Long day's journey ... ... into knights

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The Lure of the Renaissance

Grown-ups play dress-up each fall at the Maryland Renaissance Festival.

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Earlier, though, I'd met a Rennie who had confided pretty much the opposite story. She'd stopped dressing up, she said, because she started feeling like an outsider in an atmosphere that she thought pushed contemporary social boundaries. "I got too many comments, things that were inappropriate, beyond what is okay in everyday life," she told me. "I feel the wench thing gives some people a license to be creepy -- or at least they think it does. Occasionally, I'll still put on a costume, but you know, there's two ways to wear a bodice. One way is to hoist them up, and one way is to press and flatten yourself down."

***

I had wondered about the majority of the costumed people I saw at the festival, people who endeavored to dress up but did so in a less obvious, less public way -- people who came to the festival just as much to see as to be seen. On one afternoon, I moved away from the crowds for a while and sat in the shade. Before long, I was joined by a pirate I'd seen earlier talking on his cellphone, and his wife, dressed as not exactly a wench but certainly as a well-endowed matron. Their names were Richard and Patti Lehman. Patti had lovely white hair and a friendly, reserved demeanor and told me that she and Richard had been coming to the festival for 11 years before they decided to try costumes. They've been dressing up for at least nine years, and Patti owns more costume garb than regular clothes.

"Now Patti, it's like she was made for this time period. She looks awesome," Richard said proudly and grabbed her hand.

"Men are kind of trained to eyeball the young and the skinny, but I never watch any of them," he went on. Just then an 18-year-old woman in Valkyrie cups and a leather bikini bottom half-masked by gauze headed down the steep path.

The Lehmans laughed and shook their heads. "They're too young," Patti murmured.

At 62, Richard was no spring chicken himself, and his wife towered over him by a few inches. He had shoulders that worked up and down as he talked, and graying hair and a beard, and a cat-o'-nine-tails. "I work security at a college near here, and everyone thinks it's freaky I come here. They're all hunters, fishermen, mechanics," Richard said, growing serious. "I'm not like them."

His torn pirate shirtsleeves revealed a Vietnam tattoo on his upper right arm. He looked tough. I could picture him right at home at a biker rally, but I was assuming things.

"There's only a few places where I feel like I fit in," he said earnestly, "and that's downtown on Memorial Day, and Veteran's Day, and at the Maryland Renaissance Festival."

***

But I also wanted to meet people who didn't so much fit in at the festival as they fit the festival into their own lives: performers so involved in helping shape the fantasy of the period for their audiences that the Renaissance had become entrenched in their own world. Every spring, auditions are held to select the entertainment for the upcoming season, and to bring in new talent. Many, though, are veteran performers.

This is the 33rd season of the festival, and the 29th season for sword swallower and sleight-of-hand artist Johnny Fox. Two of his longtime exes, one of whom he wed atop elephants at the fair, still work at the festival. Every weekend of the season, he lives in one of his trailers by the village grounds. Over the course of his career, he's done Jonathan Winters specials and the Merv Griffin and David Letterman shows, but he always returns to the Maryland festival, where, he says, "I have the earth under my feet and the trees over my head." For his show's finale, after he crams what looks to be a 2?- foot balloon slowly, loudly, down his throat, he looks at the audience and sort of rolls his eyes and deadpans, "And what do you do for a living?"

"As a kid, I was puzzled as to why people would be interested in fiction and comics," Fox said. Like the ironsmiths and the glass blowers who are vital to the artisanal roots of the fair, who demonstrate and help preserve ancient and often maligned crafts, Fox is deeply educated in the origins of magic and elaborate feats. "I wanted a real superhero. My dad gave me a book on Houdini, said no jail cell could hold him. I read the story about how he swallowed a key on a string to get out of a cell. I thought, that's interesting. He practiced with a piece of potato. I was eating dinner one night, and I swallowed a strand of spaghetti and brought it back up. I was about 10."

Fox is 56 now, but he looked two decades younger. His head was shaven clean, and his eyes were so dark that from far away he appeared as though he was wearing eyeliner. Perhaps he was. In addition to the four shows he performs daily at the festival, Fox runs a sideshow museum there of curiosities that features his red-eared conjoined turtles, Frik and Frak, who were born that way in Louisiana. He used to keep boa constrictors in his Lower East Side apartment, the same New York City neighborhood where until 2005 he maintained another museum of strange acquisitions (including Sammy Davis Jr.'s glass eye), the Freakatorium.

In his shows, Fox comes off as a Renaissance man, but of the magic arts, dedicated to preserving their history, channeling showmanship and performance and fascination with anomaly and extremity. At state fairs as a kid, he was drawn to the sideshows, such as Johann K. Peturrsson the Viking Giant. Fox studied magic with the sleight-of-hand master Tony Slydini in New York (who also taught Steve Martin) and did fire-breathing as a street performer in Arizona until he decided it was bad for his health and that it would be in his best interests to switch to a different brand of danger and performance. He took up sword swallowing.

***

It was 7 p.m., and the sun was utterly gone. A chill descended over the forest, and the colored ribbons strung from trees waved and shook in the wind. By the jousting field, the two elephants walked trunk tied to tail back behind the scenes toward the striped tent that is their home during the season. Outside the gates, the massive dark field was spotted in headlights and suffocated in the smell of idling exhaust, as cars lined up to leave.

Naturally, the elaborate fantasy had to end at some point, but I hadn't expected everyone to go quite so willingly. Just as easily as they'd stepped into the festival, plunged fully into their characters, they now shed them and moved on. Perhaps it was enough, having lived for a day as a strange person, in strange clothing, to go back home. Perhaps it was enough to have escaped for that brief time.

A young woman walking beside me shook her long hair out of a snood and flipped open her phone: "Yeah. Yeah. I just got done with Ren Fest. I'll be there, in, like, half an hour." A 13-year-old girl, still in her own tunic and tights, made a towel into a makeshift dressing room for her mother, who stood behind their car and changed out of her garb.

The line of cars wasn't going to let up anytime soon, so I decided to walk back into the village one last time. The coin minter was running through his last demonstration; someone in the henna tattoo booth was letting down its fabric walls against the night. Though the food-stand windows were shuttered, the smell of smoked meat and funnel cake and other sweets lingered in the air. It could have been the last hour at a small-town street fair, or at Coney Island, with the red and yellow lights of the Wonder Wheel winking off. At the costume shop by the main threshold, people turned in the rentals they'd worn that day and ceased to be rogues and fair maidens as they filed through the exit and began the long search for their cars. But, in the crowd, I recognized a familiar set of studded leather epaulets and a familiar face, dour and intense and steadfastly in character. Kilsek the dark elf touched a hand to the spider decoration on his chest, squared his armored shoulders and marched through the gates as if heading into battle. He did not make eye contact, and he spoke to no one as he strode forth, rapidly and purposefully, down the long dirt paths and out into the gathering night.

Rebecca Bengal's most recent article

for the Magazine was about the Maryland yo-yo contest. She can

be reached at wpmagazine@washingtonpost.com or through her Web site at www.tvmodern.net.

Photographer David S. Holloway had never been to a Renaissance festival before shooting this story. "I had sort of pre-visualized a few things that I wanted to do," he said, "and as soon as I got there, they all went out the window. The place is really overwhelming ... There are so many interesting characters -- you're sort of surrounded." Yet, in another sense, he was prepared. On that first day, he strolled through the gates in a monk's robe. That made bonding with his subjects immediate, and he shot everyone he wanted to with ease. (On the second day, when he showed up in jeans and a T-shirt, he sometimes got turned down.) The more time Holloway spent at the festival, the more he came to understand the power of the costume, though he learned that "costume" was considered offensive (clothes or outfit, much better). The clothes let people slip into a character. On "Pirate Weekend," a grown man decked out in the appropriate garb spoke to Holloway in pirate-speak. "Arrrgh!" Others talked to him in their version of an English accent about what they were wearing and why. Holloway came across one young man, 23, with long hair and a beard. As Holloway was trying to understand the motivation for dressing up, the man told him: "Bro, you don't understand. This is freedom." Holloway asked him to clarify. "You can be anything you want to be here," the man said. "You get to create the person you are." What are you? Holloway asked. "I'm just a villager trying to meet the village ladies." -- David Rowell