Worlds Collide

On the Fourth of July I was trying to remember what we had done on the last major patriotic holiday, Memorial Day. Ah, yes! We celebrated it by finally attending the Tennessee Renaissance Festival.
I say finally because we’ve been avoiding it for the past 14 years or so. It is heavily advertised each May, and with Owen’s obsessive interest in weaponry and uniforms and his increasing ability to understand TV commercials, we were not getting out of it. It didn’t help that the twins kept singing the Free Credit Report.com renaissance fair jingle.
Two obstacles loomed: the ticket price and Tim’s lingering opposition to people in costumes yelling at him in fake accents.
Ticket price was a concern because adult admission was $18 each. That’s more than I want to spend on something I’m not sure I’ll enjoy. It’s a little easier to expand your cultural boundaries if you’re only going to invest a few dollars. Our family would have had to lay out more than $40, but we persisted. It was the event’s last weekend, and we were drawn in by the promise of a royal jousting tournament.
So here’s my suburban mom summary of the renaissance festival. If you do both the castle tour and the jousting tournament, it’s worth it. It’s not worth it just to laugh at the people in costumes because that gets a bit creepy after a while. It’s one thing when the players are in authentic renaissance-era garb. For some reason, though, the “come dressed as your favorite renaissance character” guidelines must have loosened to include any heavy-set woman who wants to put on a corset and those who wish they were pirates.
You have to deal with the corset crowd first because they do not care that the corsets push up not only cleavage but also back fat. I also doubt the Renaissance corset designers had to deal with this much body ink. The only place you’ll see more tattoos on women is Nashville Shores.
There are lots of guys who probably work at Subway during the week who come dressed like Robin Hood. Apparently, however, the pirate people have become such an issue at the renaissance festival that they now have an area called Pirate’s Cove, where they don’t seem so out of place. See, Captain Jack Sparrow did not live during the Renaissance, but that doesn’t deter them.
They do have some fun games like an ax throw, which is much harder than it seems, and cool booths that sell weapons, corsets and fairy stuff. ??
At any rate, we skipped the castle tour. I very much wanted to see it because Mr. Freeman built it himself, but I didn’t want to see it badly enough to wait in that hot line to ride an un-air-conditioned school bus/shuttle.
Trust me when I say that the jousting tournament made it all worthwhile. We all sat agog as world champion jousters (did you know they had those?!) really went at it. But I’m certain we said fare-the-well to the renaissance festival and won’t be going back anon.