Shangri-La, thy name is Renaissance Festival

I recently had the opportunity to attend the Colorado Renaissance Festival and Artisan Marketplace, and it is indeed a sight to behold. Remember the last time you were walking down the street, minding your own business, wondering why they call it a “building” and not a “built,” and accidentally made eye contact with someone dressed as a fairy or a wood nymph or a zombie ninja from outer space, and you said to yourself, “I wonder, self, why on earth this person is dressed that way, and do the orderlies know he’s escaped?” The answer, of course, is probably that the person you saw was on his way to a local Renaissance Festival. But that doesn’t mean he’s not still crazy.

Renaissance Festivals are America’s true last bastion of rampant, unabashed secularism, all dressed up like an edu-ma-cational class field trip destination. The first thing you notice is that everyone who works at the festival is either a theater school dropout or a sour-faced loser teenager. Either way, they still have to speak to you with their best impression of an English accent. Our education system being what it is, most of them end up sounding like South Africans who’ve spent a year or two in New Zealand, and then got raped in the mouth by hot coals and Listerine.

Even so, it still made me want to walk around saying things like “A pox upon me, for a clumsy oaf. I do beg your most gracious of pardons, fair maiden, and offer my sincere and unflagging apologies in recompense for referring to madam’s face as ‘a swovenly malantharp of poltroonity.’ You may wail upon my hindquarters posthaste until such time as your vexation has been appropriately and adequately sated, if not positively surfeited.”

The single most important element of any self-respecting Renaissance Festival is the food, and this one did not disappoint. If it could be breaded, fried, frozen, deep fried, sugared, pan fried, baked, flash fried, or served on a stick, you could buy and eat it. My personal favorite will always be turkey legs. As Michael Jackson is to little boys, so am I to genuine grilled turkey legs (meaning, of course, that I invite turkey legs over to my mansion for completely appropriate and platonic fondling).

But anyway, as we approached the turkey leg booth, one of the loser teenager employees said to my dad, with all the eloquence and aplomb of a PETA member protesting a barbecue at Ted Nugent’s house, “May I help you, m’lord?” to which my dad promptly replied, “You certainly may, m’lady.” Have you ever been so embarrassed you had an aneurism? If not, just ask your dad to do the same thing right in front of you. I guarantee you’ll wish you’d been born with your genitals on your face - because even that would be less embarrassing. The girl looked at him with a look that seemed to say, “If you ever say that to me again, I’ll staple your face to this grill behind me.” I couldn’t stop laughing.

Oh, and as a too-awesome-for-words side note, the guy cooking the turkey legs was a real live hunchback. I kid you not. I’m glad for him. If he hadn’t landed that gig, his only other career option would be posing for the “before” photos in Good Feet infomercials. (“It’s a miracle! My hunchback is almost completely cured! Now I can go dancing and horseback riding and pearl diving! Thanks, Good Feet!”)

I’m always amused by the fact that most Renaissance Festival organizers know less about the Renaissance than Rosie O’Donnell knows about having sex with men. The vast majority of the décor is ripped right out of It’s a Small World, with the rest being filled out with vague Middle-Ages-style gray brick. Apparently, the Renaissance has been loosely redefined as any period during which men were skilled in a specific craft, women were traded like a commodity, children were food, and all shops were required by law to prominently display the words “Ye Olde” somewhere about their signage.

I expected to see a few people dressed up like extras from “The Lord of the Rings,” but I was caught off guard by the sheer number of people who came sporting some sort of costume. A lot of them were dressed as Vikings, and I was shocked to discover how many people in the northern El Paso county/southern Douglas county area have pierced nipples. And those were just the men. Several people were dressed like characters from “Star Wars,” and odder still, I saw quite a few ninjas.

Evidently, Renaissance Festivals are breeding grounds for anyone crazy enough to walk around in public playing a pan flute and drinking two bottles of Mike’s Hard Lemonade at once. If you’ve got a cape and a long walking stick, then take a few hits of acid and head on down to the Renaissance Festival! You can watch a fake joust with plastic swords and wooden performances! You can listen to a guy play “Carol of the Bells” on a 4-ton musical contraption that would make Rube Goldberg proud in the middle of June! You can eat funnel cakes just like King Arthur did! And if you get a coupon from Wendy’s, you can drag a friend along for free!