Staff at the Festival –by Sidney Metcalf
The Renaissance Festival: home to many of the most peculiar, boisterous, and just plain wacky of
characters, all of which combined can make for quite the experience. In-character or not, the
people drawn to the Festival are sure to make your stay a memorable one.
I’d visited before with friends and had a great time of it. Despite the fact that one such friend
spent a rather extended period of time admiring the belly dancers, and the other stopped at
practically all of the food stands, we managed to get a good bit of ground covered. Thus, with the
memory of the layout still fresh in my mind, I set out for the nearest hat shop the instant I set foot
on the other side of the huge gateway.
Immediately I was greeted by the shopkeeper, a young woman in the usual medieval dress
that was common around the Festival. Clearly she was some kind of clairvoyant; she took one look
at me and instantaneously pointed me in the direction of the more extravagant hats. She was in
general very pleasant- or maybe just tired. In any case, I would soon encounter much more
enthusiastic individuals in my journey across the fairgrounds.
One such man was rather hard to miss- not by his costume, which was in fact rather plain,
but by his booming voice. I was astonished that I hadn’t heard him sooner, and was equally baffled
by the lack of any amplifying equipment nearby. This man was the operator of the coin-stamping
machine. He certainly succeeded in getting a few chuckles out of me with his over-the-top
announcing- boy, was he laying on the ham. I’m fairly sure that the