Renaissance Faires get a pretty good rap for being basically lowkey kink-festivals filled with heaving bosoms in tight corsets and rippling muscles wrapped in leather. They're seen as places of whimsical and sensual magic in a time of wenches and sexy knights and I am here to affirmatively say that none of that is true. A Renaissance Faire just might be the least sexy place ever. And it has nothing to do with the fact that they're usually child-friendly areas.
When I was somewhere between 13 and 14, I somehow discovered it was possible to join the cast of a Renaissance Faire. I had only attended one in my entire life and as far as I remember it wasn't exactly life changing so I'm not sure why I even went out for the position. I can't even remember how I found out and in my experience that means my mother discovered it and convinced us to do it. That's just how it's always worked out. Regardless, Jess and I were in the Competitive Theater department at our school and wanted to branch out so we elected to audition. The audition was held in the basement of a rundown old mill. The first floor was being used as a flea market and the other two floors were deemed unsafe for people to walk on for fear of collapse and were, obviously, uninhabited. In hindsight, that was our first warning. The audition went well, Jess and I were twins so we already had a gimmick, and we were into competitive theater so if there was anything we knew how to do, it was give a monologue. We were given parts then and there as part of Street Cast, which sounded exciting at the time. What we didn't know was everyone who auditions for Ren-Faires gets in. The people they care about get to be Stage Cast, or Main Cast, who play all the roles and perform on stage. The rest, the degenerate, untalented, or ugly got relegated to the position of Street Cast who's only role would be to be in character for all 8 hours of the day in order to interact with patrons on the street. Street Cast was also the unpaid. The next year Jess and I refused to work unpaid
Still, Jess and I were excited and happily agreed to our positions. Rehearsals dulled our spirits exceedingly however. They were held in the same dank and dusty basement as auditions and lasted from around 10:00am to 5:00pm Saturday and Sunday if I remember correctly. All day is a reasonable time to rehearse a show you may say, and I said so too, but it's only worth it if you actually rehearse something all day. You'll remember Jess and I were Street Cast, we had no part on stage. So what exactly did we do all day? The answer is improv games. Now, I was in a theater program that had the same mentality, the idea of 'let's do theater games to get to know each other and get comfortable being silly' which I hated at the time but understood was important for high school age kids. Everyone at this faire was at least 10 years older than me though so the idea of 'getting used to acting silly' was definitely stale for everyone there. The secondary purpose of them was to help us with our street interactions, but street improv usually came in the form of 'bits', or pre-planned in-character interactions you came up with in advance to do with patrons. They went differently depending on the patrons interactions with you, but it would be the same premise. Robin Hood approaches a kid to do a bit about whether or not he's seen the Sheriff, Maid Marion does a curtsy teaching session with a girl in a princess dress, you get the picture. It might have been particularly useful for that time to be spent coming up with and practicing bits, but of course we couldn't do that. Instead we played every theater game known to mankind, all of which were exhausting, overhyped, and did nothing to help anyone's performance on or off stage. And we didn't just do it at the beginning to warm up. It was all rehearsal. That's a bit of a lie though, because we also had Singing Practice. Everyone, whether they could sing or couldn't, was part of one of two Pub Sing shows the audience members neither cared for nor attended. We couldn't sing, didn't have any instruments, and hated it maybe as much as the patrons did.
We endured these rehearsals for 3 or 4 weeks before we began the actual show, which lasted just as long. We had a green tent set up close to the site that was our 'cast tent' which was hot, cramped, and overall unpleasant to be in but you went there anyway because everywhere else on site was basically the same but you had to be in character. The 'everywhere else' was a dusty circular road lined with white tents selling all number of beautiful but mostly useless items. Here on the streets I spent most of my days doing 'bits' with people who definitely didn't want them to be happening, so at least we were on the same page. I've never known anyone who's left a faire and gone "Wow, I had a great interaction with the Random Civilian, it was the highlight of my day!" It doesn't happen. No one actually wants to be interacted with except maybe a handful of people, most of whom are just off-duty rennies themselves. Most people want to interact with their own friends and family, hence why they came with them, and while they certainly don't mind having their children meet the Princess or Robin Hood or King Arthur they themselves don't want to be engaged because why would you? Who wants to have some rando come up to them and, in character of a character they have never heard of, interrupt whatever conversation they were having previously to tell bad jokes, insult them, and try to get them to go see a show. We call the last bit Hawking and let me tell you it does not work at all. Main show got a good audience though, since it was the only show people didn't ask for money at the end of, and depending on the year and the script most people enjoyed it. No one went to the cast's Pub Sing or whatever it might be called because it was not only boring but horrible to hear. Luckily they put the show where there were picnic tables so a select group of people were volountold into being our captive audience. The night ended with Final Revels which we sang at and the audience endured.
If any of that sounded sexy to you, just wait, there's more! The truly worst part of any day at faire was Morning Meeting. This sounds useful, and once in a great while it was, but for the most part it was people talking about pee colour. That sounds like a hyperbole but it's unfortunately true. Because we actors would be in the sun all day (and would be scolded firmly and loudly if we spent more than 5 minutes in the green room despite getting paid basically gas money for the run of faire) we were encouraged to drink at least a silo of water every day. That's excellent advice except for two things: First, such comments were always joined by some conversation about pee. We were frequently asked what colour our pee was and when we had last gone. Not in private, but publicly and by show of hands because that's normal. Second, it really didn't matter because the same 5 people went down for heat fatigue every run of faire anyway because you can lead a rennie to water but you can't make 'em drink. Morning Meeting had other useless parts as well, from telling us things we already knew to stories that didn't mean anything and just wasted another 10 minutes of our lives, but the worst part and majority of the meeting was a discussion of urine.
I feel the need to specify that despite all of these qualms, I excessively enjoyed my time working at a Renaissance Faire. It was truly Acting In The Trenches and gave me the ability to endure just about anything, which probably had something to do with why I moved to Florida. But it was not, in any way a sexually stimulating time of my life. Sure, some people got found doing blowjobs behind stages, and people hooked up at the cast party, but for everyone besides those 4 people the entire experience was too exhausting to even consider sex.
