Renaissance Festival War Stories September 13/14, 2025

Continuing from weekend 4...

It's weekend 5 of the Minnesota Renaissance Festival. The collective feeling going around is 'tired.' Many people I know overslept at some point over the last week, myself included. Hit was humid, 70s, and a bit rainy, and we were ready to play.

An Invasion?

In the renaissance festival community, when a big group of on faire's community goes and visits another faire, they call it an invasion. This weekend was the unofficial invasion from the Bristol Renaissance Festival in Wisconsin. While I have not had the opportunity to visit their faire myself, I have heard wonderful things. The couple I spoke with said wonderful things about our festival: the variety of food, the expansive space, the variety of music - but what he love most was just that, the variety. They loved how multi-cultural we all were all of these things. We may be in Renaissance England between 1350-Something and 1580-something, but the whole world existed then as it does now. Only downside, Bristol faire has flushing toilets and we don't.

Fart contest

One of my favorite parts of the season has been being a part of the Last Call show with Squires Wort& Gort. This season he has our segment be a game he styled "Chore Lorde." This weekend's Chore Lorde became an oh-so-classy fart sound contest with King Henry. Of course His Majesty employed proxies and won. He's the King, how else should it have gone?

Petty Zoo

This season, there has been no active petting zoo. The biggest bummer of it is that it is still listed in the program and it's on the map. However, there are no animals in the petting zoo. On the warm morning of the weekend, I went and stood inside it below the sign. I spoke some one liners and offered directions. Then would approach some families. looking for the petting zoo. I would shake their hands and say, "There, now you can say you pet a deer in the petting zoo." The children: absolutely disappointed, the parents, enjoyed the bit. 'Only Animal in the Petting Zoo' might be one of my new favorite bits.

boop-honk-awooga-shazam

Last season, I learned from Jacob and Gaspard along with Nicholas Unchained, a fun way to greet your friends. When two friends meet, you touch tummies and say "BOOP." When three friends meet, their tummies touch, and the sound made by everyone is, "HONK." When it's four people, "AWOOGA," like an old-timey car horn. And when five OR MORE people come together, it's a "SHAZAM!" It's incredibly satisfying every time, no matter the size of the group. I give credit to the gentlemen who taught it to me, and hope that, one day, I will be somewhere out in the wild and I will see strangers meet each other and boop-honk-awooga-shazam.

On The Edge

It was Sunday when Nestor and I had a great group of riddle-answerers in our audience. They were quite adept and so we were dipping into our more challenging content. I look to Nestor and say, "I'm going to slow-burn them with this one for a bit, I'm going to edge them." Gaspard, as mentioned from earlier, was passing by and stopped dead in his tracks when he heard that, but couldn't stay long enough to figure out that that meant in terms of riddles.

So I tell the riddle that has the answer referenced in it 4 different times with two different word-plays. We wait several tells before telling them clues. The anticipation builds. They audience, as a team, starts working together...interesting. Someone says something that happens to be a direct parallel to the answer, but not the answer...interesting. I give another clue. They start saying the theme around the answer...Interesting. Someone references half the answer...INTERESTING. Then all at once, about five of them say the answer at the same time. YES! YES! YES! My heart is genuinely racing. I wanted to pull out a carrot and light the end like it was a fat cigar because I was so satisfied with the solving of it. Rosie gave me a little piece of salt-lick instead. It worked in a pinch, but gods, what a good riddle it was!

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We head into the penultimate weekend 6. I am getting tired, but I still love this. See you then...