in during the weekends.  It had stained glass and etched glass windows.

Doing the Fair started to become a hardship during the last couple of years.  Our commission work was growing and it was taking us away from what we really needed to be doing and besides, it had quadrupled in size and King George was imposing more and more rules and restrictions.  That last year we did the Fair, 1982, he decreed that next year everyone had to talk in that stupid fake cockney olde english accent or suffer banishment.  That was it for us.  We sold our little structure for $6000 to the next sucker.