Come now; what masques, what dances shall we have,
To wear away this long age of three hours
Between our after-supper and bed-time?
Where is our usual manager of mirth?
What revels are in hand? Is there no play,
To ease the anguish of a torturing hour?
— Theseus, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, V.i.32
Willie had been to a Renaissance Faire, once, during the day, so he thought he was prepared for the temporal jolt that awaited him. He was ready for the jostling of genuine and well-researched Elizabethan elements — costumes, signage, and language, men with beards of formal cut, and women with voluminous whalebone-enhanced boobs — side by side with a retro sixties hippie culture of crystals and unicorns, herbal teas and drip-wax candles, all beneath an overlay of 1980s marketing sensibility: everything that was blatantly un-Elizabethan — generators, first aid outposts, pay phones — was swathed in burlap, but the ale-stands proudly advertised Dr. Pepper.
Willie was ready for all that.
But he’d never been to the Faire at night.
The temporal collision after dark was like that of a VW bus, a Harley, and a hay cart. Part geekfest, part campout, part house party, part orgy. As Willie entered, he saw a food booth directly across from the entrance crowded with half-costumed individuals lining up for a cheap dinner of pasta and garlic bread. To his left under a tattered burlap roof upheld with gnarled oak staves was a blacksmith’s, complete with forge and anvil, filled with burly, hairy Scots. They all wore kilts, some wore tam-o’-shanters, some wore cloaks, some wore leather jackets. They all drank Michelob, and distorted Dire Straits blared from the blown-out speakers of a boom box on a hay bale. Unnoticed by the partying Picts, Willie passed along the dirt road toward the canopy of oak trees to his right.
He walked a little farther and, as promised, he caught a whiff of coffee and chai and cardamom, and a burst of music and laughter borne on the same breeze. He followed his nose to where the floor of the narrow valley rose up to meet the oak trees, and found a Middle Eastern coffeehouse, its signage all faux-Arabic script, with garden seating on hay bales around a stage under a small oak tree to one side. A dumbek drummer with long braided hair and a cigarette hanging from his mouth played alongside a twenty-something with a shaved head, a Gang of Four t-shirt, and knee-high, soft-leather boots, caressing out an Arabic melody on what looked like an Elizabethan lute yet sounded straight out of Aladdin. On the stage two belly dancers undulated, wearing sparkly Egyptian cotton skirts and t-shirts that said:
I’M WITH STUPID —> AND <— I’M WITH STUPID
Willie stepped up to the coffeehouse counter. Behind it milled five or six women, all young and pretty, pouring hot water that seemed to come from nowhere into battered copper pots. A girl behind the counter smiled and came over to him. “Hi, there. What can I getcha?”
“Just coffee.”
The girl smiled and came back a second later with a hot foam cup of what turned out to be very good java. “Do you want anything to eat?” she asked chirpily.
“No, thanks,” Willie responded, stirring half-and-half into his cup. He was a little hungry, but the plate of food a customer was taking away was an entirely unappetizing pile of mush.
“Yeah, it’s not very good,” the girl offered. “I’m just so hungry. I totally forgot to have lunch, and I’m not really supposed to be working tonight, but I started, and now one of the other girls disappeared, so I should stay because it’s really busy. Ugh.”
It did seem busy behind the counter, but the girl seemed to show no urgency to return to serving customers. She was pretty in a classic-film style: black hair, brown eyes, lips made up with bright, deep red lipstick, that kind of perfect skin where she could’ve been an old fifteen or a young fifty.
“Hey,” Willie said — anyone who liked to talk this much would as a matter of course know lots of people — “I’m looking for Jacob. Is he around?”
“Jacob, fool Jacob?” asked the girl-woman, but didn’t wait for a response. “He was here a little while ago, but I think he’s at the show. Why, do you need something? Because I have some mushrooms,” she said helpfully.
“What show?” Willie asked.
“The night show, at the main stage.”
“Which would be where?”
The girl-woman laughed. “You’re new around here, aren’t you? Come on, I’ll take you.”
“Oh . . . okay, thanks. That’d be great. What do I owe you for the coffee?”
“Didn’t I take your money already?” She giggled. “I didn’t, did I? I’m not very good at this.” She giggled some more. “Hang on, I’ll be right out.” She disappeared, and Willie saw one of the other girls behind the counter shake her head as she watched the giggling girl-woman shuffle her way out a side door. She still hadn’t collected Willie’s money.
Nice gal, glad she doesn’t work for me.
Willie’s new friend — Rebecca, he learned — chattered their way up the canyon beyond the coffeehouse. It was pitch-black under the oak trees, and she produced a flashlight. Willie wished he’d been smart enough to bring his own. But as he watched, a raucous glow in the darkness of the dirt road ahead resolved itself into a gaggle of girls wearing a variety of colored, plastic glow sticks around their necks, singing an Irish neo-folk punk tune loudly and not entirely off-key. Trailing them was a little girl of no more than ten. She came running up to Willie with a big smudge of dirt on her cheek and a glowing blue fluorescent tube hanging from her necklace.
“You want some LSD on a stick?” she asked innocently.
“Sure,” said Willie, caught a little off guard.
“Bend over,” the little girl replied.
Willie did so and she fastened the necklace around his neck, stepped back to regard him for an instant, cocked her head. “That’s pretty,” she said, and skipped off to rejoin the wandering punk minstrels. Rebecca laughed, and said, “Welcome to Witches’ Wood!” She led him into a space hidden behind a tarot-reader’s booth that was draped with Indian fabrics and strewn with Moroccan pillows. As Rebecca rummaged for her jacket, Willie saw a tarot deck sitting on a table. He flipped over the top card, fully expecting it to be the Fool. It wasn’t. He couldn’t make it out at first in the dim light. He held his LSD on a stick up to it, and saw that it depicted a young man, contemplating the leaves bursting forth from a staff in his right hand.
“Page of Wands,” Rebecca said, putting on her denim jacket. “I love that card. It’s just, like, go! Be creative, be daring. Jump up and invent a new solution, on the spot! Trust your free will! I forget, did you say you wanted some shrooms?” She reached into an inside pocket and pulled out a small baggie with two small mushrooms in it. “Because I already took as many as I need. You can have these if you want ’em.”
“Are they any good?”
“Oh, yeah, they are, I’m seeing God.”
Willie took the mushrooms from the baggie and held them up. In the light cast by his luminescent necklace, they glowed blue.
He handed the baggie back. “No, thanks,” he said. “I really need to make a delivery.”
Willie and his new friend strolled back toward the center of the Faire, passing small groups carrying flashlights. Most booths were dark. There was a grungy-looking party going on at the archery range, all bleary eyes and Grateful Dead. Farther along, one of the ale stands had Bon Jovi blaring out an open side door, and Willie caught a glimpse of a bare breast peeking out from a puffy green dyed shirt as a girl raised an arm and a beer inside and screamed “Wooooo!” to Slippery When Wet.
“You want a beer?” asked Rebecca, nodding toward the ale stand.
“No, I’m good.”
They passed one stage — the Inn Yard — dark now, though surrounded by a veritable food court of Elizabethan dining options: turkey legs, roast beef, cheese pies. Willie heard a loud wave of laughter coming from over the hill. They came around a bend in the valley, and he saw the main stage, forty feet wide, thirty feet deep, twenty feet high, festooned with flowers, ribbons and pennants fluttering in the evening breeze. A replica of Francis Drake’s Golden Hind dominated one side. The stage was lit by the headlights of three idling long-bed pickup trucks parked around the perimeter of the rows of hay bales. There was an audience the size of which astounded Willie: four hundred perhaps. There were three guys performing some sort of broad comedy. As he got closer he recognized the guy in the dress. Tonight he was wearing not Elizabethan costume, but a fetching leopard-print miniskirt with pink, jeweled, plastic-rimmed sunglasses, a Marilyn Monroe wig, and giant breasts made of balloons. He was astride the bowsprit of the Golden Hind, riding it like a drunk girl on a rhinestone-cowboy bar bronco. And he seemed to be having an orgasm.
“No wonder they call it the Golden Behind!” he shrieked, his voice piercing through the crowd murmur and idling engines.
“Oh, yay!” said Rebecca, clapping her hands giddily like she had just been given a pony. “We got here in time for the Short Sharp Shakespeare show. Their night shows are the best. They always do something totally new.”
The three guys in sneakers were nearing the end of an extended crowd-gathering introduction and launching into the main thrust of their performance.
“We now present for your late-night irritainment, the premiere of a work years in the making!”
The crowd cheered.
“A dramatization of our forthcoming seven-volume scholarly epic of Shakespearean studies . . .”
A rousing chorus of booos and scattered catcalls of “boring, boring!”
And then, with a devilish smile, one said, “Entitled . . .” and then the three belted out in unison, “A Compendium of Drug Use in Shakespeare!”
Wild cheers. Someone blew a horn, others beat on drums and shook tambourines or beat on their pewter cups. “You mean drug use backstage!” yelled a hairy, bearded man with a watermelon rind on his head. The heckle got a laugh, too.
The troupe momentarily ignored the watermelon-head. “We dedicate this performance to Ronald Reagan, Carlton Turner, and the entire Drug Enforcement Agency . . . who are sitting right over there. Thanks for coming!” Willie jerked his head hard toward where the troupe pointed, but it was of course a joke, addressed to a couple of Ren Faire security guards standing to one side with walkie-talkies. “Hi, guys,” said one of the troupe to the guards. “Please arrest the heckler with the watermelon on his head.”
The guards nodded and laughed along with the crowd. They were likely just as high as everyone else.
Covered by the laugh and seemingly from nowhere, like in a Warner Bros. cartoon, the threesome produced dirty, ragged cloaks, hunched over an imaginary pot, and launched into the witches’ scene from Macbeth.
“Double, double toil and trouble,” all three chanted in croaky voices, “Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.”
Then one, witchlike, continued:
“Round about the cauldron go;
In the poison’d entrails throw.
Toad, that under cold stone
Days and nights has thirty-one
Swelter’d venom sleeping got,
Boil thou first i’ the charmed pot.”
And they all chanted in unison again, “Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.”
There was an uncomfortable pause.
Finally the bearded guy stage-whispered to the guy in the dress, “The toad, Pete. Throw it in!” And the guy in the dress produced a large rubber toad. He started to throw it in the pot, but first pulled it suddenly to his mouth and gave it a huge lick with what seemed a freakishly long tongue. The other two grabbed at the toad. After a brief scuffle, one snatched it up and gave it a wholly too-sensual French kiss before throwing it in the pot. Finally the bearded guy chanted with increasingly manic intensity:
“Scale of dragon, tooth of wolf,
Witches’ mummy, maw and gulf
Of the ravin’d salt-sea shark,
Root of hemlock digg’d i’ the dark,
Liver of blaspheming Jew,
Gall of goat, and slips of yew
Silver’d in the moon’s eclipse,
Nose of Turk and Tartar’s lips,
Finger of birth-strangled babe
Ditch-deliver’d — ”
“Dude. DUDE! Chill out,” interrupted one.
“That is some sick shit, man,” said the other.
“Birth-strangled babe? And what was that about Jews and liver? That is such a stereotype.”
And they continued on in that vein, moving quickly to other Shakespearean scenes of poisoning, drinking, and imbibing of potions. Gertrude got hilariously, rippingly drunk watching Hamlet and Laertes trying to prick each other with blades dipped in LSD. In a gay porn takeoff, Phuck squeezed the juice of a concupiscence-inducing flower into the eyes of a foursome of Greek lovers, a fairy, and a guy named Bottom, in a Shakespearean donkey show.
“Wanna get high? Take it in the eye!
Wanna have a blast? Do it with an ass!”
Finally a befuddled, lecherous friar who only had eyes for Romeo’s “Golden Behind” gave Juliet a sackful of sleeping pills accompanied by a string of tasteless Marilyn Monroe jokes. Romeo discovered Juliet face-down on a bathroom floor and wailed over her death, ignoring her cartoony snore (ZZZZAAAWP — wee-weeweewee . . . ZZZZAAAWP — weeweeweeweewee). Inconsolable, Romeo bought some goods from a passing drug dealer — who assured him “It’s killer shit” — guzzled it, and promptly died on top of Juliet, his last breath a comically choked whisper:
“O true apothecary! Thy drugs are quick!”