ericboy's Diaryland
Diary
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Knight in Shining Stupid, Entry Two, Part One
True story:
In May of 1996, myself and three friends of mine drive forty-five minutes into the ass-end of nowhere to audition for roles as paid actors at the Texas Rennaissance (spelling? do you care? moving on.) Festival, here on out to be known as Renfair. The audition process is long and subject to the scrutiny of everyone else there. Hello, nerves! How ya been?
We all get jobs.
Myself, Jeremiah, and two of my ex-girlfriends, Vicky and Mitzi, all get gigs as puppeteers. This job entails playing two characters in a constant theater-of-the-round improv format for twelve hours a day, two days in a row, for ten weekends. In preparation for that much off-the-cuff characterization, eight weekends of rehearsal and workshops are held prior to the opening of the Fair.
The puppets are operated from the inside. You strap on a harness, which telescopes another foot-and-a-half up from your back and rounds out into shoulders. A large, ugly, and brittle papier-mache head is slipped onto the protruding eliptical bar atop the shoulders. A skirt goes on your waist and billows out at your feet with a metallic hoop. This device is to disguise the fact that you have people-sized feet rather than giant feet proportionate to the giant, ugly head floating autonomously two feet above your own. Draped over the "Shoulders" is a gown of varying color, with a gold scrim as a chest-piece, conveniently centered in front of your actual face. You can see out; no one can see in. Through the sleeves of this tacky mumu go your arms, culminating in grotesquely large and disturbing papier-mache hands, which you hold onto via a dowel-rod in the wrist. All together, you are now about seven-and-a-half foot tall, ugly, disproportioned, and fucking horrifying to small children (Who, by the way, are your key demographic when in character). Half of your day will be spent inside this monstrosity, the other half outside. When outside the suit, your job is to wrangle children, cater to the needs of the puppet operator, and say "Hey, you're about to hit that tree!" Only, you have to say it in character, so it comes out "Pardon, Lord, but thou art headed in a most precarious direction, what with a limb being before thy keen eyes and all. Perhaps t'were best if thou didst duck or venture round, sire." Anything for the paycheck.
My puppet was Morgon the Magnificent, a green-cloaked badass with hands frozen in different, though equally horrific, gestures. He was a cocky bastard and the kids loved him. Outside, I was a revolving array of street-wisened lackeys with troubled pasts and skewed morals. All in all, I had fun with the roles.
The most fun about being Morgon the Magnificent was chasing kids. As you've gathered, the puppets are gargantuan, lumbering beasts that are as intriguing as they are frightening, and children can't help but either fawn over them, run away from them, or lash out at them. As they move about in their lanky way, the puppets looks intrinsically slow, and, for the most part, they are. After tooling around in Morgon's apparatus for a while, defining his limitations and borders, and getting a feeling for the grounds of the fair, however, I felt comfortable running. People don't think the puppets can run, but they can. Granted, Jeremiah and I were the only ones that did, but when we did... I don't think I've ever been as demonically pleased with myself as I have after chasing a snot-faced smartass around the Renfair for a quarter of a mile and watching his steel-resolve melt into bluthering pleas for continued existence. What can I say? I'm a sick bastard with simple, deplorable vices.
But I digress. This story is neither about chasing children while dressed as a giant Medieval wizard nor is it about my depraved stabs at amusing myself; it's about Dave W. Dave W was one of the senior instructors at the Renfair. He had been doing it for years, and his improvisational skills were unmatched. His character, the same every year, was a favorite of patrons for as long as he'd been there, and that was no mystery. The man was a comic genius. He was also articulate, attractive, ambitious, and agreeable. And that's just the "A"s. He was the envy of the other actors and the desire of just about all of the actresses. In his time outside of Renfair, he was an accomplished vocalist in a heavy metal band in Houston. Upon meeting him, you didn't picture him barking into a microphone and expostulating that he would masticate your bowels while Satan laughed, and that was all part of his allure. He was something else.
He taught improv workshops for all three years that I worked at the Renfair, and it wasn't until the third year that we actually got to talk and know each other on a personal level. In fact, at the offset of that third year, he was insistent that I was new to the festival. I insisted that I had been there the two years previous, but he was adamant that I wasn't. And so it went.
I was coasting through the workshops with a kickboxer from Austin named Kim. It was Kim's first year at Renfair and she swallowed everything with her wide, green eyes and enjoyed every minute of it. One of the sights that her eyes settled upon quite hungrily just happened to be Mr. Dave W. When she saw that he and I were building a repoire, she became even more insistent on hanging out with me after Festival hours. I, of course, didn't have a problem with this, because I quite fancied her. She quite fancied Dave W, and, to complete this true and geometrically correct triangle, I would come to find that Dave W fancied me.
Alas, I have taken up too much time in the introduction and my clothes are done in the dryer. This fascinatingly true story from the annals of "Knight in Shining Stupid" will be concluded at a later date. I apologize for any inconvenience, and promise to be as long-winded and descriptive in the second half. Until then, adieu...
12:34 a.m. - 2004-11-08
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