Faire Folk at Work
Simon Spalding
The podcast features a conversation between Simon Spaulding and Dan McLaughlin, discussing Simon's background in theater and music, particularly his experiences with historical reenactment at Renaissance Faires. They talk about Simon's involvement in child acting, learning to play various instruments, and his transition to working in museums. The importance of historical reenactment and multidisciplinary skills acquired at Faires is highlighted, showcasing how these experiences have influenced Simon's career in music and history. The conversation delves into the collaborative and diverse nature of the Renaissance fair community, emphasizing the talents and abilities of individuals beyond their initial impressions. The podcast provides insights into the cultural significance and personal growth fostered by participation in historical reenactment events like Faire.
- Broadcast on:
- 08 Oct 2024
- Audio Format:
- other
Welcome to another special encore edition of Fair Folk at Work. Well, we've fixed the technical issues that plagued us the first time, and I have remembered to hit the play button. So hopefully this will go better. This introduction worked the first time and I liked it, so I'll repeat it again. You know, for some people, Fair is a brief yet intense period in their life. For others, it's part of a larger continuum of who they are. My guest today is more of the latter. His name is Simon Spalding. Simon, welcome. Good afternoon. But before we get to how Fair has been part of your life in one form or another for most of your life, I need to ask the first Fair Folk at Work question, which is, who was the person who said to you there was a thing called Fair, and what did they say to get you out there? Well, initially, I attended Fair as a patron twice. The first time was in 1968, so I was 11 years old, and I went with my parents, but I went in costume. I think my parents were in modern clothes, but I went in costume because we had a theater costume handy, and so it had been a hamlet costume, but it had been various other roles at different times. So I came in costume the very first time, and of course, that was in China to camp, I believe. It was not Black Point, and then I went again, and this was at Black Point with some of my friends in high school. That was in 1972, so I was aware of- So what kind of 11 year old has Elizabeth and Hamlet costume in his closet ready to go? I came from a theater family. My parents actually met through the little theater scene, as it was called. I mean, now I guess you would call it community theater, but they call it little theater in San Francisco, and in fact, they got together because they were cast as the leads in a play called The Phoenix Too Frequent by Christopher Fry. It was directed by Sidney Walker, who's better known as an actor, and better known in New York than in San Francisco. They got together through that a year and a half later along came me. So my parents had me acting in shows at the two San Francisco little theaters that were close to our house, the Playhouse Theater, which is on High Street and Beach. Then half a block over was the interplayers. They were once one theater company, but they split up, I think, in the early 50s. So I had child acting roles in a production of Jean- and when we get to music, you know, we can bookmark that. Something happened in that production of Liz's strata that kind of inspired some of what I did later. And then the most ambitious thing I was in was an adaptation by AJ Esta, who was the theater manager of Henry James' novel Turn to the Screw. I played Miles, The Boy, and that. That was probably the most lines I ever had to learn. And then a few things after that, in the summer of '67, the summer of love, my father ran a program for teens. At that point, he was teaching drama in English at APG in any junior high school, and he got AJ Esta to agree to let him do a teenage theater workshop at the interplayers. He called it Interteens. And Laurie Feldman and I, who had been the children in this production Turn to the Screw, did the balcony scene. We actually had more lines to learn than any of the teenagers. And I was 10 and she was 8, but at that point, we both been in a member of production. So we were not only the youngest members of that, but also the most experienced. So that's the kind of household that has Elizabethan clothes hanging in the closet. Can I ask for a thumbnail resume for each year's parents? Neither one is living, so there's no opportunity to interview them now. My father was born in Bronx, New York. He came out to, we spent a year studying abroad, six months in Florence, Italy, and six months in Heidelberg, Germany, came back. He got involved in theater. He was involved in modern dance and fencing. This is all before World War II, by the way. This is the late 30s. He was involved in children's theater and community theater in Los Angeles. Then the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. He learned to fly. He was a B-25 pilot. Flying is one of his big lifelong passions. He was flying aerobatics into his early 80s, actually. Real passion for flying. Real passion for theater and a real passion for history. That's my dad. My mother grew up in San Francisco. In fact, on her mother's side, her people go back to the Gold Rush. I think she's like a fourth or fifth generation San Franciscan. She also had a passion for theater, went to the Brattle Theater in Boston for a while. I think she was officially working as a props mistress, but doing whatever she could on the side. She was also very active in Little Theater in San Francisco. The poet, Weldon Keys, wrote a play where one of the characters, it was one meant for my mother. I think it's called The Waiting Room. I don't know if you know San Francisco poets, but Weldon Keys wrote a role for her in a show which once in a long while will be performed called The Waiting Room. She was in lots and lots of productions. Just my parents ended up cast as the leads in a production together. That was how they got together. If it wasn't for that, I wouldn't be here. Then they continued to do that through the '60s, which is how I got to do child acting because they were still active in the San Francisco Little Theater movement. ACT opening up in San Francisco actually kind of dealt a blow to the Little Theater scene. More people were going to the ACT shows and not the shows at the interplayers of the Playhouse or the committee or any of these other community theaters. I'm pleased to say I think the Berkeley Repertory Theater actually did a lot to kind of revive Little Theater in the Bay area across the Bay. By that time, my dad wasn't really doing theater anymore. My mother still did some way up in Sonoma County at the Camp Meeker Players. After decades of acting, she finally directed a show which was the Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie. When I was, let me think, I just turned 17, her production of Glass Menagerie at the Camp Meeker Players in Sonoma County. Supposedly, there was someone who was going to do the music. There were some very specific music cues that the Tennessee Williams calls for, specific songs that were popular at the time, and whoever it was who was supposed to do the music a week before opening night turned out the person hadn't done anything. The theater manager was like, "Oh, well, I guess you're not going to do the show." But I told my mother, "Hey, I think I could come up with something." By this time, I was really focused more on music than on theater, but I understood theater having grown up in it. I couldn't really compose a score in a week, so what I did is I composed major themes, a theme for the mother, Amanda, when she's reminiscing, a theme for The Glass Menagerie itself and for Laura's somewhat complex personality. My dad and I went down to Sherman Clay down on Kearney Street. Got a copy of All the World Is Waiting for the Sunrise, and I made up a few other themes. I made up a theme that was sort of for the depression when Tom is talking about what it was like in the 30s. I put those themes and everything in between, I just kind of improvised. But I had my major themes for the specific places where music cues were called for. And so I did that. So I interrupted and I'm not quite following you. Were these themes played live or were they recorded and queued up and played when they were supposed to be played? I played everything live for each show. What instruments did you use? The violin primarily, the glass menagerie theme I made up. Inspired by but not the same as a theme from Gabrielle Forei, the French composers, Peleus and Melison. I made up a banjo theme on the five-string banjo that I played for Amanda's reminiscences. There were a couple, some of the sort of depression era music I played on a tenor banjo. Those are the three instruments. As you know, I talked... The fact that you mentioned so many instruments sort of brings me to my next question, is that in many ways you, well, play a lot of musical instruments, and obviously you are doing them at 817. What was the attraction to you at 817 to learn how to play so many musical instruments? I think part of it was growing up in San Francisco, which is a very international city, with somewhat international parents, especially my dad. My dad spoke several languages, and we have family friends that spoke those. I'd hear him talking with a landlady in Italian every morning. I'd hear my friends at school speaking to one another in Cantonese during recess at school. So, I think hearing all these sounds of different instruments inspired me to some degree. I did mention what I did was a strata. That was where I first met Francis Koshelev, who plays Russian music and other styles of music. He had designed and built an instrument of his own, which he used for his role in when the music was played live. Let me go back to the original question and rephrase it and see if I can get a slightly different answer. Every kid in San Francisco in your neighborhood heard Italian from the landlady and Chinese from their classmates, but you were the one who said there's a lot of musical instruments out there. I want to learn them. So, what was unique to you, you think, that made you go down that path? It's hard to say, but I think that combination of being really interested in music and really interested in history, the interest in history from both of my parents and music and theater are closely related areas. I came into contact with musicians like Francis Koshelev through doing theater with my parents. I think maybe it's because I got started playing musical instruments also as a child. My parents were not musicians, so I didn't have quite the hands-on coaching and instruction that they were able to provide me in theater and in acting, but by my early teens, I think I was coming around to the idea that thought music was more fun than acting. I know that by the time I was in junior high school, I really felt that way. Either playing music composed by others, I was already interested in the idea of creating my own music and I think my interests were maybe more international because of growing up in that international place. So, why did I learn to play the Aruhu? I didn't, but I also learned to play mandolin. So, I don't know. Maybe that influences are still there. I know when I cook, most of my cooking is either Italian or Chinese style. I'm going to make a transition here and I hope it makes sense, but I have a great aunt who's from Puerto Rico and she was a music teacher. I remember her telling me that she speaks three languages, English, Spanish, and music. Do you find that to be true in your brain as well? To some degree, I dream in music sometimes. Lots of people have ear worms, but I find sometimes, and in fact, I have, since I was a teenager, sometimes I would dream in music more than in verbal language. I do know with foreign languages when I'm first arriving in a country like France or the Netherlands. Those are two places where I ended up picking up the languages on the fly. At a certain point, I would start dreaming not just in English, but in Dutch or French. And at that point, I would notice that my conversations during daytime are a whole lot easier. It's almost as if the mind in sleep is processing the language and in the dreams, I'm trying to find my way through situations. Do you find that there's commonalities in how language can be, any language can be structured and how music can be structured? They have a lot in common, but there are also differences because words represent concept, concrete concepts, and music, as some people like to say, where words fail, music speaks. Music is less specific. I can't ask someone the way to the train station by playing my violin. However, one can express feelings one has that maybe exist without specific concrete concepts. Okay. Is English country music lend itself to any particular expressions of making myself clear? I don't mean English country dance music. Yes, right. Yes. Okay. Well, it has a different idiom than Scottish and Irish music, too. I don't know why I'm pursuing this, but then you articulate what the differences are between English, Irish, and Scottish idioms. All right. I can because I've got my fiddle. Okay. All right. So here's a really typical English country dance tune that is from John Playford's English Dancing Master of 1651, and which you hear a lot at fair. [Music] [Music] So that was English country dance music going back to its earliest written documentation. Right, right. Yeah. And how does that differ from Scottish or Irish? What we consider Renaissance-e ish, if that's a word. What we perform at fair for all three of those repertoires derives from different historical sources. With the English music, we have this treasure of John Playford's publications of country dance directions with the music starting from 1651, and then every few years after that, way up into the 18th century. And dance scholars can use that to show how English country dancing changed over that period. And the dances and tunes that are mentioned that are in play for are mentioned in English literature going further back into the late 16th century, right into the fair period. When we look at Scottish music, Scottish piping, especially in the Peabrocks tradition, there are tunes that go back to this period, but the pipes have a range of only nine notes. Peabrocks tradition was originally harp music that was eventually played on the pipes when the harp became less in use in Scotland. And there's not a whole lot there that's not very danceable music. So when we're looking at Scottish dance music, we start to get that written down in the 18th century. People started writing down Scottish dances more in the early to mid 19th century. So with the Scottish material, we don't have as much material to go on that goes back as far as the English material. And then with the Irish material, Irish harp music began to be written down in 1790 by Edward Bunting, but we don't start getting collections of the dance music played on the fiddle and the Irish pipes and the flute until the mid 19th century with the petri collection and then later on the O'Neill collections. So with the Scottish material, sometimes what we're presenting at fair, we're wearing clothes representative of pictures of mostly Highland Scots from that period or close to that period, but the music we're playing is more from the 18th and the early 19th century. And the dances we're doing may go back to that period, but didn't weren't written down until until the 18th through early 19th century. With the Irish tradition, we have to work with even more recent material, because the dances and the tunes that go with them weren't really written down until about the mid 19th century. When you were saying that, I wrote in big letters harp question mark, I'm trying to imagine somebody dancing to a harp. And there's descriptions of people doing it in Ireland, interestingly enough. Is that why they have such soft shoes so they don't drown out the harp? Well, I would say that when they were dancing to a harp, they probably were wearing soft shoes. Or if they were endorsing it, even take the shoes off. There is hard shoe Irish dancing, also step dancing. We've performed that at fair a lot, but it would be difficult for people to hear the harp. That's an interesting question and there's multiple answers may be possible. Does it matter if somebody 30 feet away can hear the harp, if the dancer can hear it and dance and tune to it? We're so performance oriented, we feel like if they can't see it or hear it 20 feet away, then why do it? But I think the aesthetic, 200 to 500 years ago, may have been different. Can we hear you play some examples of both Scottish and Irish dance music as they are currently heard in Renaissance fairs across the country? Absolutely. Here's a Scottish Strath's Bay, which is a reel that slowed down and played with a slightly dotted rhythm, followed by a reel. [Music] [Music] So thank you, that was really nice. Yeah, so you want to hear something Irish now? I do. All right, so here's a medley of a horn pipe and a double jig and a reel and of those, the horn pipe, probably in my opinion, came to Ireland sometime after about 1780 or 1790, because horn pipes in the rest of the British Isles existed before that period in three, two time, but all of the Irish horn pipes we have that I'm aware of are all in four, four. So that kind of suggests that the Irish got the horn pipe sometime after about 1780, 1790. The jig, the double jig, that's a jig in six, eight, may go back further. The reels may go back further still. We don't know. Can you say the same thing only using your fiddle? Horn pipes when they're first written down in England, for example, and there's horn pipes written down in Wales as well. The ones from before about 1780 are all in three two. You want to hear an example? Here's here's a Welsh horn pipe in three two. That's the Rory Horn pipe. That's a Welsh horn pipe in three two written down about 1750. Now by the 1780s, you get horn pipes like fishers or the college horn pipe that many of us know those are in four four. So in England, after about 1780, people pretty much stop writing horn pipes in three two. There's a few that survive in Scotland, but they're rare, and they're writing horn pipes in four four. And there are horn pipes, for example, in Sweden and in the Netherlands that are in four four also. So I'm guessing that the Swedes and the Dutch and the Irish all got the horn pipe after that transition from three to four four. Okay, got it now. Good. So to me, that suggests that Irish horn pipes, which I love, which I have played a fair a lot, probably didn't exist prior to about 1780 or 1770. If they had been writing horn pipes in Ireland earlier, they probably would have been in three two. I'll play you an example of an Irish horn pipe. Now we were a four four horn pipe, you know, an English one might go Well, you take that rhythm and you slow it down a little bit and you make it slightly dotted, then you can get an Irish horn pipe. [Music] Well, thank you very much. That was very nice. And it makes your point a lot easier to understand as well. Now that you got your fiddle out, if you could for Irish Scottish and English music, sort of give me some examples up to five of songs that give you joy to either hear or play. I want to start with English, just to keep referring to you, which when we did this interview, the first time we talked about one of the last times that I got to play music with Dave Ricker and Bob Thomas together, we played that tune. And I had a harmony that I made that, but I thought sounded really nice. And with Bob's bagpipes and Dave and I on fiddle and me harmonizing the second time round and doing a discount the third time round, it sounded really good. To the extent that Dave turned over to, we were playing it for the kids at workshop in the woods, he turned over and said, you know, we really got to record that sometime. But I said, yeah, we really sure that, you know, it sounds good. And sad to say we did not. And just a few years later, that wouldn't have been possible because Bob Thomas's that set of bagpipes was burned up in the house fire that Bob and Mary had. And just a few years later, Bob was gone, you know, shortly after that, so was Dave. What other English country dance music gives you joy? All of it, really. I know you want you want a top five list, I think. I'm going to just rattle off the top of my head. I'll probably miss some of my favorites. I love Parsons Farewell. I love New Castle. I'm very fond of St. Martin's. Now we're only up to four. Let me give you a fifth one that's a real favorite, heart sees. And you articulate for me what what is common of those five songs that brings a smile to your face? They're well crafted tunes and they go with really neat dances. I think when I play the tunes, I'm visualizing the dances. It's just, you know, there's some English country dance tunes that are very monotonous, half-hannequin comes to mind. It's very, very repetitious. And those five that I mentioned, they're all interesting melodies. They're well crafted melodies. That stand up to repeated listening. Right, right. Playing on the Inyard stage, or Ben Johnson, 10 plus times a day. In the early, early 80s, there was a group of musicians who were known as the Suicide Squad. To be a member of the Suicide Squad, I mean, there was no, it was a very informal thing. But we were all musicians that played more than 10 shows a day at the fair. And, you know, these are these are half hour shows. You figure out how many hours that fair is open. You're pretty much playing your instrument most of the day. Or other members of this squad. I'm so glad you asked. Ava Sminger, David Miles, the drummer. And what did Ava's play? Ava Sminger was a fiddler. David Miles was a drummer. Stacey Toye or Trevenon, who played a quarter. I think John Berge didn't play 10 plus shows consistently, but I did a few days. So he was considered part of the club too. I think that was about it. You see, the musicians who aren't on the list might be interesting, you know, consider Dave Ricker and Brian Delarmy. They played for Pipe & Bull Morris and for new Castle Country dancers, but only for them. So they would end up playing like six or seven shows a day. If you're playing 10 plus shows a day, at least at fair in the early 80s, you were probably playing for Scottish show. If there was a Scottish show, you were probably playing at least some of the Irish shows. You're basically, you know, and most of those shows happened on either Inyard or Ben Johnson. So you didn't have to have quite as many long trips up that back road along the fence to get to the stage. It was called Caravancery at one point. Actually, it was Lydian Grove back in the 70s and was renamed Caravancery. But that, you can at least get to that stage still walking along the fence. But those are, yeah, those are the people that were in the suicide squad played for multiple shows. I mean, not just with, you know, not just with Newcastle or Pipe & Bull, not just Mary pranksters, Ava and I and David and Stacy played for all of those groups, all of their shows. And then I also, I wasn't directing the Scottish show anymore, but I was still playing in the Scottish show when there was a Scottish show. And I was playing in any Irish show that they had as well, at least some of their shows. We actually had, remember those little ceramic heart pins? I still have my suicide squad heart pin. The colors are black, red, and white. And then in gold, it says 10 plus on it. And I think it has a skull and crossbones. Yeah, I still own it, actually. I have it right alongside a purple heart that was for, there was a competition for ring out. And there was one here that, by this time there was the guild system, Saint Cecilia's Guild won the ring out with a wonderful, wonderful music that was composed by John Berge that we performed. And I got those two hearts. Those are the only ceramic heart pins that I still have. But I've kept those two because they're special. I think a big theme, implicit in what you're saying has been a sort of commitment to historical reenactment. I should preface this by saying you have experienced historical reenactment as a profession later in your life, post the fair. Speak to me about where this commitment to historical reenactment has come from. And what did you learn at fair about historical theatrical reenactments that you have replicated elsewhere? Well, I think fair taught me a lot. The whole idea of getting people to speak using archaic speech, which here was a name that I didn't mention last time. And I will mention now is Dick Bagwell. Dick Bagwell created the BFA workbooks and classes that all of us learned. And I know some entertainers have kind of joked about them. Like this thing that we had to do, we had to learn how to do this. You know, what's the point of that? Well, I think there's a lot of point in that. And I've also attended interpreter training at Plymouth Plantation and seen there, they go into even more depth. And some of the sources for what they do at Plymouth are were sources that I think Dick Bagwell accessed or they use some of the same sources. There's a connection between those in trying to create an approximation. That's the most it will ever be. An approximation of how people spoke in an historical period or avoiding expressions and referring to things that were unknown in the period you're portraying. Let me correct you on something you're suggesting that I sort of took fair, you know, did fair and then left fair and went to do character interpretation and train other people to do character interpretation of museums. It's not as simple as that. There's actually more of a back and forth because in the by the mid 80s, I was interested in working in museums, maybe using some of the abilities of role playing that I developed at fair. And so I started doing special events at museums where they would want someone who could play music from a specific time and place, but also interact with the public as a person from the time and place. That grew partially out of my experience at fair, but it also grew out of the summer job I did in 1980 as a tour guide on Alcatraz for the National Park Service. I'm going to have to interrupt you there and say what does a tour guide do on Alcatraz that sort of influences fair? You have an hour and a half to impart historical information to people while you're making the 140-foot elevation gain up to the cell house and then you're walking around the truck. By the way, they don't do this anymore. Now there's recorded tours you can buy and put on your headset and listen to it all. But when I worked there as a seasonal park ranger in 1980, the whole idea of having guided tours of Alcatraz was fairly new. We had a massive training manual with tons and tons of information more than you could ever impart to one group of 50 visitors at a time and then we spent a few days going on each other's tours and that's when we did it. If you're a street actor at fair, you may be trying to communicate something to people about Elizabethan England. But if you're in character, you're doing it as a person from that time period. If you're a docent or a tour guide at an historic site, you're also trying to communicate information to people about specific people in a different time and place. So I think that's the connection. But as far as my work through the 80s and 90s, there was a lot of back and forth between what I was doing for museums and historic sites and what I was doing at fairs, primarily the California fairs, although I also directed a group of people who portrayed the kind of village militia at the Texas Renaissance Festival. By the way, we did dancing English country dances at specific times of day and singing and all of that. So I think really through the 1980s and 1990s, I'm kind of moving back and forth through different worlds and what I'm doing in those different worlds is informing what I do in other places. So in 1987, when I came up with a proposal to create an environmental area at Master's Balding's Academy for aspiring gentlemen, which later on combined with what had been the Children's Bell to form working with Cage Baker and Linda Underhill and Ms. Samantha's School. I'm sorry, this is a fair, right? Yes, this was a fair, a program of the Living History Center who still owned the fair. That was when I created that environment that someone someone had a famous quote, "How does it feel to be Phyllis Patterson's tax write off?" Because I was at that point, I was instead of working for the fair as a musician, I was working for the Living History Center as an educator and creator of an environmental area and teaching people. And the Living History Center, under the direction of Phyllis Patterson, is paying me to teach people about navigation and the sciences. And to do that, I had studied up on the sciences as understood in the 16th century. I had been studying navigation technique for some time, but I boned up on navigation. I researched a character using my own name, but a character who spent a lot of time in the Netherlands. And then I would do these gigs outside of my booth for the Guild of St. Michael's. Some of the members of St. Michael's wanted to dance, and they'd meet me at the well, which was close to where my booth was that year. And I'd fiddle and I could prompt them through some dances. That was something I learned to do to prompt dances while playing. I knew that dance masters in the historical period did that, and then I saw Dave Ricker do it at workshop, and it was like, well, Dave can do it, I can do it. So I developed that degree of stereo brain where you can prompt the dance while you're playing the tune. That's something I've used for dances of other historical periods in my work for museums. So really, there's been with my history work and I've had two parallel careers in music and in history, and I've combined them in different ways in different places. And the fair was one of the first places that I did combine them and had opportunities to create more than just a performance on one instrument, but ensemble performances, starting with the Dickens fairs in '74 and '75, creating actual shows that combined people role playing with the music and dance starting in 1978 at the Northern Fair, somewhat under the ages of Ian McKenzie and Clann McCollum, and then creating environmental areas, really starting in 1987 with when I came back with that proposal. And that was the proposal when you talked about Phyllis, did Phyllis ever intervene for me? And I know that she did on that, that nobody knew what to make of my proposal to have an environmental area where I just taught both fair participants, but especially fair visitors about Elizabethan life. And I think a lot of people just want to do this thing. And I am told, it wasn't in my presence, but other people told me that when they were discussing this, whether this was something they could do, that Phyllis said that she'd seen lots of proposals from me over the years from music and dance shows, and that she had said, if Simon says he can do it, I think he probably can. Let's take a chance on it. Let me, again, push you a little on that and ask you to articulate, what do you think was the mandate behind shipping under Oakwood? And how did you replicate that elsewhere? Well, I didn't replicate it elsewhere. I just took skills that I had that I had developed there and took them elsewhere. Shipping under Oakwood, I think that's easy. The illusion is, there's a small English town somewhere in South Central England that happens to be holding a market day, which is why you have all these booths and vendors, and just happens to be on the way of Queen's Progress, which is why you get to have the Queen pass through it. So that's the illusion. I don't think any of the other fairs I've worked ever recreated in as much detail that illusion was as the California fairs did while they were being operated by the Living History Center. I'll say that for openers. And so what I did at a few other fairs, training up groups of volunteers to portray different kinds of people, and by the way, teaching them dances and songs and all that, that's something I do. Those were maybe little glimpses of the magic that we had in shipping under Oakwood that I was taking other places. And by the way, the idea of character interpretation, which I did at various museums that I worked for sometimes just for a couple of weekends a year, such as Pennsbury Manor in Pennsylvania, a couple of different sites in Minnesota, including the Oliver Kelly Farm, and then Half Moon. One of the times I left the fair for a while was to direct a museum based on a reconstruction of Henry Hudson's Half Moon. I got a whole ship to work with, which is kind of fun, not just the facsimile of the Golden Hinde, a ground on the Ben Johnson stage, not just a smaller model of the Golden Hinde parked on a wagon chassis in front of my booth, but I actually got to work on a whole ship and be in charge of it and train the people there. We didn't do a lot of first-person interpretation there. We did some. And then when I went to work for Tri and Palace, you know, by that time the fairs were changing. This is 1998. I had been contracting for the palace seasonally in December since 1990, but in 1998, they offered me a full-time job. And so that's another time that I kind of disappeared from the fairs. And that time, in 1998, I didn't come back because the fairs in the meantime changed. They were already changing during the '90s when the fairs themselves were sold to REC, and then when the living history center kind of faded into the sunset of any. In road for a sec? Yes. I think you identified perfectly two of the three themes that I really found useful about. Agora and the fairs of the pattersons. And why it is so on in a sense easy to replicate fairs elsewhere because the concept can be explained so easily. It's market day, the Queen's coming, and the third element is have fun. You are here to go to pleasure fair, and everyone is here basically to have a good time and maybe buy some stuff, and maybe say, "Pizah, God saved the Queen." But have fun was an explicit sort of command. And what the fair did was break down whatever barrier between the audience and the participants was and to say, "You're here to have fun." The way I describe it is if you want to do a fair, you just say, "It's market day, the Queen's coming, have fun, go." And there's really not a lot of, and within that framework, you can do pretty much whatever you want. No one's there saying, "Oh, you can manage a booth if you're over 30 years old and have an MBA from Wartan or something like that." I mean, if somebody wants to set up a tug-of-war competition in the middle of the street, they just set up a, you know, they get kind of permission. And if somebody wants to do in a Scottish show, I'm not doing the math, right? But 19th century English tunes, and they make them look sort of irish-y. They're going to go, "Okay, go for it." Right at the disposal. I mean, that was something, you know, because I also write pretty effectively, that that was a skill that I had to begin with. And that's really useful. Back in the mid-70s, when I wanted to get hired as a musician, for '75, I think I wrote a one-page proposal for, "Hey, I have this music group. This music group could play in Fezziwigs. We can play every kind of dance music you need in Fezziwigs. These are the people. These are the instruments they play. This is how much you need to pay them." And so starting in 1975, I delivered written proposals for pretty much everything that I wanted to do at Fair. That helped a lot. I think that was why Ian Mackenzie in 1979 had me negotiate with Ernie Caswell on Dennis Day. The four of us all sat down together and worked out the budget for what the Scots wanted to do, how many states that we were going to do, two main stage shows that were going to include piping and fiddling, Highland dancing, Scottish country dancing, and Irish dancing. All that was laid out in a written proposal that I wrote. I perhaps overstated my freedom of the fair, because as I recall, we had to do a proposal, and I think usually Mark wrote it, and we had to audition, even though we had done... You say, "We, Mark Wallace, which Mark..." I'm sorry, Mark Selen. Oh, yes. Oh, great. Okay. Good. But I was thinking more of what we did on the street rather than the stage, I think, but it wasn't quite as loosey as I implied. I'm sorry. Well, because you had Mark, but some of the groups that I was with had me. And then I remember for the proposal for the environmental area, I thought they need to be able to visualize this. So I do a little picture of myself under a wedge dent that was pulled up with a sign and with navigation instruments hanging from it. And I remember it was funny, because when I drew the picture, I hadn't bought the tent yet, and I hadn't made the navigation instruments or any of that. But somebody in administration, I can't remember who it was, but somebody said, "You know, your booth looks just like that picture that you gave us." And I'm not a great artist. You know, it was a funny, slightly cartoony kind of picture. A lot of these groups, your group had Mark, various Irish and Scottish groups, and then ultimately myself with my environmental area, I had myself writing a nuts and bolts proposal. And I know that's a real asset. People who were just part of the groups that Mark led or I led maybe didn't see that side of it, but that side of it was always there. Looking back especially, I agree 110%. So thanks Mark and Simon for talking to the fair for all of us. And on a somewhat related note, when you are talking to the fair and coming up with a budget for your shows, what was your sort of internal caution between dancers and musicians and actors? I was sort of coming up from the stage side of the equation where everybody basically got the same. Well, there are, I wouldn't say that all those distinctions are meaningless because people who play musical instruments take them out to this hot dusty placing the strings and replacing their lead. And then there are better musicians than others, and ones that will show up pretty consistently in ones of the world. I was happy to pay musicians more than I paid dancers. Yes. Sorry. I was comfortable with that. It was kind of neat that some groups like Pipe and Bowl, for example, dancers got paid, I think about the same as the musicians. I think I mentioned in 1979, Doug Berger invited me to join Pipe and Bowl as a dancer, and I was, with some reluctance, had to turn it down because that was the year that the Clam McCallen started doing a main stage show, which I was directing, and doing our own workshops before fair. That was what I was committed to, so I stayed with that. Well, it's an interesting idea. Different compromises are worked out at different places. Now, you have been in musicals and performed professionally and written and produced and arranged things. What do you find is the difference, if any, between a fair and a non-fair musician in terms of being able to adapt to different environments? I came already from a background theater. Like, when I was directing these shows at fair, I was also part of a touring Russian music group called the Massonkaw Russian Folk Festival, and I played, in that band, I actually didn't play fiddle. I played Contrabass Bellalika, which is a Bellalika the size of a small car, but that group was like that, too. Then we go on tour, we'd be playing one-night stands in different locations, flying to all of them. Sometimes we go straight from the airport to the tech rehearsal, if the plane was late and wouldn't get to our hotel, until the little bit of time we have between the tech rehearsal and the performance. So I was performing on that level. With that group, the Massonkaw group, we played in Carnegie Hall, we played on the Darn the Shore show, we did Pops concerts together with the Honolulu Symphony, San Francisco Symphony, Baltimore Symphony, and the London Ontario Symphony, not London, England. So I was playing music with groups like that for these short little tours we did in between and around what I was doing at Fair in like 1979 and 1980, and then booking European tours for groups of musicians I put together, and then playing venues in Europe, and played some pretty big venues over there, too. I think I was already to some degree doing music in that sort of way. Right. As well as at Fair. Maybe that made me well qualified to direct these big music and dance shows because I wasn't afraid to say, okay, we're going to do it my way. Your way might be good, but we're going to do it my way. I don't think I did that very often, which is probably why I stayed around Fair. I didn't end up being tired and feathered and run out on a rail, but I certainly had the capability to say, no, no, no, this is how we're going to do it. I'm smiling a little bit because someone I worked with in Fair shows was Terry O'Neill, who is an Irish dancer, was many things, but among other things, an Irish dancer, and he played tin whistle, and he was in a lot of the groups that I played with. At various points, he teased me for running as he put it, running the Klan Colin Show with an iron hand, but he said the iron hand implies the velvet glove. And so I was working with people at Fair. I think I could be tactful. It's just that behind the tact, there was always that willingness at a certain point to say, we're going to do it my way. I'm kind of running out of questions, but before we go, you'd ask about who nurtured me along the way at Fair, and I gave you a list of people. I'd love to give you that list again. Okay, but let me ask my question first, because I'm going to be the editor. If you were to, and again, getting back to Joy, composed as sort of all Renaissance Fair band, you sort of mentioned some names already, Dave Rickert and people like that. Who would be on your all Renaissance Fair band? Just people you just want to sit down and play with. Dave Rickert on the fiddle, Bob Thomas on the pipes, Brian Delarmy on the fiddle, Ava Sminger on the fiddle. Nice to have Stacy back on the recorder. Certainly Dave Miles on the drum. There's some other excellent drummers too. Robin, there was drummer named Robin, Robin, a guy named Robin who played drum. He's, you know, going down the list, I'm sad to think the most of these people are deceased now. I'd love to have Mark Sellen fiddling. I would love to have Richie Van Healy playing. Just, you know, fun to have him along too. At various years, I found people like, Oh, who's this new person with a violin? Oh, yeah, I play in an orchestra over there and go, Hey, how'd you like to be part of our show? You know, we can pay you, you know, whatever you're making, we can also give you another $15 a day and some food tickets. I've incorporated people into shows I did it very much that way. Who's that person? Oh, yeah, yeah, he can really play. Hey, you want to play our show? It'd be great to have Dick Bagwell either on his pipe and taper or a tin whistle or recorder. I'm sure once we're done with the interview, I'll think of names of other people that I should have included. But those are some of the musicians I really, really enjoyed working with over a period of many years. There are also some excellent musicians that, you know, were in a show that I was part of or that I directed for a couple of years, but then, and then they stopped doing fair and they were just as good musicians and just as fun to work with as the others. But those names that I came up with, those are people I worked with over a period of years, in some cases, even decades. And what was the question I interrupted? Did you were going to answer? You asked me, well, who are the people who encouraged you along the way? That's right. I'd like to answer that question again. Okay. Okay. Okay. First of all, when I first auditioned age 17 to be a past the hat musician at the Dickens Fair down on Army Street, Eileen, the director at that time, I don't remember her last name. She was the entertainment director for both the Renaissance and Dickens fairs. Eileen, she let me do an audition together with Maria and gave us a past the hat license and three food tickets today. And that was great. I was just out of high school and looking for gigs. Then she was replaced by Peg Long. Peg Long was another person who appreciated a well-written proposal. And you could sit down and talk with her. And she was really good at saying, well, here's what you proposed and that's great. Here's what I need. Can we make these two things fit that this budget? And I remember having that kind of conversation many times at Peg, you know, it's great to be able to negotiate with someone like that. Then Peg was replaced by Ernie Caswell and Dennis Day. Remember that conversation during workshops in 1979 when I took over the stage shows and the in-camp crafts and other things for clan Colin. It was Ernie and Dennis and Ian and myself and kind of ironed out the details of budget and what was going to be done. Dick Bagwell, he was someone who really did a lot to help create what became Chipping Under Oakwood starting way back in the 70s before I even started doing the fairs. Like in the early 70s, he developed the basic fair accent, classes and handbooks. He portrayed Will Kemp. He's actually a was a leading person in reviving the pipe and Tabor, the one-handed pipe. You know, he played the Tabor the other hand and he and I could tell you stories about the first time that we actually introduced ourselves in fair and was in character and I got to be gobsmacked. Not the Will Kemp. I knew who Will Kemp was. It's like, here's this well-dressed man who plays the pipe in Tabor and he's just introducing me. He's Will Kemp and that was a fun interaction. And then he and I both worked a little Renaissance fair on the periphery of New Orleans together and that's a fun story if you've got time for it, how he ended up being the two Californians working this fair in New Orleans. And then moving on in time, Linda Underhill, I cannot say enough how much I appreciated Linda Underhill as a director, as a mentor, as a colleague. She was one of those people who really could imagine things and make them happen. You know, like Bagwell, almost a generation early. Dick was imagining people all speaking some version of Elizabethan English who, coming up with a course to get people to try to speak in a somewhat Elizabethan way way back in the early 70s and made that happen. Linda had great vision of how to use people and resources to create both at the fair and at workshop in the woods. These really magical experiences. So Linda is one of my very favorite people to work for and with at the fair. It goes without saying, but I need to credit Phyllis. At various points, Phyllis Patterson herself was the person who put the seal of approval on proposals that they had. I was told that at least one of those where no one knew what to make of it, but Phyllis said, hey, let's give it a shot. He's got a track record with us and if he says he can do it, I think he can probably do it and it will be good. And she would come by, especially when I started having environmental areas. So I wasn't just this musician flitting around like I was when I was in the suicide squad. She'd come by my booth. She'd tell me what things she particularly liked about what I was doing. You asked if she'd ever admonished me. She never did, actually. I think I'm pleased to say I think she liked what she saw. What I did get from Phyllis sometimes, as I also got from Linda, was what you're doing is great. Can I get you to develop this? Can you work with somebody else to do this, to re-rig the Golden Mind on the Ben Johnson Show? That was a Phyllis thing. Linda and Phyllis were really good about that. Can you remember any other Phyllis and or Linda specific suggestions? Well, I remember a compliment I got from Phyllis was she was putting together. I think she was putting together some kind of dream team to do something. I don't remember what it was. And she said to me, Simon, you always bring such a jwad to veev to everything you do. And I wish I remember more of the context, but it was such a nice compliment. I felt like, yeah, you really get me, don't you? I didn't say it, but I thought it. I do have a lot of enthusiasm for the things I do, whether it's in music or history or education. It isn't hard for me to get really fired up about something and work and work hard on it. I know that that was a quality that Phyllis appreciated in me, and she wasn't afraid to express it on some occasions. She said I had to ask my opinions on things. What are they doing over there? Is that good? Is that really audience interactive? Is it really fun? Not often, but sometimes. Linda, we give notes to everybody. And I think she appreciated that I was someone who could be told once, what we could do, you know, not have to be told repeatedly. Because there were people that she would have to tell repeatedly, or people who were unhappy with this or unhappy with that. For me, just give me a place to do what I do, and I'll do it, and I'll do my best. And that's how I've always been about everything I do in all those different areas. And that's a quality that I don't know, you either have it or you don't. But I chose to pursue these twin careers in music in history, because I enjoy them, not because they were how I was going to make the most money. Can I ask you another question about your enthusiasm? Yes. Is it true? The first year, I don't know if there's Dickens or Fair, you took five instruments as a street performer from your house to the performance venue? Yes, I did. That was that was Dickens Fair in 1974. I was a multi instrumentalist. And so I thought, yes, I would bring I brought a fiddle, I brought a mandolin, I brought a 12-string guitar, I brought a five-string banjo, and a washboard. That's right, all those five instruments. And I was carrying all those five as a street performer from one place to the other. And then when I came back in '75, I've just brought a tenor banjo. And then when I started doing the Renaissance pleasure fairs in '76, it was with a fiddle. So there was a learning curve? Oh, absolutely, very simple one. You figured that out pretty quick. After Dickens Fair '74, I would sometimes bring just one instrument, which would be a fiddle, I would sometimes bring a second instrument, which for the Dickens fairs was sometimes a Chinese arhoo, an instrument I played since my teens, for the fair, sometimes it was a cruth, the Welsh six-string bode lyre. Sometimes I play cruth in camp, or in my boat, it's fun because it's a different looking instrument. It's more common now than it was back in 1979 when I started playing, when I started playing cruth. But yeah, deciding to do fair with one or possibly two instruments was something I learned after that first year at the warehouse on Army Street. I'm running out of questions. In the course of this interview, have you had any memories that you have not thought of for a long time? This is sort of your time to do the fill in the blank, or I should have mentioned so-and-so. Well, I think one thing about Fair, when you mentioned the grandmother from Puerto Rico, and I talked about Avis, the fact that Avis was completely bilingual in English and Spanish, and with her family, her mother, and also her sister, usually spoke Spanish rather than English, and you knew her at Fair, but had no idea that she had that language ability. And I think I also mentioned that she was a graphic designer. When I was developing a group to do tours in Europe, she designed our flyers and did beautiful hand-drawn artwork on those. I would say this that a lot of the people that I met through Fair were a lot more than what you saw on the first impression at Fair. Say Bob Thomas, for example. Okay, great musician, busker, but he also did artwork for the Grateful Dead. Some of the really famous Grateful Dead artwork is Bob Thomas' work. I think the Fair in its payday back when Living History Center ran it, attracted a lot of people who are multi-disciplinaryans. And so a lot of the people that I met through Fair had abilities and talents and sides to their personality that you just had to get to know them to know. You know, Dick Bagwell and Ava Sminger and Bob Thomas come to mind, but I'm sure if we sat here and talked about them longer, I'd probably come up with dozens of people like that. And I'm sure you know dozens of people like that that, oh yeah, they did community theater. And oh yeah, they were professional artists. I think that kind of theater in the round environment where there's music and dance and visual arts and food and all of these different things, you know, some of the booths themselves. I remember at Black Point when he went up the road a while, there was Wendy Westfall with her cloak booth and it was right near Chris Caswell's harp booth. And people who played harp would just sit in Chris's booth and play the harp. And it was such a neat environment. It was away from the really big crowds as you get down the market cross and the washing well. It'd be a little bit quieter. You begin to see the trees and the leaves a little more. And these lovely environments that people would create with their booths, I think fair in that era attracted a lot of people who were multi-talented, multi-disciplinary. And it was exciting to be a part of that. And having people like that attracts other people like that. And I think that's a good ending point for this interview. So thank you very much. Simon Spalding. Thank you. Thank you, Dan. So now I find the stop recording button. And that was my 2024 interview with Simon Spalding. I'm your host, Dan McLaughlin. And this has been another episode of Fair Folk at Work. If you have a question or a comment you'd like me to pass on to Simon, you can email me at djng@earthling.net. If you have questions or comments for me, you can email them to me at djng@earthling.net. And finally, if you or someone you know would like to be a guest here on Fair Folk at Work, you can, yes, email me here at djng@earthling.net. But that's it for this time. Thanks for listening. Bye bye.