 |
RENAISSANCE PLEASURE FAIRE
MAY 1970
We took the Ventura Freeway north from Hollywood to Agoura Hills, in three car loads, past Calabasas to the Kanan Road exit. We parked in a lot and walked the rest of the way on a dirt road that wound through hills and old oaks and turned, as we turned back in time, into the High Road, down which the Lord Mayor himself led the opening procession of lords and ladies, artisans, tumblers, lute players, wenches and rogues, and Queen Bess Herself on a white horse into the Renaissance Pleasure Faire, in May of 1970.
Even before we saw the tents and banners, we heard the recorder music and smelled turkey legs cooking on open spits in Cooke's Court.
A young woman dressed in slashed sleeves sat in front of her tent, looking at us but seeing something else, weaving her arms in wide circles, bending up, down and around, tripping more than any of us ever had or had ever even wanted to, more than Sharon when she dropped acid and watched the bathroom sink drip generation after generation of flaming psychedelic flowers, more than Brenda when, certain she had reincarnated as Rasputin, she tried to stare down a plastic gargoyle in a friend's vegetable garden until the friend, also stoned, freaked out that her gargoyle was melting, more than Kaye and me when, stoned on hash, we stared in wonder all night at the luminous moon outside the window until we realized it was the streetlight.
"I bid thee good day," said an ironworker from his booth.
Suddenly, people were everywhere, the Faire workers wearing boots and pantaloons, feathered hats, flowing blouses, bodices overflowing with plump bosoms. Rogues and wenches, lords and ladies, hardworking peasants mingled. Some visitors came in costume, like Richard, resplendent in jerkin and codpiece. Many did not. No matter. No matter even that Carol had pinned a huge plastic flower to her hat.
Spendpenny Lane was crowded with booths and banners, noisy with sounds of craftspeople and artisans selling their wares. Music, and greetings of Good Days and Good Morrows filled the air.
We ripped the meat off the turkey legs with our teeth, purposeful Elizabethan eaters, and jostled for places, I pray your leave, I cry your mercy, in the Ale Garden for quart pots, pint pots and quarter gills of beer.
Bubble Red and Beauty brought their dog, and we gave it bites of turkey and meat pies. In all the photos, the dog looks like to be smiling.
The old crone bade us come into the Witches Ditch and have our fortunes told. She read palms and did the Tarot. "Prithee, be thou not offended," she said to me, "I do find that thou wilt wax most notorious with passing time."
"I thank thee," I said.
Down
converging paths came jesters and tumblers. From somewhere, we could hear a strolling player, singing,
Why doth not my goose sing as well as thy goose when I paid for my goose
twice as much
as thine? and, fainter, from a lute and
singer, Go tell her to make me a cambric shirt, Parsley, sage, rosemary
and thyme, And then she will be a true love of mine.
Through the crowds came shouts and the sound of horse's hooves.
"Good my lords and good my ladies, make way for the Queen! Fare ye good people, make way for Good Queen Bess!"
A woman with a face as white as a jar of paste can make it, on whose head sat a bright red, curly wig, whose ruff stuck stiffly from her throat over her rich velvet riding costume, smiled and waved her gloved hand as she rode sidesaddle toward us on a prancing horse.
And as the Lord High Constable bid us make way for the Queen, we began to cheer, caught up in the magic -shroom moment,
"Your majesty!"
"Your Grace!"
"Queen! Queen!"
Her minstrel plucked his lute and sang, as Queen Elizabeth I and her entourage disappeared from our view over the next hill, Long may she reign in majesty glorious, ever victorious.
On one of the paths of the Faire was the Merrie Mire, where foulmouthed wenches and knaves sat over a pond and insulted the people, and you could buy a bucket of mud and try to unseat them from their perch, into the muddy pond.
"Thou cullionly varlet, thou eater of broken meats, thou art a plague-sore and a carbuncle! May thy bunghole seize!" shouted the wench. "Thou besotted, lard-bloated tosspot - - !"
The slung mud hit its target, and down into the pond she plopped.
A rogue scrambled up and took her place. "By my troth, beshrew thee!" he shouted to our delighted ears. "Thy dank-smelling cuttle-bung doth make the gates of hell smell sweet, thou doddypol, thou - - !"
Into the pond.
Crowds laughed and gathered round, paid for our buckets of mud, and we could not get our fill of being on the receiving end of juicy Elizabethan oaths.
"Whoreson! Scabbed toad! Brazen-faced, recreant barbermonger! By God's beard and wounds!"
It was hot as hell, and the beer gave Sharon a terrible headache. Brenda lit them both cigarettes and kissed Sharon before putting the lit cigarette in her mouth. The man behind them smiled broadly to watch two lesbians in love, as I snapped the photograph.
Strolling
players arrived, followed by a lewd satyr playing his flute. There were three drunken maidens, Come
from the Isle of Wight, They drank from Sunday morning ,Didn't stop till Saturday
night.
We moved on to an outdoor stage hug with brightly-colored banners. Groups of people sat outside under the oaks to watch Elizabethan farces. Beauty lay in Bubble Red's lap, and Bubble Red bent down and kissed Beauty passionately on her neck. Nobody cared. Someone took our pictures. The hippie chick on the top left and the straight man sitting behind Bubble Red, watching on benignly, in the fantasyland of the Faire.
It was hippy heaven. Everyone was friendly and mellow. We werenÕt even stoned. But we were tosspots, for certain.
Like many others at the Faire, Brenda drank wine from a boda bag, squirting wine, with varying levels of expertise into their own mouths and into the mouths of others.
There were others of us, like Richard and me, who carried booze around in less historically-accurate containers. Big, glass gallons of cheap wine, which we lugged around by ropes. Dainty friends, like Bubble Red and Beauty, poured the wine into cups. We cruder folk, like Judy, Carol, Little Fred and me, chugged it straight from the gallon bottle.
"Good my lords and good my ladies, gather round!" A man shouted from the side of a path, "Which of thee wouldst step up to have a roll in the hay with the most beauteous lusty wench?"
A woman stood at the top of the hill, her bodice low and full, leering at the crowd, her hands on her hips.
"I do!" I shouted and climbed over the low fence
The young woman posing as a wench looked at me as though she were unsure.
"Well met, good lady" she said.
"Yes, how now," I smiled.
The wench opened her arms, we embraced and lay us down on the ground. We pushed off and rolled over and over, faster and faster, down the bumpy, hay-sprinkled hill until till we came to a stop at the bottom.
People applauded. The wench bade me a good day. The man in pantaloons shouted, "Who wilt be next to roll in the hay with this most lusty wench?"
But
sweet, bittersweet. From down
a glen, a woman's sad and plaintive voice sang a song usually sung happily,
Heigh-ho, nobody home, Meat, nor drink, nor money have I none. Still I
will be merry.
We strolled around the paths of the Faire all day, from the Merrie Mire to the Witches Ditch to Spendpenny Lane to the Ale Garden and back to CookeÕs Court, watching and being part of the passing parade. We squeezed the last drop from the boda bags and drank the last drop of wine from the gallon jugs.
As we left the Faire that night, people called from the tents, "God give you good morrow."
"Farewell, we shall see thee anon."
The tripping woman's trip had ended, or, at least, she was coming down and no longer waving her arms out in space but sitting in her tent nibbling on a meat pie. She did, though, gaze at the pie for a long time before biting, perhaps finding universes in the morsels.
"And God keep thee, and thee, and thee," said drunken Little John to a trio of young men standing in the parking lot.
Once we were back on the 101 to Hollywood, the sizzling of the freeway underneath the tires was far different from the sizzle of cooking from the spits and fires of the Faire.
A driver veered in front of us, from the left lane into our lane. Richard slammed on the brakes. We barely missed rear-ending the driver, who threw us the finger out his car window.
I shouted, "By God's teeth, I wouldst a poxy effluvia be farted out the devil's arse upon thee and thy Pontiac!"
We collapsed upon ourselves in laughter in our car seats and re-entered the real world.
The Monday after the opening of the Faire that weekend was the Kent State massacre of four students by the National Guard, and three days after that, the killing of three Jackson State College students, all of them for protesting the Vietnam War and Nixon's invasion of peaceful Cambodia.
This marked turning points, of different paths taken, for those in the photographs.
Brenda, Sharon and I, gathered at the Bacchanal 70 with likeminded, outraged others, and we fulminated that Monday night after the killings, just as we had meandered in the FaireÕs groovy haze just two days before. Now we buckled down.
Oh, we had done impromptu gay guerilla theater on Hollywood Boulevard or gone to war protests, and we always had it in us. Even as a child, Brenda, who belonged to a Sunday School class called The Doers, formed her own class and called it The Un-Doers. We had gone to Revolution House from time to time. One afternoon, I even stayed long enough to listen to some inter-group bickering, then stand up and make an impromptu, stupid speech about all of us, men and women, gay and straight, black and white, standing on a hill and letting our differences fall down around us like old clothes, leaving our true selves standing there, holding hands - - as the starry-eyed swooned, and the practical revolutionaries rolled their eyes in disgust.
After the Faire, Kent State. After Kent State, Brenda, Sharon and I joined the Gay Liberation Front, and that very July of 1970, was L. A.'s first Christopher Street West Parade (later Gay Pride Parade), on Hollywood Boulevard, and we marched in it, taking our first steps on our paths up the revolutionary road.
Carolyn Weathers, Long Beach CA, 2007
|
|
