Sunday Magic

I went to the Renaissance Fair in Tampa, FL on Sunday. The day started out at Strokers, a dingy pool bar that I’d never been to in daylight. The bartender concocked her signature shot, and we drank it, still feeling hungover from the night before. We wore our seat-belts on the car ride from Clearwater to Tampa, and felt hot and tired while we told funny stories and played Brittany Spears music on the radio. We made a stop at Walgreens to buy the tickets at a discounted rate, and took two bathroom stops ; one at a CVS, the other at Sweet Bay. I don’t know what happened to time that day, but it managed to stand still during that car ride. It took almost 2 hours to get to the fair grounds, and our excitement built as we climbed onto the shuttle bus.

When we stepped off the bus, I immediately realized this was going to be a different kind of day. The ground consisted of loose dirt and wood chips. Sweat dripped down my back, and the pit-stains I had dried off under the hand-dryer in CVS immediately returned.

We entered the Fair gates and a woman with an accent greeted me and took my ticket. The world in front of me had transformed into a hot and sweaty mess. Flesh was everywhere. The Ren Fair allows people of all walks of life to come together and live as the wenches and men of the old days. The women wore corsetts and layers of skirts, with their bellies and breasts hanging with no support. They sold turkey legs, bangers and mash, and Scotch eggs, along with Mead and Bud Light. Girls wore fur tails, and when we asked a bar tender why she wore it, she said it looked cute. To each her own.

A girl sold my friend a bronze rose. We asked her how she came to work at the fair, and her story was intriguing. She moved from Texas to “here”, and worked the Funnel Cake booth for a long time. She said, “One day a man brought me a bronze rose and said, This one won’t die, and he fell on the way back to his station. I thought he was so cute. His name is Travis, and we live in a trailer with bulldog.” My friend asked where Travis was and where he worked. She explained they worked together selling bronze roses, and he was on his way back from a break. When Travis appeared, he stood a foot and half taller than her, and about 10 years older. The girl who stood before us with rotted teeth and sore gums couldn’t have been more than 19, and he, a grown man. But she seemed happy, and as we walked away my friend stated how romantic she thought it was. I was astonished at the difference and similarities of our lives.

The men at the fair were swarthy pirate types. Manly men throwing axes and charming gypsy dancers.  The women were both beautiful and hideous. All of them full of appreciation and laughter, and stories that I couldn’t get enough of.

I bought a digeri-do as a token of my experience. I brought it home, and asked my fiancee to play it. It seemed so magical at the fair, like it had its own story. As he handed it back to me, I looked at it as I stood in the center of my beige air-conditioned livingroom, and all I could think about was how dirty it must be, and how many people before us must have placed their mouths on it and spit inside. Its magic seemed lost, and I was sad.

Hopefully, I will never forget the people I met that day. They reminded me that this country and life is full of untold stories of romance and adventure, and gave me a sense of new appreciation for the yet to come...