Chapter 1

Going to the summer Renaissance Faire, or Ren Faire, was the highlight of my vacation. I looked forward to this particular one all year long. Sure, there were others, smaller or closer by, but this was the biggest and best. I’d had my gear packed for weeks. My costumes were in plastic bags, waiting to hang in the car. My instruments had been cleaned and tuned and practiced on so much, I’d had to clean and tune them again. This year, I was going to wear eyeliner, too, as it made me look sultry. It probably wouldn’t be right for the time frame, but I didn’t care, and I’d been having some of my drag queen friends help me make it look both stunning and natural at the same time.

Almost the last thing I had to do was remove my cat, King Henry, from one of my instrument cases. He loved it in there! He was not happy about my removing him. My neighbor was coming in to take care of him, though. This neighbor loved my cat and fed him way too much, so King Henry did not mind that I was leaving; he just wanted the instrument case.

You’d think that with a cat named after a king, I’d be something special, but, alas, I was only a lowly troubadour and sometime court jester. It was because my last name is Cromwell and my mother named me Jesse Thomas that my cat became King Henry the Eighth. At faires, I went by Jesse Summer. Close enough, being court jester aka servant to my King Henry VIII. I do know my history: the original Thomas Cromwell came to a bad end at the hands of Henry the Eighth, but that’s what happens when you are owned by a cat. It could have been worse.

I became a middle school music teacher. My mother was proud; my father was embarrassed. But even a bard must have a day job, so there we are, or here I was. There is a local group that plays ancient instruments, and I joined that, playing the lute and mandolin and some other things you’ve probably never heard of. I loved all the old musical instruments and was lucky enough to be able to sing without breaking windows. Actually, I’d been told I had an excellent voice, but there’s this humble brag term floating around, now, so I just sing. People can think what they want. I impress my students the first week with old, semi-cleaned up pirate ditties, and they give me their best the entire rest of the year.

Now it was summer, the best time of the year. I was free to attend every single faire I could reach, and this weekend was my favorite. King Henry would have liked to go with me. Dogs were allowed, but not cats; I don’t know why, they’re royalty, too.

I finally got out the door without the cat and with a couple of sandwiches for the trip. I waved to my neighbor, an older lady who was hanging clothes on her clothesline like they did in the past; not the past I liked but the recent past, her past, fifty years ago, maybe forty; I hadn’t even been born yet.

Some people think that dressing up for faire is sissy stuff, like doing drag or just being an effeminate man, but if you had seen the real Henry the Eighth or probably any of them, they were definitely not feminine. The clothes, maybe, but that was the times. Didn’t you ever wear bell bottoms, or a flat top crew cut or a flapper dress? Well, maybe not that, but everything has a time and place, including fashion. Fashion and clothing styles changed like the wind, like the type of music that you listened to and the type of dancing you learned and enjoyed.

In my opinion, we are all victims of our times; sheep in the pasture of our decade, locked into the group think. But who am I kidding? My suitcases were full of fashions from the sixteenth century, my instruments are from the fourteenth to the eighteenth. I mixed things up a little. Nobody cared or, if they did, I wasn’t effeminate enough to be attacked and criticized by them. Elephant rides weren’t exactly Renaissance stuff, were they? Yet, here we are, or there they were. And food; yes, you could get hamburgers and hot dogs and soda, but you could also get roast beast, potage, giant turkey legs, black bread pudding, and ale, or beer.

This faire was the biggest in all the kingdom. It had joust—knights on horseback whom we cheered and booed. It had a troll under a bridge. It had jousting lessons with stick horses for kids; it had booths where you could buy handmade jewelry, handmade swords, nonworking blunderbusses from China, or handmade souvenirs of the usual sort from China only marked with the location of the Faire. T-shirts, or capes, or bloomers and armor, whatever you could think of. Cod pieces! Ooh, maybe I should get a couple more. And pirates, even though they weren’t necessarily present, who cared? They fit the attitude of the times, at least, the recreation of those times.