Blast in the Past

The Web site of the Maryland Renaissance Festival describes the 25-acre site near Annapolis as “a recreation of a 16th-century English village.” The trappings certainly reflect that, what with the Tudor facades, Globe Theater replica, jousting arena and whatnot. Technically there’s indoor plumbing, but the Port-o-Lets lined up behind the wood screens more closely approximate ye old privy than what we think of when we say “bathroom.”

I read recently that personal computer sales are down, as newer, faster, more portable modes of communication and media access become ever more popular and dominant. As I sit here typing at my PC’s keyboard, this news strikes me as just the latest of countless blows in what I not so jokingly describe to friends as the 21st century’s gleeful obsession with obliterating every vestige of life as I’ve known it.

Therein lies the key, I think, to why every year I make at least one trip to the Renaissance Festival, which runs from late August to late October. In terms of shtick, the event is all about Henry VIII, Elizabethan speech, elaborate costumes, period entertainments and throwback libations and grub. But when I pay my American dollars at the ticket counter (oddly, bartering is forbidden) and am welcomed into the village of Revel Grove by a jaunty lord or gracious lady, I feel as if I'm entering not so much an imagined 16th century as a gone and lamented 20th.

It starts in the parking area, which is a huge open field. I exit my car and immediately feel as if I’ve merged into the line to get into a midnight movie sometime in the 1970s. A lot of the people who are emerging from their vehicles and trudging slowly toward the entrance are dressed in costume—the guys tucking in their puffy shirts, the women assuring that their tightly corseted dresses display ample teat, and the kids adjusting tricorn hats that their parents have deemed, historically speaking, to be Close Enough. (I would have been appalled were my mom ever to have shown any teat. But then again, my parents never would have paid the 1960s equivalent of $18 to get in.)

At the ticket booths there’s no such thing as paying by smartphone pointed at an electronic reader. There only are old-school cash boxes and credit card swipers.

Enter the “village” and there’s live entertainment on multiple stages. There are microphones, sure, but no video screens, overhead Tweets or other falderol. You’ll see a juggler over there, a magician and his bungling assistant over here. Troupes ham their way through lampoon versions of Shakespeare. Knife-throwers and their targets wink at audiences and exchange banter that’s Sherwood Forest by way of 1930s vaudeville—corny, harmlessly risqué, as sunny and light in spirit as 2011 so typically feels dark and ominous.

Just as you wouldn’t have watched a Zeppelin concert back in the day without a flask or a joint, you aren’t about to traverse this alternate universe without being in a slightly altered state. To that end, there’s plenty of mead for sale. And ale, of course, otherwise known as beer. Put a tip in the jar on the counter and the bartender will ring a bell, as if to tell all the king’s subjects you’ve just single-handedly defeated a band of knaves and deserve to be celebrated.

Food booths are huge money makers, of course, and the choices are as blithely, delightfully inauthentic as was anything offered at history-tinged tourist sites in 1955, 1975 or 1995. Behind cheesy names like Ben Jonson’s Banana Split are dishes as unlikely to have been found at any Renaissance table as genuine colonial fare was to have been served at the Fort Ticonderoga cafeteria during a family vacation in 1962.

Then there are the shopping options. The prices aren’t 20th century, but the offerings are. Don’t come to the Renaissance Festival looking for the latest electronic gadgets and apps. You’ll find hippie clothes, albeit billed as the stuff Chris Marlowe or the court’s ladies might have worn. You’ll see jewelry, pottery, crafts. You need no IT expertise to make, model or use this stuff.

Or, you can spend your money on old-style soothsaying and other happy wastes of shilling. Palm reading, tarot cards, phrenology. Want to know where you’re going? Leave your GPS and Google Maps behind. Rather, ask some chick hovering over a crystal ball. She’ll tell you for $40.

A couple of my favorite activities at the Renaissance Festival are the dunking booth and the music. The former is the perfect antidote to insular, endlessly strategizing video games—it’s just me, three bean bags, and a saucy wench who questions my ability to drench her, and who’s been right all but one time to date. As for the latter, just as rocking to the Who, or to Elvis Costello in his punk days, was an incredible trip for the teen and 20-something me, so, too, is kicking it now to amplified Celtic music performed by men in kilts while I’m in the throes of a moderate mead buzz.

Really, it’s all good. It’s great, in fact. Four or five hours at the Renaissance Festival—where I’m headed tomorrow, on what promises to be a brilliant, fall-like Saturday—and I always feel as if I’ve been to high school reunion that brought back only the good memories, and to which none of the bullies, pricks and other jerks showed up.

Yes, soon enough I’ll be back on the Beltway, where I’ll have to honk phone-distracted people out of my lane and will hear radio reports of the latest economic meltdowns, environmental disasters and political stalemates. For the moment, though, as I exit Revel Grove, all I’m thinking of is the joy of a visiting a lost century—the most recent one.