I'll Never Be Able To Show My Face Around Here Again

This is the last day of personally-imposed little challenge, and I thank all of you for being so awesomely supportive and pretending you actually wanted to read all about the most unflattering things about me. Tomorrow I go back to work and likely back to my post-every-couple-of-days pattern, which will hopefully allow for some more time for reading and commenting on all of your blogs, a task which I did not accomplish this week.

So, Fie Upon This Quiet Life asked, "Have you ever dated someone you worked with? How did it go, if so?"

Interestingly, this seemingly innocuous question provides a perfect opportunity for my final likely-to-embarrass-myself post (well, it's probably more accurate to say "my final intentional likely-to-embarrass-myself post"). Because the answer is sort of and I married him. MOTH and I worked together for two summers, although we didn't start dating until a couple years later.

Here's where the embarrassing part comes in: We met? At a Renaissance Fair.

Now, now, quiet down...I can't type with all that laughter. Besides, you'll wake the baby. Yes, yes, indeed...I spent my summers in late high school and college (and a few years post-college) performing a Renaissance festival, complete with accent, bodice, and an over-reliance on Kenneth Branagh movies for historical knowledge. I called paying customers "m'lord" and pretended not to know what a videocamera was.

You can generally sort the people who work at (or visit with any frequency) a Ren Faire into the following categories:

1) Faerie Folk--these are the hippies who love walking around in leather bikinis (just like in Shakespeare's time!), live for the afternoon drum jam, and wear glitter and wings and feathers without irony. They generally dig on the "mystic energy" and can probably tell you where the good 'shrooms are to be found in the parking lot.

2) D&D/Magic/Other Wizards, Vikings, Pirates, etc.--like their ethereal brethren, these guys are totally into this mythical world, and relish the opportunity to play dress-up and live out their fantasy play...whether or not it actually has any historical accuracy or relevance. There was this one guy who used to come every damn weekend (not a performer), in full loincloth and fur regalia. My friend Melissa used to call him Pronoun the Barbarian.

3) Historical Re-enactors--on the opposite end of the spectrum, these history buffs learn every damn thing there was to know about Elizabethan England, and are liable to corner you explaining why that turkey leg isn't really period, you know, because barbeque sauce wouldn't be invented until the 1800s when Edmund Kumquatch brought high fructose corn syrup to the New World. Or something.

4) Performers (actors, musicians, etc.) who want to entertain, and treat this as a job. However, they also dig the community that comes from performing with the same people for nine weeks in a row, year after year. This was me. This was/is my friends, some of whom actually work the Faire circuit, traveling around the country performing and making a living at it. And while I would understand why a "serious" theatre artist might look down on a Rennie, I can also promise you that it's not an easy gig. You're wearing hot layers of clothes, you're in character all the time, and everything you do is improvised in front of a live audience. You perform in all weather, for nine hours at a stretch. As a result, the people that I worked with are some of the funniest, quickest people you'll ever meet. Who can also juggle fire.

I was 15 when I started, and 25 when I stopped, and in those ten years, I made some of my closest friends, people who stood up in my wedding, people I've now known for over half my life. I met my best friend there. I met my husband there. I felt pretty there for the first time in my life. It is the home of wonderful, amazing memories of me transforming from a terribly shy nerd into a garrulous, (semi)confident proud-to-be-a geek.

So mock me at your leisure, but I know people. People with swords. And people who swallow them. We're fun at parties.