Faire Folk at Work

Sue Honor

Sue talks about how Phyllis invited her mom to have a craft booth at faire, how Mom took 10 year old Sue to Faire and put her daughter and younger brother on the streets, and how that expression differs now than it did then. Sue also discusses how the parade guild in wrapped up in the history of the Faire (it was the first guild) and how her and her families history has grown up with the Faire.

Duration:: 57m
Broadcast on:: 24 Jul 2024
Audio Format:: mp3

Welcome to another episode of Fair Folk at Work. If you've ever been to a Renaissance Fair, you've probably noticed a parade or two. My guest today has probably been in more parades than anybody else I could possibly think of. My guest today is Sue Honor. Sue, welcome. Thank you. But before we get to our discussion of parades at all, I have to ask you the first Fair Folk at Work question, which is, who was the person who said to you, there's this thing called Fair, and what did they say to get you out there? Well, it was my mother. She had been asked by Phyllis Patterson to be a crafter at the fair, so she had a boot, and so we just went with her. But it wasn't like much of a choice. It was more of, I'm doing this fair, come with us, and we've never looked back. We jumped right in with both feet and have been doing it ever since. What was your mom's booth? She did hooked rugs. So back in the '60s, there was a praise for hooked rugs. So she was making hooked rugs with tapestries, including things like guitar cases and pillows and all sorts of things. Anything you could use a piece of rug or tapestry as the top of, she made. Phyllis had seen her work as some local art shows and had asked her to be at another fair that Phyllis did that most people don't know about, all the ABC fair. It was in Northridge, California for one year. Three weekends, each weekend was dedicated to the letter A, the letter B, or the letter C, depending on which weekend and so you're supposed to emphasize things that had that letter. And then after that fair, she invited my mother to be a craftsman at Southern Minnesota. So that was in the late '60s. So I have some of my mother's works, but they're starting to get a little long in the tooth and not in the best of shape. So if I had asked what was your mom's occupation in the 1960s, what would have she answered? She would have probably answered a combination of housewives and artisans. No, or crafts. How did she acquire her artisanal craftsman skills? You know, I don't know how she started. I just know that she did. She picked it up one day. The rug-hooking tool that she used was something that was traditional and the particular brand that she used was the Susan B. Anthony. So that tells you it was named after a revolutionary war stuff, but it predated that style of rug-hooking tool predated the revolutionary war. And she just picked it up one day. I don't know how she saw it or if she had seen somebody else who did it or what, but one day she started doing them. And again, she kept doing it for a very long time. As long as I was a kid, she was still doing the rug-hooking and selling things to people, even though she stopped doing the fair in the early '70s, she continued doing this, making the rugs and the pillows and everything else that she made for quite a few years after that. Did you do? I do. He was a computer engineer, worked for first in Northrop and then Teladine until he retired. I get the sense you were a valley kid? Yeah. When you were a valley lineage of schools. I went to Calvash Elementary School, which was in Woman's Hills, and then Hughes, Junior High, and then William Howard's half-high school. Before we were in the valley, we were in Palace Verde, because when he was in Northrop, they were down in the Torrance area. What were your interests in high school? Well, in high school, I was in the fair already. I had been doing fair since I was 10, so I was well-versed in fair. I liked theater, I liked singing, and I was in all the whole different service organizations, but I liked fair. I couldn't wait. We weren't doing Northern yet, but couldn't wait till summer. It was like the highlight of night. What are your first impressions of fair that you remember? It was like home. We got there and it was like, "Oh my God, this is the best thing ever." The kids were safe. Back when we were kids, kids ran around like maniacs all day long, and their parents weren't worried about it. Fair was a safe space. There weren't any cars to run you over. You could wear costume and be somebody else. You could watch all these shows, and nobody would bother you as long as you irritate the actors on the stage. There was always something to do and something new to see. For me, it was like the best adventure ever. I just latched onto that as my thing. I still did other stuff outside of fair, because fair only lasted. To those days, it was only six weeks. When you were working as a craftsman, you didn't have to go to rehearsal. My mother's booth was very easy to put up, so we didn't have to do a lot of pre-fair, but just go to fair and have fun. It was a whole family activity. We were all there. I remember the smell. I remember the weather. I remember all the different kinds of costumes and the actors that I liked to watch and the different shows that I liked to watch. I look forward to it every year. It's hard to describe in words, but it was just my thing. Some people are into sports and soccer or whatever. I was into fair. What shows or booths or foods or sensations do you remember? I can't say that they're all right from the beginning, but I always like to watch the Queen show. Southern doesn't do a Queen show anymore, but the Queen show is when you would get all the nobles up on the stage in the Queen, and she would address the crowd. To me, that felt like it was a real Queen who was really addressing her people. I feel that in my heart. I like the Queen show. They were doing a version of "Gammer Gerton's Needle," which is a traditional old English pageant. I liked watching that. There are several comedies. Again, at different times, I liked the "Cock and Feathers" show. They did "The Wizard" show. I liked the "Comadia Del Arte." They had various ones like that. There was always something. Punch and Judy was a big favorite. A guy named Cibberd. He was a preeminent Punch and Judy performer, and he did the Punch and Judy show in the traditional way with Punch actually beating up people, which is now not PC, and so people don't like to see traditional Punch and Judy shows anymore, but he did the very traditional Punch and Judy show, and we go watch that every day. The food, there was the cookie man. I remember him. He used to stand on the roof of his booth, hawking giant chocolate chip cookies. He can't say that a giant chocolate chip cookie is necessarily a renaissance food, but I was always impressed by the fact that he was standing on the roof of his booth, hawking he was a brilliant improv guy, you know, popping off different things right off the top of his head all day long. I used to like the cheese and mushroom pies. It was basically a fancy grilled cheese sandwich, but it was done in a special way with these irons. You would put the bread between these two irons and they would be cooked over a flame, and you'd flip it around so both sides got toasty, but basically the iron would cut the crust off and seal it so it was almost like a pie, and the combination of ingredients that they threw in there, which included like cheese and mushrooms and green onions and sesame seeds and various herbs and spices. It was just a really great taste combination. Loved the baked potatoes, the cinnamon buns, they had great cinnamon buns, red cheese and sausage. They baked bread and they'd get a big hunk of freshly baked, you know, whole wheat bread with a big chunk of fresh cheese and a wonderful sausage that you could just walk around the fair and eat. You know, it was like canned food. Churros, I was introduced to churros at the fair, and I'm pretty sure that fair started the whole churros trend in Southern California because we never saw churros anywhere else. No matter where else we went, they didn't have them at Disneyland. I didn't see them at county fairs. We had them at fair and they used to make them fresh at the fair. He would be extruding them out of his dough machine into the hot oil and then coating them with the cinnamon sugar right in front of your nose so you could smell it. You could taste it. It was great. So all those are all the things that I remember as a kid. They used to do a lemon. You get like three quarters of a lemon where they cut the top off and they put a candy stick inside the lemon. So you'd suck up the lemon juice through the candy stick. I don't remember what they call that, but they were fabulous, especially on a hot day because you'd have a mint stick with the lemon juice and it was so refreshing to suck on that all day. There was some stuff that they used to serve to us, the people who were staying at fair who camped over. They called it rotten pot. I don't know why it was called rotten pot. I'm sure it didn't mean rotten like bad, but it was probably something German. What was odd about rotten pot was it was really kind of a Mexican thing. It was like an egg for tata that had salsa in it and tortilla chips and other stuff. It was just like a really great breakfast item that you could get. It was a great combination of flavors and I try to recreate that now at my house, but when I make it at my house, it's more of an egg scramble with stuff in it. It's not really the face of cut it into squares and serve it to you that way, get home. I've never really been able to capture the exact way I remember it from back then when I was a kid. Did you have siblings with you out at the fair? I had one sibling. He was a younger brother, two and a half years younger and he was there for most of my early fair years. He stopped going when he went away to college. So you're 10 going out to fair. Did your mom put you to work being adorable and talking a little bit in the front of your body? Yeah, we hopped in front of the booth. What she did was, I don't know if you remember the times when they used to have an embroidery tapestry where the customers could come up and well, before they did the embroidery tapestry, my mother did, since she was making tapestry, she had a demonstration frame set up with the actual tool that she used to make hooked rugs and she would let people practice with it. So we would hawk and ask them to come over and try it. Once they saw how easy it was to create the tapestry, she would be able to, she wasn't just selling the finished product. She was selling the tools and the frames and anything you needed to make it yourself. So we wanted to demonstrate to them how you made it and we would ask them to put a penny in a basket that we had underneath there so that we could count how many people had come that day to add to the tapestry. And most people would put a penny in to keep track. So me and my brother were doing the hawking and my brother took hawking so seriously that later on they were having a hawking competition. So he entered the hawking competition. We didn't realize that it was a show and that they were trying to do a fake hawking competition. But he did such a good job hawking they gave him a prize anyway. So he was a really good boss. You remember what you typically, as an adorable 10, 11, 13-year-old, would say to customers to entice them to embroider? I can't. My brain is such at the point that I cannot remember what we said. We had our pat, you know, things that we would say all the time. I do remember my first costume was my mother's old nightgown with a bodice over it and that my brother and I indulged in a who could kick higher contest. And I learned the sad truth that you can't kick in a skirt that's tight. But I still have that bodice. I don't have the nightgown, but I still have the bodice sticking around. And it was like an old, my mother's family came from Poland. So the bodice that we had for the fair was an old traditional Polish dress bodice that she had that was just black velvet with embroidery on it. And that's what we used for the initial fair costume along with a straw hat. So what class were you going for? My mother would say that we were just merchant class and they weren't really worried about classes so much anymore. Right now that would be sort of a peasant except the bodice was made of belt. You probably say lower middle class upper peasants. You're going to try to put it into our current versions of things. Their ideas of costuming back in the 60s are not the same as what we think of now. Very, very different. When I made my first costume that was mine that I wasn't using bits and pieces of my mother's costume, I made a quote unquote middle class dress. I had the whole bodice and an open-funded skirt that looks like the nobles. But what I didn't have was a hoop, had a bum roll, the whole thing. Very similar to what I wear now just without the hoop because I didn't know about hoops. I didn't realize how you made the skirt stick out like that. And I used a bowler hat as the basis for my hat because a lot of people were using bowler hats and putting different bands around them and adding feathers. I remember you. I'm very bad with colors but it was like magenta. Yeah, I did a lot of reds and blues. I tend to switch back and forth between red and blue but my very first one that I made for myself was blue. And then I had one made by Janet Winter made my first really professionally made costume and it was brown. It was brown and rust. She went for earth tones because they were trying to go away from some of the more gaudy colors. So when I made my first one it was blue corduroy. She made me one that was as I said brown and rust with black and yellow highlights. And when I say yellow it's more like a creamy yellow. It's just vaguely yellow. And it was based on a portrait of the Spanish and Fanta but toned down to be more middle class. I like the Spanish style colors. You'll probably notice that most of the time when you see me I have the Spanish style color so that my bodice looks more like a man's doublet than a typical woman's bodice. I don't cut across here. I have a collar that comes up around my neck. So I always like those. And so I've had all my costumes with like one exception done that style since. And I usually pick the color palettes that are either in the magenta. Kind of avoid purple. Purple is my favorite color. I can't get away with wearing purple because we usually deserve that. So I get as close to purple as I can. So either the blues or the red. And you mentioned your hat. I remember you had your own distinctive. Yeah, it was a flat cap style. So it had the flat cap brim. So the flat brim that went all around. I thought of it as my mad hatter hat. It came from the the crown. It kind of went out at an angle and then flattened at the top. That was the hat that the fair had made for me. Not a style I generally would have chosen for myself. And I had that hat for a while. And then the next time somebody made me a hat they made me another one like that because they thought that's what I wanted. It's like no, no, I didn't pick that hat. That hat was chosen for me. I don't actually want a mad hatter hat. I like a smaller hat. So I've changed now to the more standard, the black, more velvety hat. I just had a brim. I can't have my face in the sun. I need a brim and some of these. As you grew older, what parts of the fair attracted your interest in places to hang out and things to do? Well, okay. So when I was still working as a craftsman's child, one of the things that the craftsman's children had to do because you mentioned parades at the beginning, parades became one of my things. So I had to explain. At that time, they didn't have a parade guild. What they wanted was they wanted a craftsman to be in the parade. And they said, pay craftsmen, you need to have a banner, create a banner that represents your booth and send a representative to march in what they called the call of the fair parade. Now, if you look at what the call of fair parade was back then, it was a combination of what we called the opening parade and what we call the Lord Mayor's Parade because it was the call of the fairment. It was the beginning of the day. But in a gura, the fair opened back then at 11. That parade led into the first show of the day, which was on the main stage, the Maybauer Theater. And they introduced a lot of the characters. So it was very similar to what we created as the Lord Mayor's Show later. So later on, when the fair started opening earlier, they decided to split it into two and they would have a parade to open the fair. And they would have a midday parade that was quote unquote Lord Mayor's Parade or the one that introduced all the care. The name of that show has changed over the years. In fact, I don't think either fair really does one of those shows anymore. Southern doesn't know any in-house shows anymore. Northern does a queen show that has kind of the elements of folks. But we thought of those shows as the shows that had a parade that led them into the stage. So when my mother needed a representative to be in the parade for her, she sent me and my brother, and she made a banner for her booth that had rub bits in it. And Ron Patterson used to be the one that would decide when you got to the stage after you marched all the way through the fair site with your banner, who got to be on stage during the show and who had to go away. And he would stand right at the top of the stairs at the front of the stage. And he'd say you on, you off, you on, you off. He was dressed like a jester. They called him the master of the rebel. But he was kind of, it was not really so much jester-y, but it was like a party-colored outfit that he had different kinds of fabrics and different colors on him. The way a jester might with, you know, one pattern on one side of his body and a different pattern on the other side of his body and mixed up colored types and all that kind of stuff. And so he was supposed to be arranging for the entertainment for the police. And so our goal was always to be allowed to stay on the stage, no matter how hot it was. Two or a later, by the early 70s, they realized that the craftsmen were too busy trying to sell stuff in their booths to be sending people off to be in these. And the guy that started the guild that I am now the guild master of, his real name is John Studebaker. His nom de fair was Don John de Cleese. He created a guild. He was the first person to create a guild in all of the world for Renaissance fairs since we were the first Renaissance fair. And Cuthbert was the first guild. He created the guild and its job was to be the people who would be in the parade so that the craftsmen didn't have to do it. And when they didn't have a parade for something, he created a parade to fit it. He provided the people to be in the call of a fair parade and they would carry the banners and things. He provided the people to be in the Lord Mayor's parade and he provided people to be in the Queens progress to carry the banners and to fill out the parade and make them look more entertaining than they would be if just a bunch of people walked through the street. And so when my mother stopped being a craftsman at the fair, we came back as volunteers and we got sucked into St. Audrey's at Southern. It was St. Cuthbert's at Northern, but we got sucked in and we said, "Oh, we'll do it." And our goal was to carry banners because we always started the banner for my mother and we wanted to be on stage. That was our thing. So we signed up to be in that group and we carried banners and we got on stage. And in addition to doing parade, they also did little pageants and both my brother and I were into acting. So we liked doing little pageants and a pageants like a skit, a short, you know, 10-minute show, usually based on a myth or a fable or a fairy tale or something. And we got it started into doing all the different things that the guild was doing, which included things like the little hobby horses, little fake horses that you ride on a giant, the big giant puppet. At one point, we had a dragon that we did a dragon parade and we would do parade and we would do these pigeons and that was my day. So by the time I was in high school, that's what we were doing. And I didn't take very long before I was in charge of the banners. When I was in high school, I was a flag curler. And so I became the banner captain very quickly. And from banner captain, I ended becoming the guild master down the line. But that was my thing. I just said, this is the group for me. There were no guilds before that. There were some people that tended to act together, but there was no organized group. When Don John created this organized group of people, he started a trend which led to all of the guilds that we have today. And the notion that the person who's leading the group is a guild master and how we organize around a particular task or classes is all because of him. And so I didn't. Yeah, go ahead. One of the premises of the podcast is that Bear was very unique in that it was a very much bottom up organization. I mean, you could kind of find what you wanted to do. And you just went out and did it as opposed to say a Disneyland where there was like an uber script and you were plugged into. Right. That's very true. And the guilds grew or I call them growing organically. I used to teach a class that we called the big picture. I taught it because one year there was a guild master meeting and one guild master was looking down his nose at other guilds saying, you know, your guilds are not entertaining. Your guilds just like to eat. You know, I got angry at him. Yeah, well, and then it came on the heels of people who had gone into entertainment to turn in their paperwork and said, we're going to be in St. Cuthbert's Guild and the people in the office said, we're sorry. And it's like, what's that supposed to mean? Yeah, I said, you guys don't have any idea what we do. I'm going to teach a class that explains how everybody fits into fair that it doesn't matter what you do at fair. Everything is important. And we fit into the big picture. And at that time, there was a trend for these giant pictures that had lots of little details in them for you to see. And there was a guy, he had painted a picture in this picture. He had recognizable people. You could see in the picture a recognizable character. You could say, Oh, that's David Springhorn and in his share costume or that's kelp proof, you know, doing this. And he had it on display with a magnifying glass so that you could look in there and find all the details in the picture. And I said, if you took any piece out of that picture, the picture would be diminished. And so I use that picture as an analogy for classing. Every single person who's at the fair plays an important part for the person who's in the kitchen cutting the carrot to the people who are on stage doing the show and to clean herself. We all play a part. It's always a niche for somebody at the fair, whatever it may be. So for example, my husband, he started out being in the crazy sea, but he has his degree in theater and specifically in the technical side of theater and stage management. So he's a stage manager now. He found that what he really wanted to do with himself was to be a stage manager. So at Northern, he's the main stage manager at Southern, he's just a general stage manager. He found his niche. It makes him happy being a stage manager. That's where he fit me. I started off just liking to be in the parade and doing lines in little pageants, but I'm also a manager type. I worked my way up to become the guilt master. I'm still a shy person. People don't believe me when I say that when I'm out there speaking on stage or whatever. I'm putting on a persona, but that's my niche. I found my niche. My granddaughter is not real fond of performing on stage, even though she does it well. She's got a little character that she does in the street that she really likes. You know, everybody's got their thing. So the guilds grew organically. As people realized, hey, there's a hole here that we could fill with this group and they would make a proposal to the fair or sometimes they wouldn't even make a proposal to just start doing it. And finally, I think it was like 1978 or 79. The fair decided all these everybody had to be in a group because up until that point, the fair was only broken into three main parts. There was people on stage, people in the streets and musicians. That was kind of the three categories. And they said, where guilds don't exist, we will create them and we're going to put you in them. And so they made everybody be in a guild. And it's been that way ever since. You just can't be free range anymore. I kind of feel sad that we lost the free range-ness of it all. Somebody has to always be associated with something. But I like the fact that there is a place for everybody. It was a way to organize so that you got lunch and to make sure you got drinks and that there was some sort of accountability for everybody who had a path. Right. That was basically my dim understanding of the guild structure at the time. And again, it was just a way of organizing people. But back in the day, they used to give us food tickets. And so guilds were a way of doing food ticket distribution. And then they realized that a lot of people weren't meeting with the food tickets, but they were selling them for cash to the vendors. And the vendors were using it to pay their percentage to the fair. So the fair wasn't making money. So they got rid of the food tickets. There was one year where they just gave everybody five dollar bills. You had to go and check in. That was in, I think it was the beginnings of San Bernardino. We were on one side of the lake where everybody had to go and personally check in with the entertainment staff to get their five dollar bill for lunch. Then they realized that that was crazy. And they started giving the five dollars to the guild master's tribute. And then they decided to just get rid of it altogether and just give guilds money and let the guilds decide if they wanted the money was to go to food or to other things. There's been many iterations of how volunteer has got compensated if you want to call it that are at least taken care of. It's now devolved pretty much that the guilds take care of their own. I have another question. Yeah, sure. And it's a change of topic. One of the questions I've been asking everybody is that, can you recall an instance in your non-fair working life when skills acquired at fair have been useful? Oh yeah, all the time. I don't know if you remember there was that organization called S. People would go to S and they would get like workshops. You would go to like hotels and they would lock you in the ballroom and they would teach you things, right? They were supposed to teach you confidence and help you with your self-esteem and be able to present yourself better. And I said I don't need any of those skills because I work fair. Fair taught me everything that I need to know about that stuff. Plus it taught me how to do public speaking, taught me how to be fearless on stage and to not be afraid to make an idiot of myself in front of others, which I have found to be extremely useful in my working life. It also taught me leadership skills because, you know, I, as I said, I started off being a banner captain and then ended up being a guild master. I got promoted at fair before I started getting promoted in real life, but I'm always promoted. So I always rise in whatever organization I'm in, I always rise. So it taught me organizational skills, it taught me people skills, it taught me public speaking skills, and I use them even today. And people ask me why I'm so comfortable getting up in front of a crowd and teaching people I said because I work at fair. I'm an actor. I know how to put on the persona of uncomfortable. I know how to teach because I taught workshops. I know how to project. So if the microphone goes out, you can still hear me in the room. I don't need a microphone. I learned all those skills. And I learned how to, you know, I'm not a big improv actor, but people will tell you that I'm very good when I'm in the mode, that I learned how to be extemporaneous. I told you when we started, I talk, I talk off my head. That to me is an improv skill. You know, basically, where you're going with it, but you don't know exactly what you're going to say. That's an improv skill. And I learned that as fair. Another thing I think fair did was there was a tradition of you cannot fail. And that basically you were trained, if you own but your mouth, somebody was going to support you. And I think that is a really valuable skill that you learned out at fair. Yeah, I count most of my successes in the mundane world to skills and stuff that I learned it. I remember Will Wood used to teach his meet and greet class. And he would teach you how to go and talk to somebody that you didn't know and not feel like you're overwhelmed by it. To just ask them a question that could be answered by a yes or a no. Like, are you enjoying yourself today? And people would answer that. Or are you here to see the Queen? Right. And the trick was recognizing whether or not based on their answer, whether there's somebody who wants to have a conversation with you, or whether they want you to leave them alone. Because if they gave you the quick one word answer, yes, and then kept walking, you were pretty sure this is not a person who wants to interact with you. But if they say, well, yes, I've been waiting to see the Queen for the last six months. I knew I was going to be here today. And they get all excited and they bubble and they talk to you. Now you've made a new acquaintance and you can have a conversation. And that technique can be useful in work situations where you're saying you're going to a conference and you're sitting at the lunch table. And there's people that you don't know sitting at the table with you. And you just ask them a simple yes or no question and see if they respond to you or whether they turn back to the person that they came in with and they ignore you. And I don't get offended by that because I'm so used to the interaction thing that I learned from Will Wood, basic meet and greet classes. Also, to build on that, you learn at fair like you've been on the street. There's going to be another person walking by you in 20 seconds. So either work on your whatever your opening question is or your bit. But there's going to be more people and more people than not are going to be entertained by what you're doing. Right. And the other one is that you're probably never going to see this person again. So even if you put your foot in it and you say something dumb, who cares? So just let it go and move on to the next one that comes up. I don't like improv on the spot, meaning that if they give us a class and they say, okay, you need to be funny right now. I feel I always feel like Michigan Jay Frogs. It's like he pointed at him and say, okay, dance. And he just deserves this rivet rivet. But as soon as your back is turned, he's singing, hello, my baby, hello, my honey. So if I'm walking along on the street with somebody else, there's no pressure. I can be funny as hell and I can send out the zingers and do all that stuff. But if you tell me in the class, you have to be funny right now, forget it. My head gets all tied up and not so hello. I'm going to look like an idiot whereas in the street, it's somebody I'm never going to see again. Who cares, right? Switching gears a bit. Who have been people you have worked with at the fair? Whose work you admire? Well, I've admired a number of people over the some of the actors I mentioned earlier, Don Don, who created the Guild of State Hospital. I was always very impressed by him. The fact that he came up with this idea of creating a guild, because remember, he was the first one to do it in the entire world was come up with an acting guild. Before people were doing games that had guilds, before there were guilds in every fair under the sun, he came up with the idea. So I was always very impressed by him. The actors who I saw when I first started going to the fair, which included Jay Paul Moore, who was playing, at that time he was playing Robin Hood. He went on to become the mayor. Judy Corey, who went on to be his, the mayor's wife, who was also in Commedia, Billy Scudder, David Spring Warren, all the various women who have played the queen. I've seen many a queen, so I've had the whole all of them. I think I didn't see the very very first queen, but all the rest of them I've worked with, they're always very impressive. And I interrupt for a sec. Yeah, go ahead. To me, Louisa will always sort of be the epitome of what a queen should be. I always felt like she was channeling Elizabeth of all the queens. I just felt like she had tapped into her spirit and was channeling. I think each woman who I've seen perform the queen brings a unique perspective to her. But yes, Louisa is amongst my favorites. The first one that I really saw was Julie Meredith. She was the first one who was queen for me, I like to watch the queen show, because to me, that woman was the queen. And that was two queens before Louisa. And after her, it was Peg Long, another one who didn't look a whole lot like Elizabeth. See, Louisa actually looked like Elizabeth. She had the physicality of Elizabeth. The others didn't necessarily. Our current queen at Southern has, they each embody a different aspect of the queen. Christina, of course, is embodying her as the very elegant, very refined queen. But yet, with a wicked sense of humor, you know, she can be very, very, you know that she, when you're making jokes around her, you know that she's laughing. She's just controlling it so that you can't sell. You can kind of see the smile on her face when you do something goofy. Our northern queen is Deidre Sargent. She's been doing it for a very long time. She's a more earthy queen. And Elizabeth was known for being earthy as well. Yeah, I understand why you feel that Louisa was the one. A lot of people who have been doing fair for a long time looked at her as the icon, the iconic queen. What was Peg Long's take on the queen? She was a very strong, she was older when she was playing the queen. Of course, I don't even know. Yeah, I remember I was very young then. So when Peg Long was the queen, I was in my 20s. So to me, she was probably an ancient bitty, but she was probably in her 30s. She was the entertainment director. So one of the things that was interesting about her was she was the entertainment director. At that time, there were three entertainment directors and each one had a different heart. So one of them handled the street, one of them handled the stages, and one of them kind of was the admin. Peg was kind of the overarching one with the admin. And so she was not only playing the queen, but she was our boss. So it added an extra bit or something, but she was a very strong queen. So you felt like with her, she could single-handedly defeat the Spanish Armada. She didn't need Drake. She was not a small woman. She was one of the larger women. She had a very masculine presence as a woman. I can see in my head her standing and proclaiming something on the stage with her arm upright. You know, you could hear her all the way to the back of the house and you just want to stand up and cheer. You know, she would make you want to stand up and cheer. She didn't do the Queen that long. She's the one that brought in Louisa to be queen. Louisa was her replacement. I think she was only doing it because she didn't have anybody else to it, if that makes sense. Which sort of segues into my next topic? As a guildmaster, what do you say to potential parade participants to make you want to be in your guild? What's your approach? My pitch is not that great anymore. Sadly, everybody and their brothers have stolen my pitch. So now when I say it, they think I'm stealing it. I would say we're good for families. We feed you. You don't have to be a skilled actor to be in my group. We're a very good group for newcomers who don't know what they want to do yet because you get to do a little bit of everything. Everybody else is saying that now. So it's like we're no longer in your niche because they're all saying the same thing. So I don't have a good pitch. In fact, I'm finding it's very hard to find people these days. And I think a lot of guilds are feeling that way as well. Not just me. Participation is down. Various guildmasters are trying to come up with good ways to bring people into fair. I know for us it's more like internal recruitment. Hey, people who are already in my guild go out and find people who want to be in my guild. Years past when we would have that opening day meeting and the guildmasters would get up and do their pitch. There were like lots and lots of people who were not aligned with any groups sitting in the audience listening to your pitch. Nowadays, when we have that first meeting and we're introducing ourselves, most of them are already taken. So we don't have a lot of unaligned people who don't have a home. So at one point, our guild was the designated guild for new people who didn't already have a home. They would come to me because I would give them a smattering of what it was like to work at fair, give them a good grounding, and then they could move on to their forever home, you know, have a season or two under us. And then they'd say, you know, now that I've been at fair for a year or two, I really want to be a constable. That's what I meant. It's really flipped my boat. Or I want to be a monger. I want to be a puritan. Or, you know, I really want to wear the pretty clothes and be in court and gave them the grounding that they needed in order to audition for those groups or to talk to those guildmasters and say, I want to be with you. It depends on which fair it is. Northern fair, we intermix a lot more than we do at Southern fair. Southern fair, we're more in our groups. Northern fair, we don't have as many bodies. And so people will, like one of the phase managers is in cupboards and she was a stage manager, and she's also running around being a puritan half the time. So she likes it. And the puritans needed bodies. So if she wants to be a part-time puritan, great, go be a part-time puritan. I've always had an open door policy that said, as long as you get your basic cupboard stuff done, or you keep me informed about what you're up to, you can do practically anything and be in my group. I've had people who have been cupboards and have also worked in a booth. I've had people who have been in cupboards and also spend some time in another group, or they have real jobs and they can't always be there every day. So we'll have them come in and be cupboards on the days when they can come. If they want to ask us a different tone of question, what for you is the ideal Renaissance fair parade? What does it consist of and what does it convey? Well, my favorite parade used to be Queens Progress. The old timey Queens Progress that we used to do at Southern. We do a mini version of it, Northern, but Northern isn't as big a venue where you don't have as many people. But the old-fashioned Southern Queens Progress, where we would have banners, hobby horse, giant, kelp, and German, and English military, mariners, and foolies, criers. Because I always look at the phrases being like the phrase of Disneyland, where you have your different contingents. So I want to have all the different contingents. And so that's always been my favorite parade because everybody's in it. It's like one of those things we're here to support your sovereigns. The Queens up in the chair, so we have height, we have the banners with height, we have things that are happening and everybody's excited. That's the best sign of parade. That's what makes a parade. A, the audience needs to be excited about it when it's going by, and B, the people in it needs to be in DBS. At Southern, they kind of got rid of parade. We do the opening parade and the closing parade. I think the kelp do a parade. And they walk the Queen from court's way to the horse tourney in kind of that Queens progress style, but very few groups go along. And so they've been diminished because they just don't want to deal with it anymore. And that breaks my heart. So I try to put on my parade energy into Northern, even though it's a much smaller venue. How much coordination or work does there have to be to make each component kind of fit in the larger parade? Well, there used to be a lot. It used to be very coordinated. One of the things that I used to do was to coordinate the parade and decide who went where and how we lined up, tried to give it a visual so that you know you'd have the different levels. And we've gotten far away from that now. The stage managers kind of took over how the bridge we're going to look at Northern. We can have a very tiny little closing parade or a tiny little opening parade and we can still make it exciting because it's all about the energy in the parade itself. So it's not a number. For me, I like to see at least 30 people in a parade. And I'm just picking a number kind of out of the air. We tended to have 12 of the tall fluttery banners we called them flutteries, 12 of those, two giants, six to 10 hobby horses, two what we called icons. There were boxes on sticks that were supposed to represent like reliquaries back in the day. Sometimes we have flower arches and we had a different style of banner that was not the fluttery ones but a crossbar. So the ones where the banner pole is like a key and the banner is hanging across the crossbar that would represent a variety of things including different types of crafts, etc. And there were times when I was able just out of my own group to have enough people to carry all that stuff in one parade. So we're talking 50 people just cut a northern. We don't have that many a southern. We probably have 70 all-fold but they're never all there at the same time. And that's not even counting the other group that would be involved in a parade like the nobles and the choirs and everybody else that would be in between all of that stuff. But those kind of parade, I mean, think about your Disney parade. You have floats and you have people running around in the middle and you have people dancing and you have all the different stuff. That's what makes a good parade. And I remember one year, I think we were still in San Bernardino, we were trying to get into the rose parade. So we made up what our parade contingent would look like at the rose parade. And it had horses because for the rose parade you always see it has to have an equestrian thing or a float, right? So we didn't have a float. So we had the horse turning horses and we had all the stuff I just mentioned, the crossbar banners, the fluttery banners, the hobby horses, the giants, all that stuff. And there was a ton of us. And we made a video of all of us marching around up by the horse turning and we didn't get in. But that is like my ultimate parade. If you want to think about it, grand ring out is kind of what I'm talking about except we're very irreverent during grand ring out. Everybody's wearing jerky costumes and being silly. But that's what I like to see in a parade. Time was when grand ring out would take literally a half an hour to get out the gate. Once the first group got there, it would take a half an hour for all the different groups to get out the gate. So tell me a little bit more about the queen's parade like an agora. Back in agora days for queen's progress because it was such a long parade because it had different segments. So once you were in queen's progress, you were in queen's progress for like an hour or so, it would stop and you know, this group would do a little thing for the queen and then we go for a while and then this group would do a thing for the queen and we would end up on stage usually at three o'clock. So like between two and three o'clock, we were parading and it was usually during the heat of the day and Cuthberts was the only one that liked to do parade stuff. So they would ride the Cuthberts. We already had the flittery banners. So we would do those for free. But they had these other kind of banners that were not ours. They were called golfing and they were extremely heavy and awkward. They were like an L-shaped banner. So if you're holding an L upside down, the pole would go up and the banner pole that held the actual banner would go out at a right angle. And so they were cop heavy and they would lean forward. We used to get extra food tickets to carry the golf anon. Since there was no yeoman, they used to bribe the people to carry the queen in the chair. Now, if you think about it, back in those days, you were getting two food tickets a day would buy you lunch. They would bribe the chair carriers with 20 food tickets to carry the chair. They would bribe the golf anon, bearers 10 food tickets to carry a golf anon banner. So you're talking for carrying a banner for two hour parade, five times the amount of money you would get for lunch and to carry the queen in the chair. They had to wear these really dorky outfits. We called them the monkey suit. The monkey suit was called the monkey suit because it sort of looked like the flying monkeys from the Wizard of Oz. But it wasn't actually from that movie. It was from other MGM movie. I soon recall actually seeing that movie once and say, hey, those are the monkey suits. They had stripy sleeves. I think I still have one in a closet somewhere. So you had to get into the monkey suit in order to carry the queen. And they were hot and they were like made out of polyester. They didn't breathe. It wasn't all treatment of light. I'm not trying to pretend like falling to good old days in the burrow. One of the questions I ask and I don't know if it's if it's not applicable to you, feel free to say this is not applicable to me. Okay, I usually ask people sort of who were your mentors at Fair? What were ideas that you got from them? But it sounds to me like you just had your parade and you kind of did a voyage of self-discovery on what made a good parade? Yeah, kind of. I mean, you could say that Don Don was a mentor and the second-gilled mess, her name was Roseanne Reynolds. She was also a mentor. But they weren't really mentors. They were just examples that you could strive towards, you know, being like them. A mentor actually helps you. So I like to think of myself as a mentor because we were the first guild and there weren't any other guilds. I didn't have any guildmaster mentors who taught me how to be a guildmaster. I was not the one that they originally wanted to take over when the second guildmaster left. I was the third choice. But I said, I'll do it because I had been being the banner captain. So I didn't really have any fair mentors for that kind of stuff. I blazed the trail. Me and Don John and Roseanne, we blazed the trail of what it meant to be a guildmaster. So yeah, it was a voyage of self-discovery. I had mentors in terms of peers. As people came up and started doing guildmastering, you could talk to other guildmasters and say, how would you handle such a situation? We would have guildmasters meeting where the entertainment staff would have us come all together and meet. And we would bring up stuff. And so it was more like that. More of a peer to peer type of mentorship than a strictly like a master or apprentice type of mentorship. What was your sense of Phyllis as sort of the head of the fair? She was extremely creative. And as many creative people can be, she had her moods. She could be moody. I was always pretty thankful that she had created this wonderful playground for us. And one of the things I was explaining to people is you may not always like what the policies are or what they come up with, but she created this playground for us to play in. She gets to decide how it's going to be. And you have two choices. You either play along with the way she wants it to be, or you can go play somewhere else. So I was always supported that way. She and I had a period of time where she was mad at me. And it was very hard on me. Because when you're a guildmaster trying to do stuff, if the ultimate boss is fit that you, it does not make your life easy. But ultimately, we got over. And so, no one will ever say anything negative about Phyllis, but I did have my moments work. What did you discern from her? What was her philosophy behind the Renaissance fair? Well, you know, I think first and foremost, she was an educator. She came from an education background. And so she wanted students to learn stuff. So when she first started doing this, at least in my understanding, it was to bring kids in so they could learn about the period in an interactive setting, you know, and that was the idea. And it kind of took off from there. And so I know that she was always very focused on making it historically accurate. You know, she had the Living History Center, which was supposed to be creating a historically accurate parts for people to come and see museum quality. And a lot of that stuff never actually came to fruition partially because of money and other issues. But I always feel like in her heart of heart, she wanted it to be historically accurate as much as you could make it and still have a viable fair that the customers would come to. I mean, we can't be so historically accurate that we have plague victims or sewage running to the middle of the street or water that will kill you. So I think she struck a good balance between theatricality and historical accuracy. And so I really respected that about her. She was a visionary. I'll just put it that way. Her vision was always really good. The way I have chosen to interpret it is that it's rather amazing how much of what Phyllis and Ron and Judy Corey and those people were doing in 1962 or so three or whatever it was has managed to survive. And there are people doing fairs today who have never heard of Phyllis Patterson or Agura. And they're going to a fair where the queen is coming. It's market day and people are here to have fun. And, you know, God saved the queen. Yeah. Well, and, you know, the sad part is that the history is getting lost. I mean, there's that that show, that reality show about the Texas guy. Yeah. Yeah. And he's claiming that they're the first fair. It's like they're not the first fair. That's bullshit. The Southern's the first fair. But that what's amazing to me again about Phyllis and Ron and Judy in 1963 is that they could go to a fair today and pretty much figure out the contours of what's going on. Judy Corey still comes to fair. Right. And what I mean is that you talked to something about it or growing organically. And so what they started has replicated itself just through sort of a folk tradition of this is how it's done. And then people tell other people and their kids and now you have three or four or five generations of fair people who just, you know, put on the brown corduroy and doff their caps and, you know. Off they go. Well, it's like my family, I think, is the first genuine four generation families where all four generations were fair. And my mother, she started as a craft person and brought us in. But every other member of my family was born into it. So two more generations. So we had a genuinely four generation fair now. Phyllis's great-grandchild finally been born. So they now have a fourth generation. But they don't do rent fair. They do tickets. And there are families that have four generations, but they came to it later if that makes sense. I'm trying to make a distinction that my family was all born into it except me and my mother, as I said, it predated us. But my children and their children have all been born into it. And it's become our thing. And I don't think any of the fair can claim that. It kind of goes along the tradition of circus and other kind of performing things where families are going from generation to generation and continuing on with the tradition. And yes, I agree with your the thing that it's amazing that these things are still going. And they all started because Phyllis had had this idea. It's great. Let me ask you one other thing. Give me a counterfactual of what your life would have been like if you had never heard of the Renaissance fair? It's a very interesting question. I, you know, I can't tell you what it really would have been because, you know, who knows what it really would have been. But I think I probably would have gone to a different college. I probably would have had different jobs. I don't think I would be as successful. I wouldn't have met the people that I met that created my family, but my family would be very different. What do you think your career path would have been? I don't know. If I'd gone to a different college, one of the reasons I picked when I went to college, I went to college in California. I went to college in Northern California because guess what? There was a fair in Northern California. I could have gone to college on the East Coast, in which case, I wouldn't have been going to fair because there wasn't the robust fair thing going. What I say is wherever there's no Renaissance fair, there's an SBA at vice-vers. So I probably would have broken from fair at that point and not continue. But I never did break from fair. Where did you go? I started off at UC Burke. I didn't stay there. I also gave up on the Renaissance and Reformation England when I realized that it was going to require a thesis, which I did not wish to write. I didn't consider myself a writer of educational essays or thesis. Are you familiar with the film Spinal Tap? There's a scene where, kind of like this, I'm inviting you to, or the character was invited to imagine himself in another career, and he imagines himself selling shoes. Have you ever had odd thought that, you know, I could have probably been a great fill in the blank. Well, you know, later in life, I went to law school in the family. I think perhaps I might have gone to law school earlier and become a different kind of, because I was always interested in law. That was another area of interest. I waited until I was old to go to law school and ask a career that spanned many, many years in a particular area. So I think a lot of my choices have been because of fair, and I really don't know what the other choices would have been. It's hard for me to imagine doing something different. Can I ask what kind of lawyer you turned out to be? I'm a workers' comp lawyer, and the reason I'm a workers' comp lawyer is because when I was in my 30s, I started working for the state as a claims adjuster and workers' comp. And progressed through various jobs dealing with workers' comp from that point onward. And I had already been interested in being a lawyer at previous jobs that I had, but I had two small children. So going to law school was not really in the cards. It took the advent of online law school in a 15-year career with state to allow me to take the time to go to law. And so I just went to the quickest, dirtiest, cheapest law school I could go to so I could become a lawyer and continue working in workers' comp. So that's what I wanted to do. And I currently working as an attorney for an individual workers' comp with data. So it was just another hoop to jump through to get to the next stage. Yes, and I did leave the state for a while to do lawyering outside of doing workers' comp, but in different areas, not just in the regulatory setting, but the ultimate goal of coming back to the division of workers' comp doing something before I retired. So I'm back and handing down the time to reflect. Well, I'm kind of running out of things to say. When you were kind enough to say yes to this interview, was there something that you said to yourself, I have to be sure to mention X, Y, and Z. So this is your opportunity to say, oh, yeah, I want to mention X, Y, or Z. Okay. One thing that we've noticed on people is when they come to fair as customers, that if they're truly one of us, because there are many of them out there, once they arrive at the fair, their fair gene activates, we've made jokes about what triggers the fair gene to activate to be the smell of a turo or turkey leg, some combination of scents and heat, whatever it is, but that it causes to activate. So if any of the people who are listening to this are customer types who come in, and you really feel like you belong to fair and you want to come and work, believe me, there are Brazilian groups that would take you in very gladly, and we'd love to have you, because we want to keep this going. Ignore all nonsense that you hear about fair people being any kind of negative comment that you've heard of fair people being. Most of us are average folks who carry a regular job during the week. The only odd thing about us is that we like to do fair on weekends. So instead of being a soccer mom, I'm a ren fair mom, what can I say? We tend to be intelligent, we tend to be creative, we tend to be well read, and know a lot of historical stuff. And if that suits you, you'd fit right in, and you'd be very welcome. So we'd love to see you, because we want to keep it going. And it's great for families, it really is great for families. As I said, I'm four generations, my mother has passed on, but now I'm the matriarch, and I've got me and my kids and my grandkids are all doing fair, and I suspect that when my grandkids start having kids that they'll probably do fair too. And we're all involved in it in one way or another. Each member of my family has found their niche. We don't all do the same stuff. There's something for everybody. And so we'd like you to come and join us. There's a lot of people who found their chosen family to come and be at fair. And many of us were very welcoming, and we welcome diversity and differences in people. And we're very supportive of all those different. So that's kind of my two cents of what I would want people to know. I think that makes a wonderful place to draw this to a close. Great. Thank you. Thanks for inviting me to speak with you today. All right, welcome. Let me push the stop recording button. Where did that go? Oh, pause, stop recording. That's my July 2024 interview with Sue Honor. I'm Dan McLaughlin. If you have questions or comments you want me to pass along to Sue, you can email me at djng@earthlink.net. Questions or comments about the podcast themselves can also be emailed to me at djng@earthlink.net. Finally, if you or somebody you know would like to be a guest on Fair Folk at Work, please email me at djng@earthlink.net. But that's it for this time. Thanks for listening. Bye-bye. Or bye-bye, bye-bye!