When I saw the ad for "Pirate Festival" I knew immediately that this was our Saturday afternoon destination - we had become stuck in a rut. Saturday mornings at the park, afternoon spent prowling Rite Aid or Trader Joe's...Sundays at the Farmer's Market and later yet another park. Or those weekends when we went from one kid's birthday party to another, considering tequila shots on the way out the door in order to deal with the high levels of squealing sure to pierce eardrums. But this weekend was going to be different, sure to show us something different.
As we drove to the festival, Shawn Joaquin asked me about the pirates.
Will they be nice pirates?
Can I hug a pirate?
What do pirates eat?
Can I eat pirate food?
Will they say aaaargh?
Yes, yes, of course you can hug a pirate Shawn Joaquin. And then we arrived....
You know that kind of creepy feeling you get at the Renaissance Faire when you come across people who are just a wee bit tooooo into their costumes and the attached role, unable to break from their "miladies" and "thou art" even when in the bathroom drying their hands with Costco paper towels? The Pirate Festival is filled with people who LIVE, LIVE, LIVE for Renaissance Faires and travel around the country to attend fairs everywhere, and more than a handful of people who were turned away at the Renaissance Faire gates — so disturbing was their intensity, their make up, their cleavage or their lack of sobriety. These are the people who flooded the ferry landing in Vallejo, ready to be seen as their true selves — black-hearted pirates, fetishists bound into corsets of amazing proportion and boning, drunken sailors with an unquenchable thirst for ale and booty of all kinds.
As we entered, I exchanged a look with Gregg that said "holy crap" while Shawn Joaquin ran past a bare-breasted woman to jump into a cage with a skeleton. Madelena, not to be outdone, screamed from her stroller to join him. With our children safely locked in a cage, I observed the scene around us.
Inhumanly huge breasts with pints of ale balanced on their expansive, vein-laden skin and cleverly hiding coaster-sized nipples to be revealed only when swigging from the stein. Men in ankle length leather jackets, overly tanned and waxed chests bare except the chains and chains of gold and pearls that tangled with their long, curly hair. Seemingly dead faces with eyeballs falling out onto their ragged velvet jackets, itchy fingers on their wooden muskets but no way to sight their enemy. Bodies of all sizes squeezed into bustiers and corsets over thin cotton sheaths, leaving breasts presented nearly horizontally and with little to no coverage. Drunken sailors, wenches, captives and captains, slurring their words and commands as they strolled or stomped about.
Welcome to the Pirate Festival. One of many life-scarring events we have subjected our children to.
$30 in crappy food later, Madelena had made friends with a pirate named Captain Shawn, Shawn Joaquin had danced a jig while hiding behind my legs to avoid the stare of a particularly saucy wench, and I had been propositioned by a drunken pirate who wore a shirt that said “I like it when you [blank] my [blank]” under his velvet jacket and ropes of pearls. Gregg had hunkered down at the relative safety of the not-so-pirate-like picnic tables, sticky with ale and effluence better left unnamed; he was able to observe the role playing and breast-serving-up all the better from a distance and behind sunglasses.
After an hour of nearly pornographic fun and with no money left to waste on bad food, we wrapped it up and headed towards the gate. Other than his jig, Shawn Joaquin had spent most of his time hiding from the scary gaze of pirate ghosts and a particularly scary 6 foot 6 man in full reaper-wear, alternating his hiding with coming out and whining about food, clothing, proximity of his sister or strangers. As we exited, Shawn Joaquin summed it up with a single line: Well, THAT was a LOT of pirates.
Yo ho ho and a bottle of Jagermeister hidden in the folds of a dusty pirate suit by a 60-year old man who's far too old for dress up…yes, yes, yes it was, my son. Aaaaargh.
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