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For the first time in the 5 years we have lived here, we dragged ourselves out of the house on a Saturday morning and drove 15 minutes up the road to the New York Renaissance Faire, in Tuxedo, NY. It was definitely… something. Was it what I expected? Maybe… Okay, I know I’m being a little wishy-washy in my explanation, but it’s hard to put a label on it – good or bad – when there was such a range of experiences, people, costumes, foods and shows. Not all so good. Not all too bad. Had everything been as good as the best thing we saw, this would be a raving review, making you want to jump out of your seat and head straight there. Were it all as poor as the poorest thing we saw, this would be a total rant declaring the event a disaster. It was neither and so I shall do neither.

What it was, was a large cast of characters (some paid workers/entertainers, some paying customers like ourselves) speaking in the best Olde English they could muster up – lots of thees, thous, ma’lady, sire, and the like. Most had a token line or joke that they would mutter as you passed, some didn’t quite understand the concept of “personal space”, some were “acting” drunk, some were drunk, some were funny, some were rude. The costumes ranged anywhere from knights in full armor to general peasantry to queens to friars to popular fairy tale characters to – and this is where it gets weird – native American Indians to devils with little horns as well as other off-color, wrong timeperiod, dressing up just to say you dressed up people. There was this one fellow who was blatantly ripping off Johnny Depp’s character of pirate, Captain Jack Sparrow from Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003) and doing a surprisingly wonderful job at it. He looked, sounded and acted the part perfectly and did so all day long.

The event itself is actually a rather large village completely constructed for the Faire with main roads, side streets, theaters, lawns, ponds, etc… We headed toward The Kissing Bridge, hoping to steal a kiss in private and were instead greeted with a rather feminine male peasant requesting kisses from every traveler who wished to cross his bridge. I’m afraid I left him disappointed.

Besides Jack Sparrow, my favorites were the knife throwing demonstration by a father/son comic/knife tossing duo, watching a blacksmith hammer out some steel, and the live jousting competition pictured above. We missed the live, life-sized chess match and opted for the jousting instead, but it’s something I’ll go back again to see next time. The admission was high, and the food was overpriced and not so great. I can see it becoming much more fun (and expensive) in two or three years when Erin is a little older, and able to distinguish between the real world and the fantasy world acted out in front of her. Today, she was just thinking that these people talk funny and really know how to dress! (I was thinking the same thing).