Faire Folk at Work
Doug Walter
Doug has danced English and Irish and discusses what he has learned about each and and what lessons he has learned from directors he has had. He talks about how the brains of those in the folk dance community seem to be have been equally adept in the 1970's and 80's to both folk dance music and dance on one hand, and on the other and computer and telecommunication work on the other.
- Broadcast on:
- 17 Sep 2024
- Audio Format:
- other
So, welcome to another episode of Fair Folk at Work. You know, you know, for some people, the path to the fair is pretty direct. They show up once, they go, "I'm home," and pretty much stay there in some form or another for the rest of their lives. For others, the path has a few cul-de-sacs, and that's true with my guest today, Doug Walter. Doug, welcome. Thank you. But before we get to all that, why don't I start with the traditional first Fair Folk at Work question, which is, "Who is the person who said to you, 'There's this thing called Fair,' and what did they say to get you out there?" They said, "Get in the car." So the first one or two Renaissance fairs, and I believe it was 1963 and 1964, were benefits for Pacifica radio, K-P-F-K in Los Angeles. And my parents liked to listen to Pacifica radio for a variety of reasons, but mostly because they played classical music, and they even played Baroque music. I guess that was somewhat unusual at that time. And so my guess is that maybe it wasn't the first, maybe it was the second year, they decided that they wanted to support Pacifica by going to this event, and they took their kids. And I have very few memories of that, because if it was 1964, actually, I'm not sure of the season, but I would have been six or seven. But I do remember sort of looking down a row of booths and seeing flags on poles, or banners, maybe, or penance. Penance would be the best word. That tells you a little bit about what kind of armament I grew up in, where we actually paid some attention to the exact use of the right word. So that was how I first got to Fair, was attending one of the first two. And I guess that would be in North Hollywood. Again, I wasn't very conscious of where I was being driven, or I wasn't conscious enough that I still have a distinct memory of it. Do you have siblings? I have one sister who is two years older than I. I've never actually interviewed her about what she does remember of going to Renaissance Fair, because she would have been at that one. And then I'm sure she also was at, we returned at least one time in the 1960s. And again, I would have to guess, but I would think that it was 1969, which was at Agura. I have many more memories of that, but not fully coherent ones of who I saw and what happened. But I remember belly dancing in an aroyo. I remember that you could put your hands into some kind of a clay solution that was both liquid and solid, and how tactile that was. And I remember some of the crafts that were being sold at the Agura Fair at that time. That was definitely part of my idea of what the range of things that could happen growing up in Los Angeles was. This is all part of the spectrum. It's no weirder and freakier than classical music concerts, seeing an opera at the music center, seeing people on the street trying to sell the free press. But then I didn't really have any contact with fair throughout the whole 1970s, then I went back to Black Point as a customer in 1982. And I definitely had this sensation of, okay, this is different now that I'm a putative adult, but there's a lot that I recognize. There's a lot that takes me back to those childhood memories. How did you hear about Black Point in Northern California as opposed to Agura in Southern California? Yeah, great question. I moved to Davis in the summer of 1981, and I had been working for University of California at the system-wide administration in Berkeley. And so I tried to get a job working for the university in some clerical capacity. And at Davis, I started out working at telecommunication. And in 1981, the telecommunications industry was undergoing seismic shift is too small a word for what it was like cutting away from all of the bell system. But there was a huge amount of uproar going on. And the relevant part of that is that one of the people who was hired to be a telephone operator about two weeks after me was a young person, approximately the same age as me from Livermore. And she was friends with a group of people from Davis who went to Black Point with regularity. And she was very, "Come on, you want to do this, this will be a lot of fun." And it didn't take that much convincing, not only because I thought these were fun people, but also because I had that background of having been to fair before. So therefore the idea of recreating some aspects of history was already planted in my mind, and the idea that it could be a fun thing to do. It wasn't a big step. Looking back, would you describe yourself as sort of a science-y person working in telecommunications, or would you see yourself as a proto-humanities student? I mean, that's a great question, and I can be very precise about it. Because during the 1980s, I received a Masters of Science from the College of Ag and Environmental Sciences, and this amuses my family quite a bit because I'm very much a humanities person. But I'm a humanities person who had very early training in using computers. And part of what I was doing when I was working in Berkeley was trying to make what we would now recognize as Excel tables, except there was no Excel, there was no Lotus 123, there was none of that stuff, and getting them to print out, and to do that I had to use the Berkeley Unix systems, which were named after the Marx Brothers, and that kind of melding of very techie with very soft, punning, humanity stuff, that's very much where I came from. So to answer your question, definitely on the side of humanities, but also not unfamiliar with some of this technical stuff. You know, I've noticed in doing these interviews that you are not alone, that there is a strain of people in computer IT departments around the world that enjoy going to the Renaissance Fair, especially as a musician or dancer or something. Absolutely. Absolutely. And of course, music does have that dual nature. It is, in some sense, a very mathematical kind of relationship that a good melody and then a good counterpoint to that melody will have. There are a lot of people who are very interested in math. I think of the title of that book, Bach, Godel, Escher, The Eternal Golden Braid. So there is that side to music, and yet at the same time, music is very much about feeling and emotion and some amount of improvisation, or at least adjusting your tempo to what the dancers are doing. In other words, you may think of it as being very mathematical, but sometimes you have to change the pace a bit. When you went back to Black Point, what felt both new and different from? I think that the visual language that the Paterson's and the people that they worked with in that era at Black Point, that visual language that they had settled on was a very familiar element to me. It certainly evolved from the 1960s, no doubt about that, but the burlap overhead definitely made me think of those penance on tall poles, the feeling of being under the oaks and medrons and other trees at Black Point, the dust, the rocks. All of that somehow felt familiar and also had a real echo of my visit to Agora. What was different immediately was the fact that I was over 21, and there was this entire dimension of alcohol and Eros and just whoa, something that I simply wouldn't have really picked up on well as a young person. And of course, on my very first visit, being with a group of people who definitely were into going to AL stands, playing with other customers, verbally engaging and participating. Remember what the group gestalt was or what class were you and what was your typical banter with other fairgoers or participants? I can't really recall what the banter would have been. Very soon after starting, I got a great kilt that was thrown together out of what we called the McThrifty tartan. So being a kilt, I was kind of inter-class or just a traveling person rather than a chipping under oakwood denizen. And the people I was with were similarly more floaters. One of my good friends, Eric, was notable for having made himself a very large black leather hat with a huge brim, which by this point was weathered enough to sort of resemble the sorting hat in the Harry Potter movies. One of the amusing things that happened years later, he always liked to go to AL stands. And one weekend, he got sufficiently distracted by being at the AL stands that somehow he lost his hat. And this guy, he didn't wear a jerkin. So he just had breaches, a shirt and a hat, but to lose the hat, he must have been pretty well in his cup. But he said during the week, "Well, on Saturday, will you go and check at the lost and found just in case it's there? I'm going to stay home and I'm going to make a hat and then I'll meet you on Sunday morning." And in fact, it was at the lost and found to my great surprise. And so I got to wear it for a Saturday at Black Point, which was just -- I mean, I couldn't really wear it on stage for dancing, but all the rest of the time I could. And it made me feel very rakish and rote-lish, and then on Sunday morning, before opening, I came down off of Cardiac Hill and marched out and found Eric in the crowd and we exchanged hats. And I still have that big black hat and it's a very nice piece of work. So how did you get from sort of wandering cult to dance performer on a stage? It happened really pretty fast. One of the ways that it happened among the people that I was going to fair with was my friend, actually from college, but my friend Shirley Brannon. And her background in theater and her interest in various kinds of Celtic culture very quickly led her to looking at how one could participate. The second year that we went to fair and bought fair everpasses was the year after Clan Colin had staged their somewhat infamous walkout. And so there was no organized Scottish guild at fair. And so we fell in, I think just by seeing people in the crowd with other people who were kind of interested in maybe trying to re-establish some kind of Scottish presence. And at that time I was involved in Scottish country dancing in Sacramento and Davis. And so that was a very natural kind of avenue for me. And so although I continued to come into fair on a fair everpass for a number of years after that, I was involved in trying to restart a Celtic presence by starting St. Bridget's Guild. And that led to a stage show where Joan Geransick and Robert Young were the noble characters and then to some extent the dancers were additional characters and would kind of play off of them and then say, well it's time to celebrate by having a dance or it's time to mourn by having a dance or whatever it was that you came up as a plot point. But I made the transition from doing Scottish country dancing on stage to also doing English in the street and that led pretty quickly to also doing it on stage. Patty Blanco of the Mary Pranksters probably taught me a little bit in a workshop and then invited me to participate in the shows because you know male presenting people are always useful in a dance show particularly if the fair was going to insist on a relative ban on cross dressing in order to have some historical accuracy. You needed a bunch of guys with you know mustaches or beards to make up the show. And so... Can I ask a question? Yeah. I mean for a second? Yeah. You worked with both Shirley and Patty in different dance productions. Yes. What sort of were their directorial overall direction? I mean they said when you're on stage always be sure to fill in the blank or my overall vision of a dance on stage at the Renaissance Fair stage or street is fill in the blank. Having worked with Shirley almost continuously since the mid 80s it would be much, in some way much easier for me to put that into words and a little bit harder in terms of what was going on in '84 and '85. And so let me start with Patty Blanco and the Mary Pranksters because that's really where I made a transition. Patty's approach was that she really wanted the dancers to appear rehearsed. Well no that's exactly the wrong way to put it. She wanted us to be rehearsed but appear on stage as people who were living, loving and laughing. We didn't have to be intoxicated but theatrically it wasn't a bad thing to appear like you were maybe a little bit in your cups just hit your marks. There definitely was a consistent undercurrent of this is the lusty side of fair country dance leads to country matter. This is something that she would say both on stage and to us some of the time. We had a very good band, a band that was very propulsive, English dance tunes are pretty simple but they can be played in a very dull fashion, they can be played in a very courtly and involved fashion and they can be played in a very driving fashion and that was the approach that we had. It was very driving and propulsive and really I thought involving music, people really wanted to clap along or shuffle along if they were in the audience. This is a question I like to give to all dancers and this is just for you, think back on the dances you did with the English country dancer types and you will get this question about Scottish dancing when we're talking about Shirley, pick five dances that gave you the most joy to dance and to see. There's not a big distinction between what I like to perform and what I like to see with English, they really do go together and I immediately know the answer. First of all, we often would begin prankster sets with a dance called Dargasson and one of the reasons for that is the way we did it, that dancers went all over the stage. We weren't concentrated in six people or eight people in the center, it really swept all the way through the stage, it involved very big motions and it wasn't always easy to catch the downbeat at the beginning of the phrase and so it really took some concentration so then when we went from sort of the introductory moving around to, nope, now we're really doing the dance, there was a real feeling of nailed it again and that was just a huge pleasure and then the other dance that immediately comes to mind is a six person, three couple dance called Stingo, again it just has a propulsive kind of tune, the way that it was performed by the prankster band always was just a real up, it pushed you just a lot of fun. Do you remember the names of any musicians in the Murray prankster band? Oh absolutely, I mean Morgan McDow was the leader of the band. Avis Minger was a fiddle player, she's deceased but she was really wonderful and a lot of fun to work with, I can't remember Robby's last name, he played flute and also danced and also drummed, I should be able to remember some drummers simply because having someone playing the side drum well really was a big part of the band sound and really was a positive. So now let's go to the same process with Shirley. You know I should say that when you talk to her you'll find out that her progress through the 80s took a few more turns just getting to be able to have some input into what was going on but when we were working with St. Bridges and that was a Scottish show it was a case of trying to find Scottish country dances that presented well to an audience that looked interesting but that were sufficiently, they weren't too hard and weren't too simple for a bunch of people at fair to perform because you know the problem with doing light shoe dancing of any precision is sure on stage you can wear your gillies but you have to switch to shoes or boots immediately in order to go along the roads at Black Point because they're full of rocks and they're full of dust and it's not very comfortable in a thin thin shoe like a gilly and that truly was a problem and I know throughout the 80s I had a pair of very nice custom let's just call them hippie boots that I wore and so they did not have a vibram sole or something really chunky like that but they also were not as thin as gillies and so my footwork was not as unbound as it would have been if I had been changing into the gillies for it I think that Shirley's orientation with the dancing it was again very very audience oriented not to say that we didn't enjoy ourselves not to say that we didn't really enjoy the music that we were dancing to but we were always remembering to try and present the audience to smile to the audience to invite them into the patterns and figures that we were making I have to say that I remember the dancing more than I really remember any of the the lines to you know the scenario that we were spooling out with Joan and Robert I certainly remember Joan and Robert on stage and how really pretty their Scottish noble costumes were that it really was this jewel-like setting here's the jewel and then there are all these scruffy dancers and men at arms and whatever I have another question for you yeah oh great every performer at Fair has to sort of for themselves and I guess our director grapple with you have a 20th century audience and a 16th century source material so there's a continuum so you can be a hundred percent period and totally bomb because people are looking at you like eh or you can be totally modern and sort of say forget period and where do you fall on that spectrum and where have your directors tended to fall on that spectrum fortunately there's been a reasonably good alignment between my abilities and my director's approaches and that would be in the middle between those two extremes I mean we are blessed and cursed in dance ethnography and dance history because we don't really know what people did in the 16th century there's a little bit of documentation that might be helpful for court masks and dances but when you get to what was being done more than 200 meters away from Elizabeth and her courtiers there really isn't much to to go on and so it has to be a recreation on the other hand for most 20th century audiences Irish lights you dancing Scottish country dancing and to a large extent English country dancing are all a bit weird you know they didn't see them in school they might have been exposed to square dance in school and square dance has got a little bit to do with all of those traditions so that's a little bit of a thread maybe that some of them can pull on especially if they are from somewhere not in California because I don't think square dance in school was a big thing in California now my grandparents happened to have been involved not in square dancing but in Mexican dancing and I think that was a pretty unusual thing I just think that not that many folks have a lot of background in organized dance so there was a little bit unusual and esoteric there already and there are a few ways to try and communicate you know here's what we're doing but the main way that I think my directors wanted to get that across to a modern audience was we're having fun we're in time to the music we're paying some attention but really we're having fun we're looking at our partners we're interacting with the other members of the set this is a jolly thing that we're doing you might say it's a fun thing but since we're at Renaissance Fair we'll say it's a jolly thing that we're doing and that spirit was a big part of how we communicated and interested in people I think you know the other thing was that hearing acoustic music well performed by not a large group of musicians but more than two people again it's a little unusual but I do think that a lot of people in the Bay Area had somehow come across some of this kind of music and and performances of this size and configuration just not with funny costumes I want to get back to Scottish dancing and give you the opportunity to tell me what are your sort of top five Scottish dances to dance to give you the joy really we should probably use this as a way to transition to Irish dancing you know but with Scottish dancing I think we used to do Montgomery's rant and Petronella I wonder if we actually know I think that that medley of Petronella and Posty's jig was a later thing I won't go into that but some of the the Scottish war horse dances that are very upbeat very energetic a lot of energy to do them not that I had such a restrictive costume but you know to do them in costume on stage in the dust and sun at black point did take a lot of energy but they were the kind of dances that rewarded and channeled the energy really well and snapping good tunes that helps a lot for listening I'll take Scottish and Irish tunes over the English country dance tunes most of the time not to say the English tunes aren't good just my preference that I'll express that and one of the things you know part of the genius might be a little bit too strong but part of the inspiration that surely brings to things is that when we were lacking sufficiently presentational dances to do on in-yard and Ben Johnson stage for large crowds in the Irish repertoire that we had access to not to say that there aren't ones out there maybe but we didn't know them she took Scottish dances and adapted them and we did them with Irish steps and maybe with slight variations but we took some of the best of the Scottish dancing and turned it into an Irish dance I believe Ian Powery's farewell to Octorata is an eight hand Scottish jig and we did it as Sean Powery's Caledonian jig and you know again it wasn't that it was so darn complex but it was sufficiently complex it had eight people weaving in and out of each other in interesting patterns and it was reasonably successful a great joy to me to be in a group that could pull something like that off and because it was something that was complicated it helped me concentrate and execute and I think that as long as you have a smile on your face but you're concentrating and executing that is a posture and attitude that communicates reasonably well to an audience that's like oh these guys are kind of serious about this fun that's something that you would see I think all over Black Point was people who were having fun but were doing it in a way that required some attention and intention and execution and you know in that way it wasn't like oh we're doing something on stage that's so superior on the contrary we were doing something on stage that was really nicely echoed in very different ways in the booths and in the streets and in other kinds of stage shows in the spirit of that slogan that all the fair is a stage I think that there was a little bit of trying to make sure that what we were doing on stage wasn't so tremendously different from what we or others were doing in the street you know that they were a continuation of one another well it was a continuation of subjecting the audience members to adjust constant onslaught of sight and sound I'd like to make a transition here if I could certainly you were talking about the attitude of having fun but being professional at it at the same time has that influenced your sort of non-fair work attitude clearly it has had some influence in a moment I will give you one very very specific instance that actually turned out to be rather valuable to me in general although I come from a an academic family it also was a family where showing up and putting in time and honest effort was very much an expectation I brought some of that attitude with me to fair although I camped out for a couple of decades at black point I was not someone who spent a lot of time roistering after hours and part of that was that I had a partner and so you know what was I going to be doing there was no point in me trying to impress members of the opposite dancing gender in that way because I was going to go home and have a partner and that's what I wanted but also my attitude was I want to put my energy into my day of performance and I want to have all the fun I can squeeze out of that and there's a variety of ways that I want to squeeze that fun but one of the main ones was by getting to my shows being present at those shows doing a really good job of what I was asked to do and maybe maybe adding something extra so that that was a very involving kind of thing and my mother was a librarian my father was an associate research physiologist they both worked in the center for health sciences at UCLA is she a medical librarian oh yes oh yes she retired as the head of technical services at the biomedical library so where did where did you go to high school I went to university high on Westgate in Texas excellent I'd like you this is a thought exercise it is 500 years in the future and there's been some sort of end of the world thing and so there are no sound recordings from our time period left you are a Irish music folk dancer scholar and in your time period all that's left of the tune O'Denny boy has transmorfed itself into a real fast real and that is your reality is that O'Denny boy is his ripping roaring tune the finger snap in your research you come across the sheet music from the 1967 Lawrence Welk St. Patrick's Day celebration where he has a 10 minute long dirge version of O'Denny boy what do you do as a scholar in the 25-24 and you come across this 10 minute overly orchestrated dirge like version of the O'Denny boy which as far as you know is completely well it's completely different than the O'Denny boy you know it what do you do well I mean first of all one in history one data point of contradictory data is really interesting but it doesn't necessarily mean that your paradigm is completely wrong and as evidence I'm going to point out to you that you probably haven't heard the Richard Thompson version of O'Denny boy have you no okay so and I think that this is probably something from Banchos in the 1980s but yeah driving baseline rip roaring very fast a rock and roll tune of Denny boy but anyway I mean my my approach to history is that you're always seeing through a little knot hole in the fence and what you're glimpsing is therefore always somewhat cropped and limited and on the other hand if you can get a number of knot holes and cracks in the fence to look through you're going to get something of the shape of what's on the other side do you have the context that Lawrence Welk was a popular entertainer for a lot of people as opposed to a narrow caster that's one of the things that I think was useful for people at fair to realize was that on the one hand yes they did need to appeal to a 20th century audience but they were getting a selection in our audience not everybody came to fair and especially not everybody came back it was people who were a little bit more interested in acoustic music it was people who were a little bit more interested in trying on the view of or something like the view of other people people didn't come to fair just to drink the Pepsi you know maybe to try some meat whatever the hell meat is um you know meat is not a particularly exotic thing to me because I worked in retail grocery for a long time have there been any times in working with a customer in retail grocery or you used fair charm or fair expressions or fair mannerisms yes oh so yes part of this is that after all for at least a few years while I was membership director at the Davis Food Co-op one of our member owners was Louisa Puig really also known as yes also known as Queen Elizabeth and I had a tiny bit of a relationship with her more from workshops really than from performances although actually thinking about it the pranksters did do one dance with the queen we would dance new castle with the queen you know we'd show up and we'd be making a not a petition but like we just think you're so wonderful oh I hear your dancers yes yes we're dancers we're seven dancers oh you only have seven dancers I could be the eight I think actually most of the time the way that Bob Krab would work it is he would say I'd so presumptuous but could you be our eighth and she would dane to do so and it was you know it's a lovely little moment of dancing new castle with the queen doing something with the queen and her partner oh usually Bob Krab would be her partner he had a costume with slops and so he did look middle class but he looked like a classier middle class that was a good match it it kind of there's a big step down but it wasn't as all the way down to you know touching a peasant or it was a little bit have a favorite dance or oh the only one that we ever did that I recall was the dance of new castle which is a lovely eight-person dance we always used to talk with Scottish country dance of how the patterns would look to someone who is up in the balcony or since we were at Inyard Stage there are those two windows in the corner and so how would it look to someone who is looking down from there and new castle has some very nice permutations of bodies that work for that kind of perspective but getting back to the original story um luisa was like the head of the Davis food co-op no no no um luisa was just a customer oh i said but you know but i i got to occasionally in the produce section talk about fair things or how you know the same kind of attitude was reflected in the unusual business model that we were carrying forward but i wanted to tell you a story about a performance and really a life less than that i learned at fair i wrote this down because i experienced it at the time as a negative experience but it provided a very large positive benefit and the negatives about it are pretty reasonably easy to reduce when you examine it from other perspectives you know it wasn't such a big deal so i would guess that the year was some time in the first half of the 1990s and on the last day of workshops i completed my reckoning card and got in line to turn it in for my gate path and the line was long but it was not heroically long and there wasn't very much shade but on the other hand there was some and people were very cooperative to try and keep anyone from standing in the full sun for a long time that was okay and when i got to the front i presented my card and i was told this is okay but we won't be able to issue your past until the morning of opening weekend come back to the past house then and this was directly contrary to what i'd been told to what everyone had been told so i said nothing but i assume my face fell and yon Todd the stage manager of the fair was standing near the table at which the registration clerk sat he called me out saying how hard registration people working and he castigated me for a lack of appreciation and i said nothing but i kind of was seething to myself and i continued to see but i also saw that the only way through was to go forward in my past experience the past house on opening day was a mad house so i would have to endure and that's kind of a familiar experience for people who work at fair in fact the past house was functioning very well the morning of opening and there was no appreciable wait to receive my past the anticipation far exceeded the difficulty and what i took from that experience first and foremost was that i was often in a position parallel to mr. Todd when dealing with volunteers at my work as i said i was the membership director of the davis food call for 27 years i needed to support my staff i needed to be seen supporting my staff as he had tried to do but i also needed to make a positive impression on our volunteers and i saw i could do so by offering an apology when appropriate and by giving praise for whatever the volunteers had done right within our system but i took inspiration from it and made sure that story and thank you were a big part of my work vocabulary whenever i was tempted to rebuke someone for not complying i remembered that they didn't have to volunteer and whatever they'd done right was worth mentioning to them even if i was then going to say yeah but you don't qualify for the discount because you failed to do this other thing and i never talked about this with mr. Todd because at the time i just thought of them him as always having bigger issues to deal with now i think it's just a tiny moment in a giant story and important only to me and only because i got so much good from it did you ever get to apologize for sulking to the person you talked to well i didn't think i sulked i mean again i didn't say anything i mean i may be a great actor i'm not a great actor but i may be a halfway decent actor but how much pathos and pain could i convey with just an expression if i didn't say anything you know when i get myself in trouble it's with my mouth okay anyway i i also wanted to point out that one of the things that this little story illustrates is how little distance there was between the proverbial peasants of fair even though i was either irish or middle class in my character but i wasn't you know a big performer and the higher ups the people who were big at fair we worked together when you're near someone over a bit of time you see their better and worse moments and you generally form an impression that doesn't fixate on either the one or the other extreme and that's certainly my view of yawn he got a lot done and he worked with almost literally everyone on site you know which is why i don't think there'd be any reason for him to remember that particular little thing and it was a little thing but so many times i just would remind myself you know it isn't gonna cost you anything to say i'm sorry that didn't work out well for you i can explain why it didn't work out well for you but i'm genuinely sorry because i know that you don't have to shop here and you don't have to volunteer here and i'm really glad that you made that choice i think that's one of the reasons why i kept that job for so long was because i had a positive attitude but also one that uh well i think it's also something you many people learned at fair was that the personal could so easily overlap into the professional world that they lived in and that they learned those lessons at the fair that that they'd later applied in life um and yeah i mean i i also think that there are some you know less specific kinds of lessons that i learned about not so much making do with the materials that are at hand but taking the quirks and abilities and deficits of the team that you're in and getting better outcomes out of it i mean it would be nice if everyone i always worked at it fair was incredibly talented wonderfully humble and uniquely self-aware and but they weren't and you just got to try and do as well as you can with what they are able to do and i think that that feeling of being on a team and a team that is working with a number of other teams is very helpful in being in any kind of large organization let me approach that theme in another sort of way sure one of the themes of this podcast is that in many ways the fair was a bottom-up organization you had the basic parameters but you were basically just thrown in there and you could do whatever you want you could sort of rise as much as you want and it was a genuine sort of artistic community as opposed to say a Disneyland which was very top-down they have their overall script that's been designed by somebody and you figure out where you fit in that script i think you've already answered this but do you like that fair style of working where you're working from the bottom up i mean it's basically it's fair day the queens come in people here to buy stuff go and make it up as you go along yeah and no one's looking over your shoulder saying your Mickey Mouse ears have to be a quarter an inch back to be period Mickey Mouse or something like that well let me say that i appreciate both styles for theatrical presentation but absolutely what you say about how fair work that resonates with me very much the fact that you could do so little and get by that was fine for some people for me i definitely did want to rise up some just in terms of there was more fun in it you know doing something a little bit more elaborate or a little bit more involving was a lot of fun for me but i will say that among my great memories are not just being on stage but when i was in St. Patrick's and we had procession that we would do to the stage making stuff up while in procession was definitely a joy and unfortunately i never wrote down but but one year i worked out something called the seven of epiphanies of renaissance fair it had to be seven because that was the right number as opposed to i i actually had seven different insights did you make up things to say to the participants or audience members well the seven epiphanies was definitely a participant's only kind of thing but yes absolutely making up filks that were period enough that we could sing them when there were customers around oh yeah that that definitely was part of it i mean another thing that i just got so much fun out of was after a while i got to know patrick morris at archery well enough that he said you know don't stop by any time and i would stop by any time and you know spend a little bit of time in their backstage area hang out but i pretty quickly would go up they they had a little bit of a balcony off the front of the structure and um you could hawk to the crowd that was going past and just trying to make some noise and get some attention to the archery booth tended to increase the customer count a little bit and they were very happy for me to come and you know maybe get four or five ounces of beer because i didn't have the the time and energy to get a load on i just you know i just have a little bit to sip and go up there slow the crowd down a little bit and talk to them you remember what your typical beer ah no because it was sufficiently and distinguished that that there wasn't anything really that that clever about it but it definitely was a case of anything that you could say that would get a person to look up and change their gate was worth it we certainly would occasionally say things about strong shafts you can't get any cruder than that and on the other hand oh it's it's at least a step removed from being um utterly crude and just you know kind of that again a little bit of that spirit of i'm not sure exactly what he's doing up there but he's clearly having a good time that engaged people one of the other themes of this podcast was one thing that the pattersons did right was set up a playground where everybody was meant to have fun the whole gestalt of the fair was join us in playing in our town yes well and and two things that they they did very right in their publicity and again i remember this from you know looking at the publicity even during an era in which i wasn't going to fair the phrase play fair play was was really something that was said more than twice as being part of the experience and do come in costume and we know that the costumes that people came in they didn't qualify as period they they wouldn't have passed costumes no but people got to participate at a level that they were comfortable with and without really predicting the trend towards costume play they created a venue in which it was completely acceptable and part of the fun and something that paid participants knew it was good to play with and play off of and you know interact with on a it's great that you're doing this level as opposed to you know somehow making fun of someone because of a transgression against history well you saw a little kid walking down the street with a wooden sword wearing a robin hood hat and his sister's wearing a garland and that's was like great well and then my lord and exactly exactly you're a knight aren't you right um although actually i will say and i i remember that i learned this from roger bramble if i saw people walking with their children i would engage the parent and ask them about buying the child the approach oh that's a fine looking child you have there would you consider selling them parent makes a response yes no oh very interesting plaver plaver and then the finishes well we'll meet at three of the clock at the market cross and we can discuss this further and there was an end and you know it it didn't mean anything but it definitely was something that got people involved so for some of them it was very very amusing definitely would get a certain number of parents who would immediately be you want to buy my child oh yeah that was that was fun and then that family probably remembered remember this spring we went to the renaissance fair and you tried to sell me maybe it might have been to the therapist but i betch it that girl still has that little garland she was wearing she has it tacked on the wall someplace in her room yeah no i mean i i do think that was a way in which we helped build memories for people i'm very happy to have been able to participate in that i think that's really a nice legacy to have left well i'm kind of running out of words to say um when you were kind enough to say yes i will do an oral history interview with you was there something you tucked away in your brain that said i've got to be sure to mention abc so this is your chance to recover and say whatever abc's well so certainly two things that i i knew i wanted to get out one was that you know all the ways to get tricked into doing fair having your parents take you there when you're um seven years old is certainly not that not that i haven't met people who you know grew up at fair the extent to which my parents participated in anything like that was very small they did like to play recorder duets and trios and quartets with other people so you know they are i guess that kind of people to a certain extent but still they definitely were not run away and join the circus kind of people um the the story about how i um realized that saying i'm sorry that my institution did something to you as a a volunteer that you didn't exactly like that was a very valuable thing and i wanted to get that out um you know i think that fair giving me the opportunity to hang out around musicians was just a tremendous boon i think that the hobby of being a dancer and trying to learn various forms of dance has been very valuable to me because it engages the mind but it also keeps the body moving and now that i am a retired person i actually have started going to a gym and following a little bit of a an organized fitness routine i didn't so much for all the time that i was working and you know practicing dances and you know being involved with a live music and live dance scene was a big part of keeping a a healthy balance in my life and i i really appreciate that and i think that that's you know you don't have to do any of that to enjoy renaissance fair but if you don't like the music you know golly there's a there's a whole lot of stuff going on you could do it just on words alone i know you could do it just on words and word play and making up sonnets in your spare time but um for me that's that's always been a huge part of the experience that was really a pleasure and so you know thanking the people who have um you know made that such a great experience um you know another thing is that without having a lot of theatrical background beyond amateur theatrical and fair um i mean i worked on stage crew for credit in uh college but not a lot it gave me a way to access parathyatrical environment and actually be involved in building a few shows and my involvement was pretty peripheral i was around people who were doing the heavy work of putting together a concept and a script and a cast and rehearsing them but i think i did contribute beyond you know just showing up and doing my part and that has also been very rewarding and as i think i said earlier that feeling of being part of a team and a team that has to work with a number of other teams has been valuable to me in getting things done in other contexts and i'm you know i'm grateful for the any insights or inspirations that i got from participating in fair that that worked in other places um yeah i see i think that that's a good spot to end this so let me see if i can find the stop recording button well that's my september 2024 interview with Doug Walter i'm your host Dan McLaughlin and if you have a question or comment you'd like me to pass along to Doug you can email them to me at djng@earthlink.net questions or comments about the podcast itself can also be emailed to me at djng@earthlink.net and finally if you or somebody you know would like to be a guest on Fair Folk at Work email me at yes djng@earthlink.net but that's it for this time thanks for listening bye bye [BLANK_AUDIO]