Kage Baker liked this show. I loooove it. And Season 5 just came out today on DVD!
So I was at Best Buy when the store opened, and now I have all the disks and a full carafe of coffee and a box of Junior Mints and Harry on the couch with me. And it’s hiatus time!
For a few hours anyway.
Kage Baker spent a lot of her Labour Days at Northern Faire. In the earliest days, it was always traditionally the weekend before last – and being a 3-day weekend, it felt like the Faire would never end. That provoked mixed feelings: euphoria, frantic last-minute playing, dancing on the aft deck as we slid under the cold ocean of Fall.
Even as time went on and the performance schedules changed (some years we almost made it to Halloween) the mayfly hysteria of 3-day persisted. Three whole days of Faire! Three whole nights of Faire – Kage had the good sense to sleep, but I was often awake most the of the entire weekend. One could do that 30 years ago … something has happened to time these later days, a few days without sleep and one just falls right over …
Despite the protracted fun, Monday was always Dawn of the Dead. Many years, the semi-annual Morris Ale had been in my Innyard the night before; the place would be carpeted with plastic cups, congealed Mullah meals, abandoned Morris bells and the occasional Morris Man. The sticks and swords were always leaning on the statue of Hern in the garden. Dave Ricker’s fiddle was usually upstairs in my bedroom, where he ceremoniously and decorously left it each time before wobbling off to the Grey Barn. Someone always left a pewter mug. Someone else always left a black cardigan.
I’d wander out in the eredawn and get my first cup of coffee from Don Brown’s up the road. I’d sit there amid the falling buckeye leaves (nothing looks as dead and sere as a falling buckeye leaf) and savour the most peaceful half-hour of the year.
The Inn at Blackpoint backed up to a spur of the eastern ridge, so morning sunlight just skipped right over us. You could see the sun hit the trees in front of the Inn; you could watch it fill up the Serpentine, and light up the Pacific mist falling in over the western hills. But we were under the crest of the wave, and so the morning was all indirect sunlight in the Yard. Easier on the very tired eyes.
One by one, zombies would shamble forth in search of their brains. Tom Westlake would emerge from the hovel we called Weasel Hall at the back of the Inn, in the most retina-burning paisley bathrobe in Christendom. My sister Kimberly would bustle out, inhumanly alert, usually in pursuit of her small son – Michael learned to walk on the steep slope of the Yard, and would come bounding forth like a mountain goat lamb, demanding scrambled eggs and French toast from Terry’s. Various other Guild members would surface from the Tap Room, the Baby Pit, the hooches in the back (we often slept a dozen people in that old Inn), fetching coffee and chai and Mullah mush and hideous day-glo cereals in wooden bowls and the Green Man Sacred Breakfast Food: chocolate doughnuts with frosting like melted brown crayons.
Ultimately, bizarre noises from the loft would mean that Harry the Parrot and Kage were coming back to life. I’d climb back up, and fetch Harry down in his cage to share everybody’s breakfast. Kage would start fighting her way out of her sleeping bag (it’s hard, when you also have waist length hair and sleep in an old-fashioned shift) and then I would be back with her first cup of coffee (and my third).
By the time the coffee and doughnuts lured her all the way down to the Yard, the morning was in full swing: Harry would be rampaging through the cereal and scrambled eggs, the first of the sensible Guild members who slept off-site would be coming up the road, ice would be slamming on the front tables. People were finding, repairing, trading costume pieces for the day. My ladies were making iced tea and lemonade; my gentlemen were setting up the day’s first keg (or vice versa. We were an equal opportunity chaos.) I was wandering around being vague and exclaiming “What? What?” at the day’s first disasters.
And Kage would come over and flop down on a hay bale, clutching her coffee. Despite a night’s sleep, her eyes would be red as stop lights and glassy with visions. I’d start to brush out her red hair, backing up three or four feet to get to the ends … and she’d gulp her coffee and say, “I had the damnedest dream …”
Happy Labour Day, kids.
Tomorrow: the weather in Torquey
Kage Baker started a lot of stories while on the road. As she was a life-long passenger – she never learned to drive – it was one of the ways she entertained herself on our lengthy journeys to and from Faires. When I was driving, it was how she kept me awake. But it started on The Bus, staring out at the endless unreal vistas of I-5 and waiting for the Green Flash.
She was sure she would see the Green Flash someday, somewhere on those long stretches where I-5 looks like a post-Apocalyptic dance floor. The Sierras to the east and the Diablos to the west consistently foiled that, though; she didn’t see it until the last year of her life, at a cocktail party on a Carmel beach … though it was worth waiting for, I must admit. Looked like Davy Jones’ ship should come sailing out of it.
Instead, Kage saw other things on I-5.
***
We were heading North on a Friday afternoon, staring out the Bus windows at a landscape of salt marshes and corn fields. We were somewhere between Buttonwillow and Kettleman City. On the frontage road (fronting what was neither clear nor even quite imaginable) a mattress was lying, burning sullenly in complete solitude. Kage pointed this oddity out to me and then said:
“I’ve got the clearest image in my mind, looking at that. Someone walking along, between the tumbleweeds and complaining what a horrible place this is.”
“Uh-huh … ”
“And they pull out a thing like a big pocket watch, all tiny lights and gears, and they say: ‘I don’t care, though, as long as you get me out before 1906.’ ”
“Before the earthquake. A time traveler? Cool.”
A silence, wherein the smoke from the mattress faded behind us. Then Kage said, “I think her name is Mendoza …”
Thus was born Mendoza. Kage first saw her there, walking along I-5, in a wide dark hat, a riding skirt and a striped serape. By the end of that weekend, she had been incarnated as a botanist, was destined to be immortal, and had embarked on the worst love life ever.
***
As you approach Santa Nella, either from North or South, the first thing you see rising out of the rolling yellow plain to either side is a windmill. It’s the flagship structure of an Anderson’s Pea Soup restaurant. Its vanes are lit at night, and you can see it for miles like an hallucination straight out of Bride of Frankenstein. We used to see it on Fridays as we were heading for Blackpoint. The closer we got, the more lights and straight lines emerged against the flat blackness all around: by day, you could see it was Modesto and Los Banos and Gustine, tiny townships surrounding by miles of empty roads and lamp posts, but at night it was a mystery city.
It eventually became Troon, city of grain and emphysema in the harvest lands of Anvil of the World. The straight lines of I-5, intersected by uninhabited geometry and nameless feeder highways, became the iron tracks of the Children of the Sun. Yendri watched from the dark avenues between almond and apricot and walnut groves. Crazy demons passed us on motorcycles, trailing garish scarves and the glint of sunlight on tusks, flakes of outrageous tattoo inks hitting our windshield like the suicidal bugs.
And Kage recited the life story of Gard the Dark Lord and his saintly wife. We passed the details back and forth as the miles and hours rolled out behind us, and the story grew with every exchange.
***
The Bus was full of voices. It was a three-ring circus early in the ride, as people settled into their seats and caught up on the long week’s absence from the Faire family they saw every weekend. There was a constant crowd roar, with half a dozen different songs competing with some frantic rehearsal and the usual impassioned debate on the World Series or the latest Hollywood strike. As the night wore on, though, the voices diminished and grew lower; most of us fell asleep, and the insomniacs sang lullabies and told soft lies.
Kage always slept, on the Bus. But she heard the voices as she leaned on the window or my shoulder. She listened to the night sounds, and characters found their voices as she recorded them in her sleep. I am not sure precisely how Nicholas/Edward/Alec sounds – just what she wrote, the smooth dark tenor like a violin – but she heard that voice first on the Bus at night. She woke up in Blackpoint talking about it, staggering to our tent in the moonlight. I never found out who or what it was. After that, it was just the voice of The Man.
A lot of the operatives were first heard on The Bus. Joseph came to her out of the dark there, too. So did Victor and Nan and Nefer.
All those voices on the hot wind of I-5. All those voices.
Tomorrow: less memory, more work. Maybe.
Kage Baker had a real fear of confronting strangers. Not a handy phobia for an actor or a writer, but then she never intended to become a public figure. All she wanted to do was write and perform. She wanted those badly enough to learn to deal with the necessary audience.
She adopted personae to get through most of it – when we went to SF Conventions, she channeled our Aunt, the actress Anne Jeffries. Auntie Anne has a wonderful southern Grande Dame personality; while wearing that, Kage was armoured enough to eventually relax and be her own wry, somewhat less Grande self … those who had the persistence to come to know her, found a shy, funny, sharply observant person.
And, of course, the internet gave her a safety zone. Email, chat rooms, interviews – all provided a layer of distance that let her relax. She still couldn’t read her own mail or reviews, though. I read them first, and I translated them and then I paraphrased them, until finally Kage could bring herself to read the comments first hand. If they were nasty enough, she never read them at all. So any of you who just had to tell her all the hateful malice of your hearts: too bad, so sad, she never saw it. Nyah (I say with with great dignity) nyah.
I mention this because I have just gotten the first mean comment on this blog. Some total stranger met some Faire people once and didn’t like them. She felt it necessary to tell me how horrible my cherished memories are, and how they would constitute her “worst nightmares.”
While I don’t enjoy having anyone wipe their nose on me, I’m not much afraid or impressed. I’ve left her comment up as a reminder to myself that mean people are a fact of life, and that some of them feel required to lash out at other people. I’ve left my answer to her up, too. I admit it’s mean-spirited of me. I’m not sorry.
No one is required to read this blog. Do I really have to say that? But honestly, kids – if you don’t like what I have to say, there are more than a quarter million other bloggers on this site alone for you to sample. Choose someone else to read. I’m just shouting into the dark here, to keep a light lit in this long echoing abyss where we are all alone. If you don’t like my light, go stand by another. Better, yet, light your own.
You sure can’t put mine out.
Tomorrow: who the hell knows?
Kage Baker was a great admirer of the surreal. I always suspected it was how she actually saw the world, at least out of one eye. Due to intermittent strabismus, she only ever saw out of one eye at a time. Both eyes worked, but since they seldom looked at the same place at the same time, her brain blocked one eye’s vision – usually the left one. When her left eye was looking straight ahead, it meant she was having a rare attack of binocularity. Or a migraine.
Riding The Bus may have been that rare atmosphere where it didn’t matter. Very strange scenes happened there.
I remember … walking back along the aisle after having discouraged some sociopath from opening his take-out dinner of kimchee. As I lurched from seat to seat, I found our one shawm player (brilliant and irreplaceable Darin) just fitting a noose around his neck: the other end was tied to the luggage rack.
ME: What the hell are you doing?
D (in apparent sincerity): My David Munrow imitation …
I remember … that Tim, the head of St. Blaise (the Cryers) brought his cat on The Bus one Friday. I’ve forgotten why, but Terry Collier was not pleased. Especially as he discovered it about 20 minutes out, at the base of the Grapevine.
Terry: And I suppose he’s gonna hold it in for the next 400 miles?
Tim: I swear to you, angels will come and take away his shit.
Maybe they did. I do remember the cat preferred Blackpoint, and lived at the Ben Johnson Stage for years afterward. Lots of animals traveled with us, often one way. Usually it was unhappy kittens in baskets, or uncomfortably lively rats. (Protip, kids – animals rarely make good props.) One Sunday, though, a lady Labrador retriever patiently brought her dozen puppies down to the Bus stop, one after the other. At least 6 of them came home to LA with us that night. Petstore Pandemonium!
I remember … Athene Mihilakis and Cheryl Gilnor standing in the aisle, giving the classic safety lecture on airline oxygen as we pulled out of LA, using someone’s gold brocade belt pouch for a mask. Five people spread out over two seats, all frantically sewing pearls on Athene’s sleeves: by the time we hit Blackpoint, it looked like it had been beaded by a spider on LSD. An improvised live action version of The Wizard of Oz, starring Scott Dodd as Dorothy and Athene as Glenda:
Scott: If all I had to do was click the damned shoes together, why did you make me go through all this?
Athene: Well, Dorothy, it gets pretty boring for us here in Oz …
I remember …the immortal Kevin Brown giving a dubious recap of the speeches of FDR, using an empty Coke can as a radio echo chamber (Today ….ssss – the forces of Imperial Japan … ssss – attacked my wife Eleanor …). Kevin recounting the adventures of the fiendish Angus McCreech and the Great Babby Drive. Kevin singing obscene versions of the Cowardly Lion’s songs from Oz (Oz was a perennial favourite with us). Kevin describing the cold, dark, swirling, shark-infested waters below the Richmond Bridge every damned time we crossed it: to a chorus of outraged yells and death threats from everyone else on board.
Costume Mistress Chris Zaida coaxing David Springhorn to wake up by dancing a sock-bunny on her hand across his nose.
Numerous people sitting on bananas, pies, freshly starched ruffs, bodhrans, fiddles, Orange Juliuses and – once and memorably – a McDonald’s bag with a hamster in it.
Morris Men playing hacky sack between the 18-wheelers thundering in and out of the Santa Nella truck stop. Me having to explain this behaviour to the 18-wheeler-drivers.
Getting shot in the head with a rubber band helicopter toy by Luisa (OMG the Queen!) Puig in a Burger King.
Watching Sandy Grinn steal a portrait of Colonel Sanders from a KFC in Castro Valley.
Some people almost died; a couple almost got born. Marriages were arranged, dissolved, sometimes consummated. Kage saw all this. And more. In, I think, several alternate dimensions. These people and their antics, their faces, their voices raised in songs both profane and exquisite, their youth, live forever in her mind. She did amazing things with some of them.
Tomorrow: where the stories started.
Kage Baker considered the Faire Bus a rolling smorgasbord of story ideas. She commented once (watching delightedly as Marque Siebenthal traveled up and down the aisle by swinging from the luggage racks like Spiderman): “It’s like Schrodinger’s Box on wheels! You never know what will happen to the cat until you look!”
We were all her cats.
Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters didn’t have a patch on The Bus. For the riders (50 beautiful seats! 53 lovely passengers!) the weekend’s performance began on Friday afternoon as we pulled away. The entire lot of them reverted to a mental age of 5, and stayed that way for the next 8 hours. Inspired, creative, often drunken kindergarteners, crammed into a bus with most of their props, instruments and costumes: it’s a wonder we never drove straight through a black hole from the weight of our own insanity.
What motivated Kesey’s lot? Politics, boredom, a need for attention, copious amounts of drugs? What motivated the inmates of The Bus was the urge to Make Art. Mostly they did that by working Faire, spending their weekends in a 24/7, 360-degree, 48 hour orgy of historical recreation – but there was all that time on The Bus, too, and it was never wasted.
This was in the days where the most sophisticated electronics available to us was someone’s Bible-sized cassette player – and even those were frowned on, in the Golden Age atmosphere of Faire. We made our own music. We made music literally at dinner and bathroom breaks, where people would run to fetch food and drink for the musicians who obligingly stood in the hot dark parking lots and played for the rest of us. Then we danced. The parking lot of the Orange Julius in Buttonwillow was the only place I ever got all the way through a set of Goddesses, in a furnace wind and a storm of tumbleweeds and hamburger wrappers – it was an ecstacy.
People threw money (and sometimes rocks). We passed out flyers and discount tickets. One evening J. Paul Moore, in flawless white tie and tails, set up a tiny folding table with a linen cloth and candlebra, and sat there sipping champagne while the rest of us stamped and clapped and danced. I can see him clearly, nodding and keeping time with one magisterial hand in the air. At the end he pulled a flower out of thin air – he was a magician, too – and presented it to some Bakersfield matron who had been watching us with her mouth hanging open.
We sang on the bus, for our own entertainment. There were a lot of standard Faire songs, of course, most cribbed from Steeleye Span and The Watersons; or the after-hours things you couldn’t sing where the audiance could hear (and I hope to never hear The Ball at Ballymore again in my life). But Monkees songs were also very popular, as were commercial jingles and musical comedy scores and Victorian music hall. I learned Rule, Britannia on a bus on I-5. Terry Collier could change into the MC from Cabaret so fast it was scary … sooner or later, though, every evening, we sang Amazing Grace for Barry, our long-suffering driver – perfectly straight, perfectly serious, perfectly gorgeous.
There was a noise gradient from the front to the back of the seats. It was moderately quiet in the very front, so as not to bother Barry; then very noisy indeed in the middle (lots of jingles there); then not quite as noisy but much smokier in the back, where most of the musical theatre happened. The smokers could only light up in the very back, too, and we somehow fondly imagined the smoke abode by the rules and didn’t drift forward; but in those days, you could even light up in hospitals.
And how do I remember all this? Kage. Kage Baker remembered everything.
Tomorrow: Strange Scenes Inside The Gold Mine
Kage Baker hated busses. She hated most forms of public transport – except dome cars on railways, which are as close to private rail cars as public transport can get – but most of all, she hated busses. They’re big and smelly and too far off the ground; you have to clamber in and leap out. The ratio of seats to interior is absurd, far too much bus shell to the amount of seating actually available. Their routes are absurd and seldom maintained. Worst of all, they’re full of other people and she couldn’t think on them.
Ah, but The Bus – The Faire Bus. That was something else again.
Occasionally, in the 1970’s and 1980’s, the Faire would have lots of money. One of the things the management did at those times was actually pay for select irreplaceable actors to be transported from one end of the state (where they lived) to the other (where they performed). Southern Faire was in April, May and June; Northern in August, September and October. So they rented a Mark IV bus and chartered it between Los Angeles and Novato. During the Southern Faire, it brought 50-odd performers from the North Bay to the Agoura site; during Northern, it left Los Angeles and delivered its peculiar cargo to the Northern site at Blackpoint.
That was on Friday nights. The route was reversed on Sunday night. It meant the actors spent Fridays and Sundays on I-5 in various degrees of hilarity and coma, arriving at their destinations somewhere between 2 in the morning and dawn: depending on what disasters had plagued the ride between start and finish. There were engine failures, flat tires, getting lost in Berkeley and Simi Valley, traffic jams, brush fires, Department of Agriculture check points, medical emergencies, and sometimes misplacing actors at the dinner stops.
For some reason, the Southern Bus – the one that took actors to Northern Faire, y’see – had a slightly better record than the Northern bus (which brought its passengers to Southern Faire.) Lots of the St. Audrey/Cuthbert Parade Guild rode that Northern bus, and I remember times when they came running up to Opening Parade pulling on their costumes, fresh from the bus still smoking in the Parking Lot. We on the Southern Bus usually made it in while it was still deep night, and I often went to sleep watching Orion wheeling across the sky.
Kage and I always rode the Southern bus, living as we did then in Los Angeles. The bus left from an empty lot on Los Feliz, near Griffith Park, as close to 6 PM as we could force the passengers on board. There actually was a boarding list, to try and make sure no one was left behind – like the APQ (the Actress Playing the Queen) or one of the scarce and vital musicians. There was also a Standby List, hoping one of the regulars would fail to show. And there were the satellite cars, who would follow the same route as the bus, and could sometimes be persuaded to take overflow passengers.
While the bus had 50 seats, we usually had about 53 passengers. People cuddled up close, sat on the floor, took turns standing – a few of the younger, smaller ones were put to sleep in the overhead racks. Jan Todd, who eventually grew into a lean and saturnine young god, used to be carefully bedded down up there by Bob and Margie Wright of Court. I remember him as a tiny, cold-eyed little boy in a blanket, scowling and demanding people Shut Up. They did, too; for a while, anyway.
This herd of cats was run by whoever The Office had placed in charge – the Bus Daddy (or Mommy), whose business it was to make sure all the necessary people made it to the Faire. When I started riding The Bus, that was Terry Collier, the dread and ferocious Manager of Main Stage: he was used to getting actors where they needed to be, and suffered no fools. When he retired, the job went – for reasons I have never understood, but I must have pissed off some god – to me.
For Kage, it was a goldmine of inspiration. It was the one bus she loved. It was full of her own people, after all. It rapidly became full of the first of the people in her head, too. Her long habit of storytelling on the road began there.
More on that tomorrow.
Kage Baker was a firm believer in keeping going. Even if it’s baby steps, keep your forward momentum going as much as you can. If you wander off the chosen path, keep going anyway – there may some cool scenery at the bottom of that slope you’ve fallen down, or at least a pub. However …
Yestreday I got a lot of my prescriptions refilled (I am middle-aged and wearing out), and now the metoprolol is making me pee constantly. The levothryroxin is making me sleepy: but when I tried to nap, I discovered the I’d accidentally shut the cat in the drawer of my captain’s bed, right under my head. The dog hid a chew toy in my pillow, and the other cat clawed the gel insert out of my huaraches and noisily disembowled it.
Both vaccums are jammed, there’s a grasshopper caught in the lace curtains on the French windows and I’m out of Fudgesickles. I give up. I am retreating to Torquay and the Ladies of Nell Gwynne’s – reality is too much for me today.
Tomorrow: we’ll try The Bus again …
Kage Baker followed science news. Most science fiction writers do. They follow the cutting edge to determine what new thing is being carved out. They are constantly learning and analyzing, and only partly in a search for interesting tidbits that spark a story. The other reason is that most of them care avidly about what science is up to. They are the engaged and informed public for whom science directors and outreach coordinators long, and to whom so much PBS scheduling and museum programs are directed: but it’s all preaching to the choir. These people already care, and have learned to go after the interesting news themselves.
Kage combed several sites online on a daily basis (the convenience of the internet for authorial research cannot be exaggerated). We read magazines like Scientific American and Discover. Kage also subscribed to a small, eccentric clipping service (me) that read through new articles and releases and sent her memos on potentially interesting topics. I love to read; I love to read especially in the biological sciences; and I love to then lecture a captive audience on the fascinating advances in, say, dinosaur taxonomy. Or the current antics of the Large Hadron Collider, which so far is the poster child for the axiom: If we knew what to expect we wouldn’t have to ask the question. Or the interesting idea that the human immune system can not only produce thousands of customized substances, but also declare any one of them anathema; Kage wrote a story about a poor fellow who develops an allergy to his own mRNA and thus must forever seek novelty lest familiarity drive him mad (Facts Relating To The Arrest of Dr. Kalugin).
Obviously, for many reasons, I still peruse all these sources daily. (I have a couple of fascinating new books on mass extinctions waiting to be read; I know there is a story there.) Today the journal Natural Genetics published an article describing the breaking of the genetic code of the apple! True, they used a Golden Delicious, which only yestreday I maligned as being boring; but as the gateway to the genetic history of the noble apple, even that icon of lunchbox ennui is interesting. They already have found that at some point in its history, the apple apparently duplicated its entire genome – think of all the room in there! No wonder there are 7,500 varieties of apple!
Apples are from Kazakhstan. Apparently apples, like so many of civilization’s arts and crafts, arose in the Mideast. Along with farming and pottery and beer and writing and the domestication of the goat … raise a toast to human ingenuity, kids. Swig some apple beer from a ceramic mug in its honor, and go pick some ripe tomatoes from your backyard or patio. And pet a goat. It’s all research; research into how we are human, and how we stay that way. Or not …
Tomorrow: The Bus. Maybe.
Kage Baker really did love apples.One of the delights of our advancing age was the proliferation of apple varieties – breeds new or hybridized, heritage varieties found still bearing in abandoned orchards … all that bounty of the family of the rose. (Yes, they are.)
When we were young, there were only three kinds of apples to be found in Los Angeles markets: red Delicious, yellow Delicious, and green Pippins. There has never been an apple more misleadingly named than a Delicious – they aren’t, they are bland and mushy and too sweet – and Momma would only buy Pippins for pies. So aside from a burgled Pippin (and, of course, the pies) apples were boring. But as time went on, things got a little better; Macintoshes and Romes were available sometimes, and while they are rather staid to eat out of hand, they are wonderful baking apples. Especially the huge, glossy red Romes, like glass Christmas tree ornaments; core them, plug the bottom with walnut meats, cram the rest of the hole with brown sugar and dates, and bake them for a hour at 300 degrees … then, when they are literally bursting and the flesh is like exploding like honeyed kapok, take them out and drown them in cream and eat like a madwoman. Bliss!
In our 20’s, one began to hear of older apples, that were now being rediscovered and re-marketed: Eastern Spy and Graventeins were among the first. But this was before Trader Joe’s or Whole Foods, or even farmers’ markets, and so those old varieties stayed mythical for us. But then we started doing the Renaissance Faire in Northern California.
Napa, Sonoma and Mendocino counties may be most famous for wine grapes, but they also grow all the fruits of paradise. Green, red, yellow and Santa Rosa plums; cherries red and yellow; peaches, nectarines and shameless sweet-fleshed crosses of all of them, fruiting without benefit of clergy in backyards. And apples. The fruit stand at the Blackpoint Faire carried everything local it could find, all laid out in rough wooden bins under a canopy of pink cloth that made the fruit incandesce in the late sunlight. The smell alone as you walked by was enough to make you drunk.
Now, when we started going North for the Blackpoint Faire, it was on THE BUS. The management of the Faire rented a bus every weekend, to bring up the 50-odd most needed performers from LA every Friday and return them Sunday night. It meant you didn’t have to drive the 400 miles yourself, you could sleep or drink or smoke questionable substances on the road (and survive) and you had lots of company. However, it also meant you couldn’t leave Faire after hours to find a grocery store or a restaurant. Or money – and no ATMS were around then, anway.
When we were thus trapped on site and/or short of cash, it was our habit to hit some select stands late in the day. A plate of English cheese from the roast beef booth was nicely complimented by some leftover wheat bread from the Cheezewits vendor. We’d fill our Imperial Pint mugs (20 ounces!) with Bass Ale. We’d get Gravensteins from the harem-lit fruit stand, and then we’d climb the hill to Actors’ Camp.
These were the days before we ran the Green Man Inn, and we pitched our tent like most everyone else on top of Heart Attack Hill. We had a favourite spot at the shower end, where you could see through that one split tree with the natural door-arch in it, over miles of yellow hills where Summer lived. If you went down that side you ended up in the lot by Tobin House. But we climbed up on the Grey Barn side, well clear of the quarry where the worse-aimed arrows from the Archery Booth flew, and took our dinner safely to our haven under the oaks.
Then we’d strip down to our shifts in the hot twilight, and we’d sit on our sleeping bags and feast: on Glouchester and Cheshire cheeses, and cool Gravenstein apples sliced with our belt knives. Rough bread and warm ale. The sun would set, the moon would rise, and up the hill would come all the laughing shadows with the voices of our friends …
Tomorrow: riding the bus through the Memory Mansion
Kathleen, Kage and the Company 