Faire Folk at Work

Laurie Sullivan

Ever how much thought and effort in being made the person standing at the edge of the stage, interpretating the show for the deaf people? Ever wonder how such treasured Elizabeathan "jests" such as, "Say where does Julius Ceasaer keep his Armies?" get made into ASL? And "Where by the Mizzen mast?" All that and more are revealed herein.

Oh, up his sleevies.

Duration:: 54m
Broadcast on:: 07 Jul 2024
Audio Format:: mp3

Welcome to another episode of Fair Folk at Work. You know, when you think about it, the Renaissance Fair is kind of like you take 21st century people, you try to make them 16th century, and then they have to kind of translate it back to a modern audience. And if you're an interpreter, it's probably a little harder because you don't have all the singing and dancing in General Baruahaha. My guest today is one of the long-time interpreters at the Renaissance Fair, Lori Sullivan. Hey, Lori, how's it going? Hi, Dan. It's going great. Thanks for having me. But before we get to that, I'd like to ask you the traditional Fair Folk at Work first question, which is, who was the person who told you there was that sing called Fair? And what did they say to get you out there? The person who brought me into Fair is John King. John King is a fabulous human being. He worked at Fellowship Foundry to start with, as well as he was one of the mongers when I first started. I first started in 1988. I worked with him in the real world. He and a couple of other guys worked with him also did Fair, and they were telling me all about it, and I was like, "Oh, well, that sounds like fun." And so I got in for the first time working at Fellowship Foundry for my first two years. Did you have a previous theatrical experience? Not really. At that point, it was more of just trying to figure out what was going on. I was still in my site language classes and my interpreting classes at Pierce College at the time, and I had met a couple of people that had mentioned something about interpreting at Fair, but it just went by the wayside, and I didn't even really remember it until my friend John that he worked there, and that if I was interested, he could get me a job working at Fellowship Foundry. So I did do that for two years until I finished my interpreting program, and I started interpreting at Fair in 1990. So you came to interpreting before you came to Fair? I was in the interpreting program when I first started working Fair, so I was not yet a working interpreter, so I was not yet working at Fair as an interpreter when I first started. What drew you to interpreting in the first place? Well, I learned how to do finger spelling when I was eight years old, and I was always fascinated by it. My aunt said any time I saw anybody signing, I would stop whatever it was I was doing and just stare at them, which by the way is rude if you know sign language. I just fell in love with it. I was very fortunate in the college that I went to. I went to Pierce College, and they had an interpreter training program, but before that, my high school had a mainstream program where deaf students were a part of the regular hearing classes. They would go in with interpreters, and so my high school had that. So I was always fascinated at that time, and then when I went into college, I liked doing theater stuff at that time. I had done a few little itty-bitty things like in high school, but nothing major until I really started interpreting, and that's when my acting ability was improved by my interpreting, because I could become someone else and have no worries about it. It didn't matter who that person was. I could become them with no repercussions. I'm going to make an assumption here that you didn't have to memorize your lines because they were actually being said by somebody else who's responsible for getting them right. It depends on what it is. So every day, as a sign language interpreter, we go into situations where we do not get the information ahead of time, and we have to do it cold to do it right now. When there's a script or if there's music and we have access to that in advance, it makes our interpretation better, because we have time to practice, we have time to think about what things mean, how we might want to sign them. So having a script beforehand is always beneficial, but we don't always get that at fair because not every show is a house show. Some shows are traveling shows. So the more often we can do their show, the better we get at it each time. Doing that really helps our processing time. So the way that things work with languages and interpreting languages is always a little bit of time. That's called the lab time. So from what is said to what is signed as a little bit of gap of time, because we have to think about it. So our audience now has reaction time. They have the ability to laugh at the right timing, just like a hearing person would. So if there's that lag time, but we're still giving all the information, the deaf person might laugh after the hearing person. We try to avoid that as much as we can. We want them to have the same reactions at the same time, having a script helps. I immediately have about 10 questions. I mean, I've been in on fair shows where I have had interpreters. But first, let me get the really inconsequential question. Where did you go to high school? I went to Birmingham High School, which is now a charter school. I live in San Fernando Valley at the time. And then I went to all of my sign language classes at Pierce. And then my first job, other than Renaissance Fair, was at El Camino College. What did mom and dad think when you said signing is going to be my career, and my first job is out at the Renaissance Fair? Yeah, well, you know what? My parents got divorced when I was two. So I've always had a very strong role model with my mom. She's always encouraged me to follow my passions and to do what it is that I wanted to do. And once I realized that I wanted to involve sign language in whatever it was, she was just very encouraging. She paid for my schooling as long as I was willing to work and help pay for a few other things. And I kept the grades. She was willing to help me in that regard as well. My dad wasn't a ton in the picture, but he was always very encouraging. When I first started interpreting at the Renaissance Fair was in Dvor. And he lived up in Big Bear. So I would go up the hill and stay with him, go back down the hill to work, go back up. So he was always encouraging in that way. When my mom was always encouraging with whatever it was that I wanted to do, I could do it as long as it didn't hurt anybody else. Before fair, and you were doing theatrical things, were you typecast in any particular way? I don't think so. Because I didn't do a ton of acting before I started interpreting. And for a really long time, I didn't do any acting while that was interpreting either. But I did start acting right before the COVID lockdown a couple of years. I did some acting at fair. I was a theme character. I stopped interpreting, and that was crazy. But it really helped me a lot to be able to become someone else. What was your theme character? So my theme character, I was related to the mayor, and she's a made up character. Her name is Calanthea Tander. She's as difficult as her name is. She is basically the Susan Leche of Porte Fert. She is always thinks she's the best at everything and always loses every competition. And she is related to the mayor. My sister is married to his brother, the sheriff. And then they got sent off to Nottingham for tax evasion, and now he's taking care of me. Well, it's nice that you have built in competence to always fall back on. Exactly. I was going to ask these questions later. But how do you deal with sort of puns? Because like we had a joke that we often inflicted on the interpreters. Like, where does Julius Caesar keep his armies? Answer up his sleeve, yes. How do you sort of in the timing of that, an audience has to visualize Julius Caesar, and then has to go to armies as in a general and his armies, and then go to somebody just pulling the sleeve up their arm? Yeah, you know, that's another one of those things if we have the script. We can practice ahead of time, figure out what it means, what it looks like, what's going to be the best visual equivalent to the funny part of the hearing, of the words. If we don't have information beforehand, we just do our best. And everyone would possibly do something different. But once we know the line, usually what we would do is everyone who has been assigned to that show or potentially could be assigned to that show, we would get together and have a meeting and start discussing sign choices. Could you describe to me how you would do armies and sleeve ease? And Julius Caesar for that matter. So Julius Caesar has a name sign we would do as long as it's in context of the timeframe. We would probably spell his name first, and then we would use JC as his name sign. And then, but it also could mean Jesus Christ if you used it in that context. So that's where you have to set up context. Say JC, then you would say, do the sign for army. And then you could change it up and play around like this is something I haven't thought about before in a long, long time. So how would I do it? I would say armies and then, or sign armies and then I could show my arms as an equivalent and then roll up my sleeves. And then you can do the sign that would like show a whole bunch of people coming out of their sleeve onto their arm. So there's a variety of ways that it could be done. That would be one way. I am impressed. Let me give you another one. Okay. It's what a pirate would say. He goes, our, our, we're be the Mizen mast. The other person goes, I don't know, it be Mizen. Okay, so the way that this one would work for me is I would do similar hand shapes. That's one way to rhyme in ASL. You can have movement of signs be the same or similar. You can have hand shapes of signs be the same. Those are different techniques in rhyming. And this is a type of rhyming scheme. So what I would do is set up the mast. It doesn't matter that it's a Mizen mast, because then it would change into a sign for missing or disappeared because the hand shape would start the same and then you would add a second hand and then just have it be gone. So that is one way that I would probably choose to do that phrase. How about just generic phrases like, are Nicky new, are Nicky new or? So anything that is like a gibberish word, there is a sign for gibberish and that's probably what we would sign. It's basically taking your two index fingers, putting one in front of the other directly in front of your mouth and then crooking your fingers back and forth. That means gibberish. And it could also be playing the clarinet? Not necessarily because the clarinet bend would be actually the way that you would play the instrument. I see. Okay. So that's what's called an instrument classifier. English doesn't have classifiers, but I believe Chinese characters have what's called a classifier. There are words that are or in this case specific hand shapes that are used to add meaning to a verb or a noun, those kinds of things. So I would use classifiers a lot to show the kinds of things that I wanted to talk about. I just want to give you a quick reaction to Julius Caesar and his armies and sleeves. For those of you who can't see my guest today, she took her fingers and ran them down her forearm. And it was just brilliant because she became the armies coming out of the sleeves and it just actually reinforced the joke. So I actually made up a really dumb death pirate joke, if you're interested. Oh, please. Okay. So you know how we always do the little miniature R with the crypt figure for a pirate, right? Because it's for the hook. Well, actually, that is the letter X. Okay. If you cross your fingers, that's the letter R. Okay. So that's a little background. If you don't know the letters. So here's my dumb death pirate joke. Death pirates don't say X, they say R. There you go. There are some shows and I've been in them that you sort of play with the interpreter. You say some incredibly tongue twisty absurdist. Is that fun for you? It is for me, I enjoy it, not every interpreter does. Now, most of the time, especially at fair, interpreters and the actors, when they're playing together have already arranged it, we know that we're going to be playing together at minimum. We might not know what it is, but we do know that there's going to be interaction between us. All right. That's a minimum communication that we must have with the actors. Right. And then if you guys want to actually make something that looks, you know, not rehearsed, you can rehearse it and have it go like that, but interpreters can never just interject, can never play around, never react unless the actor has invited it. So that's why beforehand, we must have that interaction because normally as an interpreter, they're there to facilitate communication, to give all of the information that is being given to the hearing people so that they have equal access to it. So if they weren't there, technically we wouldn't be there either. How do you deal with, and this is somewhat related, I was talking to Laura Gregory, my last interview, and she said Linda Underhill had a very, very period choral group, but she would slip in incongruous, like they'd be singing about, you know, bass ale, bass ale, wonderful bass ale, but then she'd say, it's better than Guinness. So how do you do that? So in music, now I used to interpret for the Mary Emergence, which was Linda Underhill's group. I loved them. That was, and then they became siren song after that. So I got a lot of experience doing music with her group. There was lots of things like that. So there's a variety of things that are going on in regards to your specific question. Anything that is a name brand, most of the time is going to be spelled out. We don't have time to spell out names, but we don't have time to spell out Guinness. We don't have time to necessarily do this to spell out bass ale. So we would set up a sign. So bass ale is lighter than Guinness, Guinness is darker. So we would say light beer is better than dark beer. Okay. So that's one way you can do it. That's the main point of what you're asking about. So we would need to condense these. Is there a sign for like parenthetical aside here? Yes and no, it's actually a grammatical feature that we would do. It's called roll shifting or contrastive structure where we turn our body to become somebody else or to compare or contrast two different things. So if we're talking about something here and something here, something here or something here, we use once or not go toward non-dominant side then to our dominant side to do these comparing and contrasting. We also do that with, we can do up to eight people. It's really hard to keep track of with eight people, but it's doable, but it's hard. So there's certain grammatical features within ASL that would help us to accomplish that. Theatrically, if there's just like one person on stage miming or do you like turn and give your focus to the person being the mime or you just fold your hands and look out into the audience until somebody says something. So your question is in regards to something that's really important as a grammatical feature in American Sign Language and that's I-Gaze. Where we look is where the deaf person is going to be looking. Because where the interpreter is looking, that is going to be guiding their attention. So if there's action going on, if there's just music playing, if there's just miming, if there's no words at all, we will always turn and look and watch what's going on on stage so that they know that's what they should be looking. Well, that makes sense. I'm going to change my focus a little bit here and talk more about signing at the fair. And it seemed to me that fair had interpreters long before I noticed them anyplace else. And there seemed to be an institutional commitment to signing. Is that a true assumption? And am I- so can you explain how the fair decided to be a proponent of American Sign Language? Mm hmm. Absolutely. So in the 80s is when the Guildmaster's Fund was developed. And I believe as Jim Kahlo was in charge of the Guildmaster's Fund at the time, he used his own money to provide interpreters and docents to the fair. Wow. And set up the Living History Center, I believe. I could be wrong on that one. So you guys were making thousands and thousands of dollars a day as an interpreter? Don't we wish? Don't we wish? No. One of the things about fairs is they get a lot of volunteers to make the whole thing go. There's not that many people that get paid at fairs these days unless they're a contract acts. Any- most of the guilds get like a stipend. We were one of the guilds. When I first started, not everybody got paid. Right. My Guildmaster gave me her daily stipend of $25 a day. So yeah. We were making the big bucks then. This was 1990, my first year interpreting it fair. And we, not very many people got even that $25. Let me go back a bit. I'm sorry to interrupt. What was his name, the guy who Jim? I believe it was Jim Collub, a- a- h- l- o, I'm not sure. I can find out for sure. I'm so terrible with names. Do you know what was Jim's reason for wanting interpreters to be at the fair? I don't know. And I wasn't there at the beginning. I believe Chris Bartley Williams was there at the beginning along with her mother, Sue Diamond Booker. Unfortunately, we have lost Sue since then. We lost her a few years ago. She was one of my mentors. I love her to pieces. Do you remember the first show that you signed? First show I signed. Ooh, I don't. But I do remember several of the shows that I did sign. I signed Pipe Powder Court because John King was a part of Pipe Powder Court. And I would go when I wasn't interpreting it and watch his show every day for lunch. And then when I knew I wanted to sign it, as soon as I was ready to start interpreting, I did what I called a challenge show, Dr. Faustus, that was tough. That was a hard one for a very baby beginner interpreter. But they saw something in me and said, "Go do it." I did once or twice a taming of the shrew. Billy Campbell was there, so I got pissed by Billy Campbell. Did you ever go out in the street and just sort of randomly interpret who have interactions with individual patrons walking around? Absolutely. We did offer that as a service, as part of our guild service. We put people in the information booths so that there was an interpreter there. If the person had information questions, we offered to shop with the deaf person so that they could talk to any of the shopkeepers. If I saw deaf people around, while I was out and about, I would make sure to engage them. Just like we do with our hearing guests. Do you have a fair character that you would play with patrons as? Not until my character really developed a little bit later. Not Calanthea. She was my acting character, but my regular fair character, I dressed up like a cow. My fair name is Moosterous Brow Cow Heifer Wise One. Every once in a while, I will go out as her and make sure that if I see deaf people, I engage them always. Do you incorporate sign language when you're talking to a speaking person who doesn't need the sign language to communicate? Yes and no. If there are deaf people around, then yes, I will sign and talk at the same time. Would you talk and sign at the same time to a person who is not necessarily dependent on your signing? No, not normally. I do use my hands a lot, but unless they know sign language, I probably don't sign much. Once in a while, I'll sign a sign and they'll go, "What was that?" Where do you work outside of fair? I work at San Bernardino Valley College, I coordinate the interpreters and I'm an advocate for the deaf students and I've been here for just over 10 years. Have there been times when you, in your faculty role, use fair experiences to help make your point? Yes. So not only do I coordinate the interpreters here, but I also teach American sign language here and I have used pictures of fair characters in my classes to have my students describe them in sign language. Which pictures I'm thinking of, "Commedia," kind of characters and photos? Fully in particular, who has a lot of colors on her skirts, I've used a bunch of times. I think fair is a great way to get people thinking in a different way and to help encourage people to see things that they normally might not see. Well, let me ask you, how would you use sign language to describe Arlequino? So Arlequino's fun, depending on which mask you're using for Arlequino. Normally, what you do is you start with gender, if that matters, and then you would start describing them from head to toe. You start with hair color, eye color, what they're dressed like, and then any accessories. So if Arlequino is using a mask that is the big fat nose, that might be his name signs for the show. We might use his mask or a physical feature to say who he is. Say you're describing Panaloni. Do you mention he's supposed to be a miser or a querulous old man, or when you're describing him from head to toe and he's hunched over and he's doing this bit. How much do you interpret, how much do you tell, and how much do you let the audience figure out? Well, if it's obvious and you can see any characteristic, we let them see it. So, with this kind of a character, hopefully they have some background already. These characters are very famous and run us on time, so hopefully they know a little bit. If not, Panaloni shows his stripes early on always. You know he's a miser. I don't have to say he's a miser, he's always like him. So we show that on our face. Okay, we show the open mouth and that whole like scrunched in behavior, that's mimicking who he is as a human. We don't have to say that he's miserly. He shows himself. And I suppose you don't have to say she's the queen when she steps forward. Well, we do sometimes it depends. We do the full introduction as it is given. Our demeanor changes. Our posture changes depending on who it is that we're interpreting for. So once we become the queen, we are now standing up tall. We are regal. We are looking down our nose potentially. We mimic the actor that we are interpreting for, which is why it's really good to be able to watch some of the shows beforehand so we can see how they behave, how they act, how they move. And then we can mimic that and that helps the deaf person know who's talking. And so if there's a scene where the queen and the Spanish ambassador are going back and forth, you are sort of the stumpy little squeak guy and then you're the tall regal queen kind of thing back and forth. So she would look down on him. He would look up on her. We would be whichever side of the stage that they're standing on. He would turn in the direction that they would be facing as well. Whichever way they're cheating out, that's the way that our rule shift would stand. So if the queen was standing on the right, when you're looking out at the audience, standing on the right side of the stage, I would turn in the direction more toward my left because that's the way she would also be looking. And then so we would take the same positions that they're standing in. And then you just hope it doesn't get above eight people in the scene with lines. You know, when there's that many, it's hard. I mean, four is hard enough. Get up to eight and it's really tough. So we tend not to. We just go back and forth and hope that they can follow. There are the lines that are like, give us a lusty cheer hip, hip, huzzah, hip, huzzah. Can you do those just pretty much as they happen? Where the audience is supposed to go, huzzah or whatever. Well, the huzzah that we do is the same as the clapping, you know, the jazz hands type thing. So we do hip hip is encourage, encourage, and then celebrate huzzah. That's how we did hip hip, huzzah. Have you worked other fairs? Yes. I currently work Northern fair. I am the interpreter liaison for Northern. There are two of us at the moment. I'm about to actually switch over to another position this year. I'm going to be assistant to the entertainment director. So I'm looking for another interpreter to take my place. So if anybody out there is listening and you're interested, yep. Have you ever done a sort of non-Patterson-derived show? I did slow one year with the Poxy Bogards. I was their main interpreter for many years until I stopped interpreting at Southern fair. Just finished doing Corona Burke. We just, for the first time ever, had interpreters there this year is really exciting to be able to have that happen. The larger question I'm getting to is, did you notice that there are any variations in signing styles between fairs that you visited? So there's always going to be regional differences. Just like there are regional accents or regional words that are used in certain spaces, those kinds of jargon and sign choices can change depending on where you're located in the United States as well. For the most part, because what we do is rooted in the past, we tend to be more on the formal side of signs, but regional signs will still sneak in. I want to go back to the question of have you used fair experiences in your day-to-day job? Other than using pictures as educational aid, have there been times when the experience of doing something in public at fair has given you the confidence of something to do at work? Yeah, I think that fair, because the nature of fair and being on stage, having that many people watching you, doing something that is different, really helps and translates into the real world. It helps your confidence no matter what, because you're like, "Okay, I can do that there in front of 200 people, why can't I do this in front of two?" Being able to have your brain translate what you're doing at fair into the real world, I think is going to help no matter what it is that you do. It's going to help you take being in a fake environment where you're safe. You know what you're doing in that fake, safe environment. Why can't you do that in potentially unsafe environment and still accomplish your goal? You should be able to, and I think fair really helped me to be able to do that. The other thing that fair can do is that there are so many things you have to do right after the other. I mean, if you semi-screw up one thing, there's going to be another bunch of people coming down the road in two minutes, and so you just do it again. It's an entirely different person who knows nothing about you, except you're, in my case, trying to sell them swampland in Scotland or whatever it is, and there are they going to be amused or move on, and either way, you just keep going. Yeah. You know, I had a student from an interpreting program that I worked with this interpreting program as a mentor, and the instructor asked me if I would take her under my wing, this one student who might not be passing her whole class. And so I took her under my wing at fair, and we picked two shows. One show was the same one every single day, and the other one was something different every single day. And what we did was we worked, especially on that one show that she did every day, and we started talking about what things she could improve on, what things she did really well. And because she got to practice that every single day of those 14 days, and she got to improve what she was doing each time, it helped her brain processing, knowing what she's supposed to do, and then how to get to the end results for goal of communicating the message, and then improving on that each time she does it. That whole process during those 14 days helped her be able to do it when she got cold information. So that processing in her brain translated out into the real world, she ended up passing her classes, and she's doing great. What basically do you like about interpreting or just acting out at the Renaissance Fair? We have the ability to affect people every day. When I was switched over to my other character to Columbia, we were doing towers tournaments, and there was a blind woman who came with her attendant, and I started explaining to her about the game, and what it was like, and what they had to do, and the rules and all this stuff. And her attendant was just like so happy because she got a second to herself. I took over with helping this lovely person to understand what it was that we were doing. Now she had a whole different view of one more thing at fair, but she had no idea what it was. And we all have the ability to do that for every single customer, hearing, deaf, blind, sighted, whatever they have going on in their lives. We have the ability to affect change on them if we take the time. And one of the premises of this podcast is that that was something set up by Phyllis and Ron and Judy Corey and those people in like 1960, and still 60 years later, people who have never heard of the Paterson's or Agora are replicating the same thing. And in so many ways, it's such a simple idea. I mean, it's fair day. The Queen is coming. You're here to have fun and buy stuff. And everyone is welcome, and no one can fail. And I mean, with that basic premise, you can entertain a lot of people. I'd like to get back to something I talked about earlier, but I think I skipped over it. Why not giving you time to fully answer the question? Who were other mentors in signing at fair and what you learned from them? So my main mentor was Sue Diamond Booker. She was also the person that I started working for in the real world outside of fair first at El Camino College. Sue was larger than life. She was an amazing human being. She laughed a lot. She encouraged people to just do their best and to keep learning. And I always tried to do that for her, and she actually taught me a lot about how to be a boss, how to make that line of being a boss and being a team player and where that line is and where it needs to be. I learned a lot of that from her. What she did a lot of at fair interpreting that I really wanted to do was the Dilling Wizards Show, and I absolutely loved that show. A lot of people loved that show. I loved it on a different level. I wanted to interpret that show. So that was a show that was tough. It was fast. It was funny. It was lots and lots of double entendres. And how do you make that look good to a deaf person was something that I was really interested in trying to do. So once I finally got to interpret that show, I thought I was on cloud. I knew I was on cloud nine, and I thought I was the, you know, I was it because I finally got to do that show. I wasn't it. Not at that point anyway. But it was fun. And it was something that I learned from her how I could do my best for our audience. So when you're interpreting a good show and you're doing a good job, what for you do you feel when things are going really, really well, how they got there and how does it feel? So it depends when there's deaf people in the audience or if there is or if we don't know if there's any in the audience could really change how we give our performance part. I mean, we're really confident in what we're doing in regards to the show and there are deaf people in the audience and you bring them along and they get it and they understand and they're laughing along at the right time or they're feeling what they're supposed to be feeling at the right time. We feed off of that. We see it. And it just like with the actors feeding off the audience's energy, we'll feed off of their energy too, whereas if all things being equal, we don't know any deaf people are in the audience. We might not do as well of a job. We might not give as much energy kind of thing. So because we don't have somebody to connect to, having that connection is always going to be better. It's always going to make us better. It's going to make us feel better. It's going to make us more on our toes and more ready to do what it is that we need to do, which is give the message of what's going on on stage. So have you hired interpreters for the fair? Yes. So what I've done is I, at Southern Fair, when I was in charge of the Guild, I would host auditions every year before fair started usually around February. Maybe who was already so part of the Guild, we would all meet any of the potentials, interpreters come, do interviews, we have them practice, we do a show, we read off one of the shows that we have a script for, or we'll play something off of YouTube that is a fair show so that they can do that. We do that in a fairly similar environment to fair. We do it in an open park where there's lots of noise. So they get the experience of what it might be like it fair. >> Can I interrupt for a sec? I hear your introduction, what is fair like to someone who has never been there but might want to work there? What do you say to them? >> I say, are you interested in having fun doing something different that you might not ever get to do again and being able to interpret in a place that will hurt absolutely no one if you make a mistake. >> That most people stick around after that? >> Yeah. Even if they don't stay interpreting, they'll stay in another capacity or they'll keep coming back as customers or whatever it is but yeah, they tend to want to stay. Not everybody does, because it's not everybody's thing. >> What show do you use as the sample test, you'll have to be interpreting for something like this show. Do you use like the new show or the queen show or? >> No, not those because those shows normally already have an interpreter that gets put on those. They have standard interpreters for those types of shows. One that we did Hell in Us play, the Octopus one, that was a fun one. That's to see how they play with the language. We had one of Shelby Bond and his partner and one of his previous shows before he was doing his one-man shows. There was a duel. We had his script. We've played Brian Howard's show from a video on YouTube. It just depends on if we have a script from a previous year. We might read out a script from the queen show or something like that. >> Can you tell pretty quick if there will be a yes or a no? >> Fairly quickly to have the right attitude, because as interpreters, we tend to do things alone for the most part, one or two of us and that's it. At fair, it's very different. We are a guild and we all have to participate as a guild and there's certain things within a guild that everybody has to do. You have to all clean up. You all have to keep your place nice. You can't just come and go. There's things that have to be done and if they're not a good fit for that part, that's where it usually ends up. It's not usually the part of the signing. It's usually the getting along part with the other people. >> Let me ask sort of the same question, but in a different way. I've asked about shows that you feel you've done well at. Have you ever done a show where you basically have bombed and if you have, what did you learn from your failures? >> Normally, when I bomb, it's because I'm not feeling well. >> It's 110 and you're sweating like that. >> Yeah. When I was at Cronenberg, the first three weekends were great, weather was, the last two were terrible. It wasn't there, the final one, but the weekend before that was getting hot and at a certain point, I could feel the heat taking its toll on me. It was in the middle of doing the joust and I ended up having to miss a little bit of it so I could drink some water. I have a hot at the moment, I'm about to have surgery. When that was hurting, I would have to switch my hands and use my other hands. There's things that we do to compensate. Sometimes we just need an extra beat to breathe, take a sip of water, and then continue and that's okay if we need to do that, we're here. >> I started with this question, how, and I've had this conversation a lot with musicians and dancers, it's like there's the 16th century way of doing things and there's a modern audience. What for you is the line between being accessible and being period? >> That's a little bit harder for us to do because we can't necessarily do that by telling somebody what we're doing, right? They have to be able to see it on us. So having us in costume helps a lot. There are other fairs out there that will have interpreters for like a day or a weekend and they don't dress, okay, how does that get them involved in this whole feeling? So having us dressing costume really helps them visualize what we're doing in that timeframe. We also slightly change our science because we're on stage, our science space gets a little bit bigger than it normally would be. So because of that, science tend to look a little more formal because they're bigger. So having something look like it's more formal and mimics something from the past. So when we talk about vocabulary, the queen says the and now to everybody, but we as peasants would say you to a customer or to the queen or anybody above us. That is more of the formal that you as opposed to the and that was informal. When we sign the vow and you, we sign them differently because they're a different register. So we would use the pointing for the and vow, which normally we would do for you, right, in our modern time. But you back then was more on horrific. So we would instead use our whole hand and indicate the person instead of just pointing. So that is one way to show the difference in the language use in the timeframe. That's our question. Well, I had no idea what was going on over on that corner of the stage. Wow. I know a lot of shows that I did, we hit a lot of our incongruities and muttered a sides like that'll never pass code, which is clearly anachronistic, but I can see it also being hard for you at your end. Well, something like that we would say, oh, I'll never pass inspection. You see, that was the intent of it. You know, so what we would do so we would be doing our normal blah, blah, blah, blah, and then we would go and I'll never pass inspection. So we would take this little like body shift and make us smaller. And then we would sign that so that they know that that's an aside. I think I know the answer to this one, but there are a lot of shows where this happens. The bad guy comes in. He has tankard in his hand, then he turns around and pisses in the tankard. And then he sets it down and then somebody else comes in, picks it up, and then spits all over the first two rows. I guess you don't need to interpret it because it's all visual. Correct. Yeah, that kind of thing, I would make sure I was watching the actor because again, that I gave his thing, that is the one that I would make sure that they saw because that's the whole brunt of the joke. If they miss seeing that part, the rest of it doesn't matter. It's not funny. What's the point? I was in a comedian with a reduced Shakespeare company, People's, and it involved basically he's a Bella going to the market and buying a fish. And she comes home very proud of the fact that she spent all my scooty on a fish. I go nuts, basically, and I'm swinging a fish around and slamming it against the stage and swinging at her, but I'm saying it, but I'm actually saying words like, you spent all my scooty on a fish, my fish, a fish, a stupid canvas fish. This is nothing but a prop. And then I'm swinging it around. How much of that gets interpreted and how much of that sort of you looking at me being hyper? Let's put it that way. So it really depends on what's going on. So there's a couple of techniques that we might use. We might look at you and watch you for a little bit and like, what are you doing? And then we bring back our attention to the deaf person and tell him what's going on. Or we could then just sign what you're doing. And we mimic a little bit about what you're doing as well. Because I'm actually going nuts, but I'm at the same time I'm conveying some information that's sort of useful in the later parts of the show. Sure. Really, it depends on the interpreter in the moment. Are they feeling like your actions are more important? Or are they feeling that your words are more important? And that might be something that they would talk to you about beforehand. Okay. It's like, we would ask you even, do you want us to emphasize what you're doing? Or do you want us to watch what you're doing? Which would you prefer your attention for our deaf clients to be on? Okay. Any other questions? When you were kind enough to say yes to this interview, was your next thought, I have to be sure to mention X, Y, and Z. So what are your X, Y, and Z's that you maybe haven't mentioned yet? I just think that it's really important for fairs and people who put on fairs to understand that there are deaf people out there. 10% of the population is deaf across the United States. If people have money to, they want to spend it, they want to enjoy it. Pay for interpreters at your fair. Have interpreters and pay them. This is a great way to tick off your ADA boxes. So owners of fairs get interpreters for your whole run for every day and pay them, please. Do you advocate as having interpreters wander around the fair or just be assigned to shows? I advocate having assigned to shows, having them in information booths, as I had mentioned before, and having the ability to have a deaf person request an interpreter to go shopping with. Yeah. And also, how about the hearing person that they brought with them doesn't have to now interpret every single thing all the time. They can enjoy themselves too. Well, since we've spread out of the spontaneous stuff. Okay, then I'll give you my traditional last question. Congratulations. You have just been awarded the highly coveted Phyllis Patterson Award for lifetime achievement in fair skills applied to life. The band has been told to sit on its hands and you have as much time as you like. Give me your acceptance speech. Oh, this is very unexpected. Now I know how they feel. I think that the best thing that this whole board represents is the best in every single person who comes to fair, who works at fair, no matter your position. This is something that everyone should have, everyone needs to have it. And it's something that all of our lives we can learn from. We can take our experiences at fair and apply them to life in any way, shape or form, even if it needs to be tweaked a little bit. And this award being given is something that is inside all of us. If we all let it just let it out and become someone different, go to fair and dress up. Have fun and just enjoy. I think that's really good. So I will stop recording. That's my July 2024 interview with Lori Sullivan. Questions or comments for Lori can be emailed to me at DJNG@earthling.net. Questions or comments about the podcast itself can be emailed to me, Dan McLaughlin, at DJ Finally, if you or someone you know would like to be a guest on Fair Folk at Work, email me at DJNG@earthling.net. But that's it for this time. Thanks for listening. Bye-bye. Bye! [BLANK_AUDIO]