A Day at the (Ren) Faire

King Richard's Faire

We went to King Richard’s Faire on Saturday. It’s a classic Reniassance fair which has been operating in the town of Carver, south of Boston, for the past 31 years. It’s quite an operation these days, with permanent structures that stay up year round and a huge staff of performers and behind-the-scenes workers.

We went two years ago because we got a good deal on a Groupon, which is good because the whole deal is so expensive. Normally, adult tickets are $27 each and kids 4–11 are $15.[1] Well we got the same deal again this year which was two adult tickets for $29. So we spent about $45 to get in.

Of course, the spending doesn’t end there. The food prices are exorbitant, especially for the quality of what you’re getting. And they do this food ticket thing which hides the actual price of the item at the time of purchase and also lets them require minimum purchases. You end up buying more tickets than you need and there are no refunds on unused tickets.[2] Plus other fees for games and mazes and rides. It adds up quickly.

We tried to circumvent the overspending by bringing our lunch, because it doesn’t say anywhere on their website that you can’t bring in outside food. Alas, that sign is on the front gate. Likewise the notice that they don’t take credit cards for tickets is buried on the site. But they do have handy ATMs… with a $3.00 surcharge.

Nevertheless we did have some fun… after we realized in the parking lot, following our one hour drive, that we’d forgotten the diaper bag at home. Luckily, we’d packed the sippy cups separately and Melanie had put one emergency diaper and wipes in the glove box just the other day. We decided to brave it and it turned out okay.

Oh yeah, the fun. Of course, the jousting is the big deal. Knights on horseback crashing into one another at full tilt. It’s all playacting, I know, but Isabella and Sophia loved it. I think the galloping horses were the highlight for Sophia. Ben, however, did not like the noise of the accompanying drums and cymbals nor the spray of sand and hay as the horses galloped past. Melanie had to take him out in the middle of the event.

We also spent time wandering from place to place, seeing the occasional humorous show put on by performers doing a comedy bit with swordplay or jugglers or a storyteller. The girls especially loved the princess academy where they got to meet the princess and her court and learn courtly manners and then meet the queen herself.

The Ren Faire Phenomenon

There was also lots of opportunity for people watching. It’s a curious thing, these Ren faires. Lots of people were in costumes of all kinds and of varying levels of authenticity with most not very authentic at all. It was fun to see people in out-of-the-ordinary period costumes like the Saracen and the Scottish Highlander. On the other hand, there was an inordinate number of pirates, pointy-eared elves, and even a family of vampires(?).

But one thing that really stood out to me was the unbalanced ratio of bawdy wenches to noble ladies. In fact, it was more like 30 to one. For every woman in a demure dress designed to make her look like a woman of noble bearing from the Middle Ages, there were a couple of dozen in dresses designed to make their breasts hang out. (It’s such a phenomenon that this weekend they held a cleavage contest for best, well, you know.) What is it that makes women prefer to be wenches instead of ladies? Women used to (and some still do) want to be pursued by a gentleman instead of throwing themselves as a sex object at every man.

General bawdiness actually seemed to be the rule at the fair. Even in shows aimed at children there were oblique sex jokes and liberal use of the words “damn” and “ass”. (I just know this post is going to make some people’s Internet filters block my blog.)

Thine Elephant in Ye Olde Roome

I wonder if some of that stems from what was distinctly lacking from a fair designed to portray life in Medieval or Renaissance England[3]: any mention of the Christian faith.

The Church was a major part of life in those centuries, even including the Protestant churches after the Reformation, so what happens when you excise it? You end up with an idealized view based on an anti-authoritarian wish fulfilment. Let’s face it: Ren faires grew out of the Sixties hippy movement, a rejection of authority and a harkening back to an imagined time of free love and unbridled fun. Likewise, I think the accompanying fascination with the occult and Wiccanism is part of that. In the Middle Ages, anti-authoritarianism still looked pretty much Christian, but that’s still too Christian for today, so it’s something even further afield. Which isn’t too say that there wasn’t evidence of the Christian roots of merry olde England, whether it’s the knights’ cheers of “For God and King!” or the subtle pattern of the Chi Rho embroidered in the queen’s gown.

In the end, however, King Richard’s Faire was mainly good, if expensive, fun and a chance to glimpse a different reality for a day. I do have to say in conclusion that it wouldn’t take a lot of encouragement to get me to start re-enacting in that world, although I think I would tend toward the SCA’s authenticity over the Ren faire’s loosey-goosey attitude. If you’re going to do it, re-enact authentically.


  1. Do the math and you realize pre-teens and teens get charged the full adult rate!  ↩

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  3. The tickets are 50 cents a piece and you must buy at least $5 worth at a time. A sheet of 40 tickets is $20. Meanwhile, french fries are 12 tickets and a sandwich is 16 and two ice cream cones is 18 because I have all these extra tickets and what do I do with this 1 extra ticket left over at the end? Oh well, it’s non-refundable so something was 50 cents more expensive today.  ↩

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  5. They aren’t exactly clear on their time period and even the regular players are mish mash of different eras and even different societies. I suppose the reality–no pun intended–is that it’s really a fairy tale period and not supposed to be any particular real time. This isn’t the Society for Creative Anachronism with its penchant for accurate re-enactment. It’s a theme park.  ↩

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Photo from Flickr user C.C. Chapman. Used under a Creative Commons license.

 

USS Constitution sails again

For only the second time in the past century the USS Constitution, the oldest commissioned warship in the world, sailed under her own power in Boston harbor.

The sailing marked the 200th anniversary of her landmark battle versus the HMS Guerriere during the War of 1812, in which she became the first US warship to defeat a British warship of equal size and power. It’s also the action in which she earned her nickname “Old Ironsides” for the way in which the British man-o-war’s cannonballs bounced off her sides.

The last time she sailed was in 1997 on her 200th birthday. She was towed up to Marblehead, Mass., the birthplace of the US Navy, on the North Shore of Massachusetts, for a week of festivities including lots of Navy brass. Even the network morning shows came up to broadcast live from the shore of Marblehead for the final sailing. I was there too, standing on the shore at the crack of dawn to see her towed out to sea where she put up her sails for the first time and made her way as the Grand Dame she is.

Then in 2007, I had the opportunity to be aboard the Constitution during her annual July 4 turnaround cruise. My dad had come to know one of the former commanders of the ship and got two of the precious tickets for the public. That was an awesome experience and an amazing day. Among other things I was able to record video of the 21-gun salute as it was fired from the gun deck.

So you can imagine that when I heard about today, I very much wanted to go see it. The sail was to occur in Boston Harbor (map), as she would be towed out to President Roads then turned around whereupon she would set her sails for the return journey. Thus the ideal spot would be Castle Island in South Boston.

Unfortunately, Mass for us is 9:30 am and by the time we got done and would have been able to get to Castle Island would have been too late to get through the crowds into a decent viewing position, not to mention the starving children.

Ah well, maybe someday she will sail again for a third time in my lifetime. Hmm, maybe too much to ask.

Our hometown pizza glut

Pizza Box!

The little Boston suburb we live in has about 11,000 residents. That’s pretty average by Massachusetts standards–in fact, it’s right about the mean for population of cities and towns in this state–although that also includes the tiny rural communities in the central and western parts of the state. For the area around Boston, we’re pretty small and easily overlooked. Yet for such a small town, we have a glut of pizza shops. It’s mind boggling.

According to a 2011 pizza industry report, Massachusetts is the state with the highest per capita number of pizza shops in the nation at 3.4 shops per 10,000 people. And how many does our small town of 11,000 have? Six. Yes, six. Nearly twice the per capita of the state with the highest per capita in the US.

We also have two Dunkin Donuts (within about a quarter-mile of each other), two breakfast/lunch places, a dive Chinese restaurant of the sort that seems to make most of its money from its bar, a sit-down family-style, sports-bar-ish restaurant, and a Burger King. And six pizza shops.

It’s not like our town can actually sustain six of them. Just as we moved into town almost 4 years ago, the local Domino’s (seven!) closed its doors. In the past year, two of the six have closed and changed hands. In the past four years, at least one other place has closed and re-opened under new management as well. (This one has become our favorite because their hot wings are great and we can order through their website, a convenience not to be underestimated when dealing with four hungry, hyper kids at 5pm. Phone calls are to be avoided at this time.)

The closest pizza place to us, about a quarter-mile away, closed about a year ago, I think, and several months ago, we saw work begin on the renovations of the closed store. What is it going to be, we asked ourselves, and we half-jokingly guessed at an authentic Mexican taco stand, a small sushi bar, a cute Indian cafe.

No, we got another pizza place. And I’m not confident this one’s going to be around that long.

For one thing, they don’t do delivery. In this day and age, if you sell pizza, you have to deliver, especially if your restaurant has no parking to speak of, as this one doesn’t. Even the venerable Italian grandma’s place downtown that sells pizza but tried to remain a classic, red-sauce Italian restaurant has started delivering.

The second strike against the new place is that they’ve done zero marketing. Keep in mind that in our area, when a new restaurant that does delivery opens up within a four-town radius of us, we get their menu in the mail right away. The new pizza place has been open for a couple of months now and we’ve received nothing. I’ve gone online to search for their website. Nothing. (Construction of the restaurant took months, perhaps six or more. At one point, I thought they’d given up. That should be plenty of time to come up with some kind of website, never mind a marketing plan.)

In fact, the extent of their marketing appears to be a three-foot by two-foot signboard out front on the street with their three telephone numbers handwritten on them all cramped so that it’s impossible to read when driving by at the marked speed limit, never mind memorize for later use.

If you’re going to open a restaurant in this economy, you have to have a rock-solid plan, a way to ensure that you’ll reach your customers. But then what should we expect from someone who opened another pizza shop in a town that has twice the per capita pizza shops of the entire state which leads the nation in per capita pizza shops in the same place another pizza shop failed just last year?

Oh well, maybe when this one closes someone will open a sushi place. Keep the hope alive.

Pizza Box! by joebeone, on Flickr

The Butterfly Place

IMG 1444As I’m on vacation this week, we decided to take the kids on a day trip yesterday. As few weeks ago, the Get My Perks website, a Groupon clone, offered a deal for The Butterfly Place, a small family-run butterfly house about an hour away in Westford, MA.

The kids love butterflies, especially Isabella, and she can identify many of the species by name. For her birthday, she received a butterfly-raising kit, which we used to raise some Painted Lady butterflies and then release them. I even made up a bedtime story for her when she was toddler called “Fly away, butterfly.”

So you imagine how entranced she was when we entered the butterfly house and she saw hundreds of butterflies of all shapes and colors and sizes flying around her. It’s not a large building at all, a few hundred square feet, and it contains dozens of butterfly friendly plants strewn among stone paths. And yet it was quite magical at times. Some of the butterflies would flit past your face while others would land just inches away on leaves and flowers.

I even seemed to attract more than my fair share with butterflies spontaneously landing on my hat and arms and legs with no prompting by me. I later realized that as a diabetic there’s a larger than normal amount of sugar in my sweat and that must have been what attracted them.

It doesn’t take long to walk through, but it’s nice to just stand or sit in one place and be entranced by the beautiful, flitting things.

With the Get My Perks deal, we paid $20 for two adults and two kids (three and over), plus an identification guide to the butterflies. Without it, the cost would have been $40, which might have been enough to dissuade us from going, but I’m glad it didn’t. The pure joy on the kids’ faces would have been worth the trip and cost at that price.

Tips for Texans for dealing with snow

Dom snowblowing the driveway

They say Eskimos/Inuit have many different words for snow because it’s such a part of their lives. New Englanders have many different words for snow too, and not all of them are four letters. The fact is that growing up in any of the snowy parts of the country, whether it’s New England or upstate New York or the great snowy plains or the upper Midwest/Great Lakes or the interior Pacific Northwest or the great-granddaddy of them all, Alaska, we, natives of the region take for granted the important lessons for how to deal with the white stuff when it falls in great quantity. It wasn’t until I married a native Texan and her sister came to live with us that I realized how much of what I took for granted needed to be explicitly taught.

Herewith, then, are some important lessons regarding the clearing of snow that has fallen, whether just a few inches or a great galumphing blizzard that buries you in.

Preparation is everything

There are several important things to know about cars and snow. Driving in snow is such a big subject that it needs its own post, but there’s also plenty you need to know when the big hunk of metal is just sitting in your driveway getting buried.

For one thing, preparation is important. Always make sure you have at least a half tank of gas. As soon as you hear the forecast of a storm of more than an inch or two, ensure you’ve got enough gas in the tank. For one thing, your car will spend a lot of time idling as you clear your driveway. Almost every community in snowy regions bans on-street parking during a snow emergency so that the plows can get through. (Some big cities don’t because there isn’t any place to put all the cars. More about on-street v. off-street parking in a moment.) If you have more than one car, you’ll likely be doing the driveway shuffle, moving cars in and out of the driveway so you can clear the snow properly. And if the storm is big enough, it may be a few days before a local gas station is open or deliveries of gas can get to the station. You don’t want to be stuck.

Also, make sure your windshield wipers are off when you leave the car for the last time before the storm. My sister-in-law sometimes leaves her wipers on when she turns off her car, but when you turn the car on to warm up while you’re clearing snow and there’s 3 or more inches of heavy wet snow on the windshield, you’ll burn out the wiper motors pretty quick as they try to move a lot more weight than they were designed to. Some people like to leave their wipers sticking straight up in the air before a storm, but I don’t think it’s generally necessarily. If it’s an ice storm (those are fun), it will prevent them from sticking to the windshield, but if you give the defrosters time to work, it’s not a problem.

The other preparation tip is to have a sturdy snow brush/ice scraper at the ready. In the car is fine most of the time, but if you keep it by your front door during a storm, you won’t have to clear your car just to get your snow clearing tool out. (Make sure to put it back in the car when you’re done.) I’ve gone through just about every cheap snow brush there is, but this one has served me well through last winter and into this one.

Clearing your car

When clearing your car, make sure you clear around the grill and the exhaust pipe before starting your car. You don’t want deadly exhaust gases backing up into the car. Be sure to clear off the whole car. I’ve seen crazy people driving down the street with just a small round porthole in the snow in their windshield. No visibility to the sides or behind! Not only is this stupid it’s illegal. Also clear your headlights, your taillights, your license plate and all the windows. Be sure to clear the snow off the top of your car as this is a hazard to other vehicles. You don’t know excitement until a giant slab of snow blows off the top of the car in front of you on the highway, landing on your windshield and blinding you while driving at highway speed.

It is generally frowned upon by most municipalities (i.e. you’ll get a ticket) if you clear snow into the street, whether from your car or a driveway. In a big city where it’s also illegal to throw snow on a sidewalk, I’m not sure where you’re supposed to put it. (Throwing back up toward the clouds doesn’t work well.) In the suburbs, just keep piling it on the lawn.

What we do in our driveway with three cars parked in parallel, is that I clear out one car and move it into the street, then clear where it was. I moved the next car into that spot and clear where it was. I repeat for the final car and them move everything back.

On-street- vs. off-street parking

Again, if you’re not from a snowy region, and you move to one when it’s not winter, you may not understand why locals so value off-street parking when looking for places to live. As I mentioned, many cities and towns ban on-street parking during snowstorms in order to allow plows to get through and clear the streets. In some places, the city opens up public parking lots and garages to let residents park for free. In others, you’re on your own. At our house, our driveway is just wide enough to allow out three cars to park side by side. Don’t think that not having a driveway relieves you of shoveling. You can’t imagine how hard it is to dig out a car that’s had snowplow after snowplow send piles of snow on top of your car so that it looks like a great snow dune. Let it sit for a day and it becomes icy hard. Once you do experience the arduous experience of digging out a car parked on the street, you’ll then understand the unwritten law of the street that says you can claim your dug out spot for up to 48 hours after the storm. (The time varies by local custom.) The possessor of the spot will often mark it with a trash barrel, a traffic cone, a folding chair, or any handy household item. (I’ve seen some bizarre things out there.) God forbid you should ignore this law because your car (and maybe even you) will experience harsh street justice.

Snowblower v. shovel

If you have your own driveway and you don’t happen to have the cardio-vascular system and muscles of a triathlete or are over 35 years old, you should consider getting a snowblower. (Sometimes it’s called a snowthrower.) This is not an admission of weakness. Running a snowblower still requires lots of upper-body strength and patience. The difference is that it does most of the work and could save you from a heart attack. Every time there’s a big storm, there is a rash of stories in the local media about some poor schlub who keeled over from overdoing it in his driveway. A snowblower is especially important for the most difficult part of clearing your driveway, the end by the street. When the city plow pushes snow down the street, it is pushing the snow up to the sides, regardless of whether the side is your lawn or your driveway. This is often the heaviest, wettest snow and the iciest and the most difficult to attack. Even with a snowblower, you have to take your time, often eating away at it a bite at a time. We just had 16 inches of snowfall, but with the work of the plows the end of the driveway had more than 3 feet of heavy snow.

If it’s a very windy storm, you’ll also get drifting. The wind will blow the snow into drifts which can sometimes reach the roof of a house while blowing the grass bare in other spots. These drifts can make clearing driveways and walkways difficult. Always work with the wind when throwing snow. You’ll learn quickly that throwing snow into the wind will guarantee you a cold face full of stinging ice pellets.

The big difference between shoveling and snowblowing, besides the time it will take, is that with shoveling it makes sense to get out in the storm after every few inches of snow so you don’t have to shovel it all at once. A snowblower can tackle more snow at once, but keeping up with the shoveling will save your back and arms.

Be a good neighbor

In addition to clearing out the driveway and walkway for your house so you can get out, remember to think of others as well. In some places you are required by law to clear the sidewalk in front of your house or business. It is just plain good manners to clear out your mailbox for the mailman and it’s good sense to clear snow from the closest fire hydrant. You don’t want firefighters to waste time digging it out if you have a fire at your house.

Please check on your elderly neighbors. Make sure they have someone to plow their driveways and walks and knock on their doors to ensure they rode out the storm in good shape.

Most important of all, take it easy. There’s nowhere you need to be in such a hurry that you need to hurt yourself clearing snow. And if it is an emergency, call 911 and let them take you where you need to go if it is really an emergency. If you get socked in with an 18-inch snowstorm and all you have is a shovel to dig out, then your boss will have to understand why you couldn’t get to work.

That’s it for my tips. Have a good tip of your own to share? Please leave it in the comments.

Update: A couple of more tips occur to me. First, make sure your dryer vent on the outside of the house is clear of snow. (At other times of the year, make sure it’s clear of leaves and debris and squirrels aren’t nesting in it.) If the vent is blocked, it can cause heat and gases to build up inside your house, creating a fire and air quality hazard.

Second, turn up the house heat a few degrees if there’s a chance of the storm causing a power outage. We often lower the thermostat overnight to save on energy consumption while we’re warm in our beds. But if the power goes out (which causes most heating systems to stop working, unless you’re lucky enough to have a wood stove), that extra few degrees will buy you a little more warmth before the power comes back.

World’s End

Bettinellis at World's End

We’re here at World’s End, which sounds pretty dramatic. In fact, it’s a park, part of the private Trustees of the Reservation system of parks. It’s in Hingham on an island and peninsula overlooking the Atlantic ocean and Boston harbor.

It’s beautiful with the foliage but very windy today. Definitely someplace to come back to in the spring and summer.

Posted via email from Domenico’s posterous

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