One of the Guys

Chapter 5

AUTHOR’S NOTE: I first wrote about this concept in one of my Problematic Tropes series, of the same name (One of the Guys). I wrote the Tropes essay first, before the memoir, and so it could be a fun and instructive exercise to read the one and then the other, to compare the two. As I said in the Tropes article’s Author’s Note: 

You can compare the two, the way I [used to] compare the two versions of Brent Staples’ “Black Men and Public Space” from its essay form and within his memoir, with my Comp students. Am I comparing my work with an excellent, award-winning, eminent essayist? Maybe…

Tell me your thoughts, if you do decide to do this comparison—I’d love to hear about it.

Also, I discuss some of these concepts in more of a personal essay (rather than a memoir) type way in my vocab word piece called Vapulate. I think there may be an actual clip of this in there too. And one more thing: in this chapter, names of individuals have been changed, but nicknames, stage names, and institution names remain true. When this becomes a ‘real’ book, I’ll have to decide how to standardize that, but for now I’m taking it on a piece-by-piece basis. Tell me what you think about that too.)

Next Time

5 One of the Guys

How I Came of Age as a Man. How I Met My Husband. Bros Before Hos. 

Chapter 5

One of the Guys

It’s 1997 and the small, elite troupe of sword fighters are the highlight of the Colorado Renaissance Festival. These young performers are all either acting students in the esteemed CU Boulder BFA program in acting, or they’re just as well trained elsewhere. All of them have an extensive acting resumé already, even at their young ages, and they have all been in intense training in the SAFD style of theatrical combat, for several months as the RenFaire opens for its weekends, spanning June and July. In total, there are six core trained fighters, with an additional two that weren’t as well trained who got small parts here and there in the course of the fight schedule. 

Even more centrally within the outer circle of affiliated actors and the inner, trained main troupe, are three particularly elite swordsmen – these three are the most talented, hardest working, most completely trained swordfighters in the cast. They’re also the most charismatic, the heaviest drinkers, and biggest heartbreakers. Their job? Nine spectacular fight scenes each day of the hot, dusty, costumed event. The full troupe would gather up in remote Larkspur, Colorado at 8am each day of each RenFaire weekend. They’d costume up, then at 8:30 sharp, they’d warm up all the fights by running them in order: once at ¾ speed, once at full speed. The cannon at the front gates would boom at 10am, signaling to all the booth attendants and performers and anyone else allowed on site before it sounded, that said gates were now open and patrons would soon be coming in, in mostly-costumed droves. 

There are any number of those who work for the RenFaire, all of them necessary but lesser beings. There are artisans and booth attendants, engaged in commerce. There are walk-around characters—singing, telling dirty jokes, enchanting the child patrons by embodying faeries or elves, all shilling for tips. There are the stage acts, vaudevillians like the late great sword swallower Johnny Fox, comedy duo Puke & Snot, a wild animal sanctuary parading beautiful creatures across their stage, and genius dark comedian Ded Bob—calling him a puppeteer is not describing even a third of the delight of his act.¹ 

But above all this rabble are the sword fighting troupe, conducting nine complex and athletic combat scenes every day. They are part of, but above, all the Renaissance play acting: they also put on Western gunfights and bar brawls at Denver bars, lightsaber demos later in the ‘90s at Star Wars movie openings, that sort of thing, but the Colorado Renaissance Festival was their main gig of the year. This troupe—On Edge Productions—were the pro hustlers among the RenFaire little league. They were trained, tight, and brilliant. In their way, they embodied the indigenous mythical motif of The Band Of Young Men: a roving, shape-shifting, dangerous bunch of youths who wander the landscape, causing trouble of all kinds. Magical, sexual, and violent.

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This being RenFaire, the main weapon of choice for the Band of Young Men is the rapier. By itself, it’s the elegant weapon most will remember from the epic Westley v. Inigo fight in Princess Bride. Paired with a long dagger in the left hand, it’s a vastly more complex system that’s period-correct for the Renaissance (the late 1500s and early 1600s). This weapon is not only beautiful, but it’s ego-raising too—a gentleman’s sword from the days of the Musketeers. It looks cool, and feels cool to wield. But it takes the kind of training an actual gentleman from back in those days would have had to undergo, to be able to wield them at all well. The Band were all high level students and teachers in the SAFD school of theatrical combat: though constructed for theatre, the drills and choreography were based on the real martial art of rapier from real ancient fight manuals.Therefore, though the cuts and thrusts might be positioned mostly offline (not aimed at the body), it’s only a few inches and a rotated stance away from being real. The weapons themselves, though not as razor sharpened as the real thing would have been, are still made of steel, wrapped in leather, and in all other ways made exactly to a real rapier’s specs. This particular school has a strict requirement of hours to tests to certifications, amounting to classes of a couple hours each, three times a week, for a full semester. The members of the Band had, after this initial training and vetting, met for a rigorous rehearsal process which spanned another couple months full of three-hour-long, fully physical meetings during which the Band would learn, memorize, and repeat the complex choreography until their movements were all smooth as silk, or steel.

All of the Band were either one or two years fresh out of college, or just barely graduated. So the intensive theatre training regimens and scholarly adherence to detail were still the way they all rolled. Most of them had to have day jobs to pay their rent, and the closer to the theatrical gig work they could make those, the better. One of them was a little older than the rest, and had just passed his bar exam and worked as a lawyer. The rest of them were either just about to graduate with a theatre degree, had just done so, or had done so not too long ago, and nearly all were poised in that sweet spot between their BFAs in theatre arts and whatever graduate school they were vying for next. Everyone was between 22 and 25 years old, apart from the lawyer, and all were in a liminal state, career-wise. This summer gig was a regular one for most of the Band, and as such was doubly liminal—between academic years, between life or career phases, between wild teen/early-twenties-hood and responsible adulthood.

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The Band of Young Men don’t perform on the wooden stages or in the jousting horse fields, like the other acts—no, each fight they enact is right at the entrance gates, kicking up wood chips with each fight scene and warding off drunk or merely clueless patrons from walking into their real, if unsharpened, swords. This year they’ve conscripted the Singing Monks to help them clear the fight areas of patrons, and by mid-Faire, the monks had come up with a series of songs to accompany the fights. The last fight of each day, not only did the monks sing an excellent rendition of some John Williams Star Wars music, but they’d provide lightsaber sound effects as well. This ain’t Shakespeare—more like a postmodern concoction of anachronism, trash talk, and movie quotes. Well, and also some quotes from Shakespeare. Rapiers, as well as daggers, six-foot staffs, and the occasional broadsword, and once, an axe, all make their way into the elaborately choreographed fights of the Band.

All RenFaire workers are required to wear period correct clothing for a vague era called “Renaissance,” which includes velvet doublets, breeches, tights, cuffed boots which would withstand the harsh wood chip strewn ground. The Band would also wear long leather gloves, to protect their weapons. No sunglasses allowed. The Band wears their swords at all times. Because of these restrictions, and because they’re the only people on site, patrons or performers, who carry drawable weapons, they aren’t allowed hats against the sun nor cold beer during their long days. All other character actors could eat and drink whatever they liked, as long as they paid for it. 

The Band’s nine fight scenes were scattered throughout the day, and they’d get ten short minutes before each fight to gather themselves and run through the choreography, and only ten minuscule minutes after each fight scene to catch their breath, get some cold water, and rest before they were then required to walk back on site in character, in the sun, in dusty velvet, heavy boots, and sword-torn brocade.

At the closing cannon’s boom at 6pm, the Band would, already having changed back into civvies, literally run headlong across the faire to the one tap at the one pub which would be generously and kind of against the rules, left open for them. Usually Woodpecker cider—I developed a fondness for that sweet drink that I never would otherwise. But I've given it away, haven’t I ...

This summer, 1997, at RenFaire, one of the central core Band of Young Men is actually a woman. Me.

Dressed in men’s clothing, my presence is a running joke through the many gags, cock-swinging quips, and movie quotes that make up the scripts of each fight. In one particular scene, a well-executed, athletically precise swordfight performed before the large midday crowds, the young woman, character name of Rosalind Silver, battles a male character, name of Lord Buckingham. During a brief break in the fight, the flashing steel swords momentarily pause and the following dialogue ensues:

LORD BUCKINGHAM: Rosalind, you fight as well as a man.

ROSALIND: I wish I could say the same of you.

BUCK: What happened to the dress I bought you?

ROS: I ‘accidentally’ threw it into the fireplace and burned it.

BUCK: Tell me: have you ever been mistaken for a man?

ROS: Why no, Lord Buckingham. Have you?

That quote from Aliens was only one of many movie quotes that would pop up in our fight scripts, some from Army of Darkness and the rest of the Evil Dead series, some from Princess Bride. The following year I’d help to write these scripts, but this year I was the greenhorn in the field: tussling and dick-joking, sexist bantering, movie quoting, and then as the summer matured, hearing all the details of the rest of the Band of Young Men’s many sexual conquests. I was not the first woman ever to have been cast, but I was the first to ever be a member of that inner circle, that Sacred Three Dudes that were always the admired and the envied of performers and patrons alike. On Edge were the act that many regular patrons looked forward to every year. They were why several of the regulars were regulars. I had a test fight on site in 1996, against a critically hung over director/choreographer of the Band, the alpha as it were, and apparently I did well. In 1997 I was given my own character. The odd woman that they cast in the past used to have one or two minor parts in fights, dressed in dresses, and was usually dating one of the swordfighters. I was unusual—cast not as a token and girlfriend, but as an actual member of the Band of Young Men.

I was not romantically involved with any of the Band; I was not there as a sexual partner to any of them, but as one of them. Not that I didn’t want to be—I had a pretty hefty crush on the director and choreographer of the troupe. He was a bit too short and chubby to be purely physically attractive, but there was a reason he was the alpha of the Band. When you watched this man move? Something extraordinary happened: you saw into the past, saw clearly what the swordmasters of yore must have looked like. A smoothness and masculine grace, especially when he wielded his rapier, was intoxicating and mesmerizing to watch. He also had a rich, deep, baritone voice, and was Shakespearean trained. So, he wasn’t much to look at, but by the time I had undergone a few months of serious training under his instruction, being treated as a favored grunt, I was an ardent follower. And then, there I was, a member of the elite BoYM, playing his sister. But that’s the thing—he didn’t cast me as arm candy or a token girl, or as the chick he happened to be bedding at the time. He cast me as an equal fighter to him and also to his second in command. The three of us were the true Band of Young Men. This meant I couldn’t sleep with him. I was one of them. Bros before hos, and I was a bro.

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Each summer, the alpha and his second in command would engage in a contest. It would begin at the first day of RenFaire, and would end at the alpha’s birthday, which was just after the last day of the faire. Basically, it would run from day one to closing cannon on the last day. The contest was a sexual one: the alpha, his second, and the other elite in the Band, along with any other man who wanted to enter, would log as many sexual conquests as they could within that two month-ish time frame. The one who bedded the most women by the end, was the winner. What he won, I don’t know—I can only assume the prize was attaining hegemonic masculinity. Maybe it was as the old Japanese TV series Iron Chef always declared: “The people’s ovation and fame forever.”

This summer, they didn’t let the minor glitch of the elite third man in the Band being a woman get in their way. Nope—Zuko was one of the brothers in arms, and was expected to join the game. Though her male possibilities were significantly fewer than the men’s bevy of babes, she was still expected to at least have gotten laid once before the contest was over. At least once. We few, we happy few...

At this point in my late blooming life I had shared my body sexually with only one other person. I didn’t yet know about my bisexuality—this was the ‘90s, and that wasn’t a choice that I knew existed, let alone felt particularly safe about if I had any inkling. Add to that my confusion and naïveté, plus the (what would today be called toxic) intense masculinity I was surrounded with at the Faire, I would have been bullied severely had I included women in my pool of possibilities. I came to the Band of Young Men from a lifetime of insidious girl-bullying: the bitchiness that cuts deeper (or at least differently) than boys’ tussling. 

This rough and tumble, high-fiving, potty-mouthed camaraderie made me feel for the first time like I belonged. I wasn’t the only nerd in the group, I wasn’t the smartest and therefore targeted for that. I was on equal footing with the Band of Young Men—the three of us were equally talented, boisterous, witty, pretty, strong, and because of that, tight. Brothers in arms share a particular intimacy: even though all the combat was theatrical, the training and practice was real—it felt like we were fellow soldiers, training and fighting side by side, supporting each other, hazing being a test of loyalty and mettle, a signal that you could hang. I’d been tested, and I passed. I was one of them.

You’d think that a hyper-masculine scene like that would applaud girl-on-girl action, as the porn stereotype suggests, but the reality is that this was a serious coming of age ritual, boys into men. As such, the peer pressure was like a pressure cooker—I was one of the elite, the best of the best of the Band, and I wouldn’t dare let them down. I learned, as so many young men do, to perform masculinity to such a height that it wouldn’t be questioned. Bros before hos: If I were to engage in a sexual activity that intimated I had no use for men, the bullying would have been severe. Even in my nearly-virginal, socially naive state, I saw that clearly. Zuko was a bro, and heterosexuality is the only option when it comes to hypermasculinity. I know that sounds off, but rituals are rituals, and their power is primal, absolute.²

So, I only looked at male targets as my own potential entries into the contest. And at the nerd-cauldron that was the Renaissance festival, other than my fellow swordfighters who were off limits for the contest, the attractive and available male possibilities were limited. My participation turned into an aligned but separate contest, called Let’s Get Zuko Laid. The other two stayed with the traditional quantity race.

But it wasn’t merely a question of quantity, though that was the main parameter of the game. Anyone unattractive would be the subject of jeers, and an intimation that you were lowering yourself or desperate, not the way to perform masculinity. Anyone already taken would be immediately counted out, unless you could work some secretive magic, then you were a player. Underage was an absolute no-no, though the inside talk about a cute underage girl would shock any contemporary listener.  

I had somewhere around four technical possibilities myself, though it was really more like three, as one of them, the most gorgeous of the lot—a co owner of the doublet booth—was happily married. One of the others was only mildly attractive, a redheaded member of the improv troupe and erstwhile minor level Band fighter and attaché. One other, a blond, was only 18, which was allowed in our contest, but what was I to do with him, dress him in my clothes and make him my waiting gentlewoman?³ 

The other possibility was tall and lean, one of the walk-around character actors that would sometimes hobnob with the royals. He was very pale skinned, and sported long black hair down past the small of his back, tied with many leather loops in a low tail. His costume consisted of a leather hat and full black and silver doublet, breeches, and tights. He was sort of boring, personality-wise, but I was in a contest, dammit, and he didn’t need to talk. Thing is, he was working there with his long-term girlfriend. He showed interest, though, and they broke up and reunited a few times during the course of the summer, so I didn’t rule him out completely. 

He was known for the pewter goblet he wore hanging from his belt—many of us wore vessels of some kind, as it was so hot there on site and hydration was essential. His small silvery cup was particularly elaborate and pretty, and nothing the Band would have been allowed to wear, rough and tumble as we were. So they named him for that pretty little chalice of a cup.

All of the potentials and conquests got nicknames by the Band—all of which were demeaning, particularly if a Band member were to actually bed them. The 18 year old was a member of the royal family performers, and so was called Princeling. A woman the second in command ended up with was called Piggy or Miss Piggy, named so as to insult her mutual sexual desire for him. And this lithe man in black was Tiny Cup. 

There was a pretty flower seller boy, too, but he soon fell through the cracks, and so it was a matter of which of the two would be Zuko’s sole contest entry: Tiny Cup or Princeling. 

I only had those two as possibilities, let alone being painfully socially awkward. So I did my flirtatious best, and the other two young men competing in the contest proceeded to plow their way through multiple patrons and workers of the Faire alike. We’d bandy nicknames and bedtime stories around each morning’s warmup session, over our woodchip dusted coffee and well oiled swords.

And as the list of broken hearts got longer and longer over the summer, the many jilted ladies began flocking to my side.

One afternoon, I exasperatedly asked the alpha, “Why is it that all your exes are trying to become best friends with me?”

He replied, “It’s because you’re, like, one of the guys. But you have tits, so you’re safe.”

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The storyline through all the fight scenes cumulatively and dramatically built through the day until the ninth fight at the end of the day that was the climactic scene. The basic premise? Two households, both alike in swashbuckling. One family was all blond and pretty and basically the goody two shoes cops of the Faire: three actors and a couple additions from the more theatrically skilled of the walkarounds. Then the three rogues, all sibling characters, which were me, the alpha, and the second in command. All fight scenes were a mix of conflicting goodniks versus rogues, and all were choreographed by the alpha. The alpha also was the instructor of the stage combat class we took that previous semester, and, apart from his second in command and one other actor whom he’d worked with before, he cast the rest of the performance troupe from those students. He told me, as we began rehearsals, what role he’d put me in, and why. He said something similar to the above: that I was not only talented enough to pull these difficult fights off alongside the two top dudes, but that I was the only person he knew who could hang out with them all day.  I took this as a huge compliment, a testament to my talent, hard work, and even my personality. Suddenly, I wasn’t ostracized, bullied, or cast in a minor role I didn’t deserve. I was one of them. One of the trinity. A star.

As most sports and martial practices do, the trash talking during rehearsals was off the charts. I joined right in, happy to be joking about how this dude who got his butt kicked was a “f*g,” and how that power felt, to be included instead of ganged up on. Trash talking is a sacred practice of intimacy when engaged in intense physical training, particularly when said training has to do with violence. I had a good time, too, once I was firmly established as one of them, playing a feminist subterfuge game with the language. When a bro would jocularly tease, “What are you, a pussy?” I’d reply, “No, I’m not a pussy. I have a pussy, but I’m not one.” 

This would make the trash-talker blink for just a second, and then laugh and accept. Just for one split second, to see him go, “oh… yeah” was so satisfying, and strengthening. And amusing. I had even more fun with the ‘90s quip, “That’s tits!” I haven’t heard this slang since, but back then, if something was “tits,” that meant it was awesome, great, cool. One time, one of my opponents said, “That’s tits,” and I added, “Not only is that tits, that’s *my* tits!” It’s true that my boobs are legendary for their beauty, and though none of the Band had seen them, they believed me. After that, if something was cool, it was “tits,” but if it was off the charts amazing, it was “Zuko’s tits.”

Right before the opening day of the Faire, we all gathered at a local bar after rehearsal, to celebrate the beginning of a beautiful combative summer. The teacher of the alpha was there too—the director of On Edge before the alpha had taken it over from his mentor. It was me, the teacher’s teacher, the other two elites in the Band, and two other men who were on the opposing “team.” They all ordered cigars and rum or whiskey or brandy. I had only rum, as my smoking habit hadn’t yet begun at that time. We all toasted our swords and the upcoming gig. Then each man passed me their cigar, having dipped it first in their spirits. It was a ritual, they said, to have a girl bite the cigar end instead of cutting. It would bring them luck. That was how I first learned how to handle a cigar: by biting that of everyone in the gang.

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The last night of RenFaire 1997, and I was drunk off my ass. That wasn’t unusual, though the particularly gooey drunk that comes from drinking mead is a special swimming sensation I can’t quite adequately describe. I was sitting and socializing, at nearly midnight, across the big campfire from a bunch of my Faire colleagues, feeling alone in a crowd. The Band of Young Men were off doing whatever they were doing to whomever they were doing it, and I was coming to the conclusion that I was going to be the only human in the history of the Faire, to not get laid at Faire. I had fended off the halitosis-laden attentions of Princeling—apparently word had got around the gossip farm that is the Faire, that he was on my radar. I didn’t find him at all attractive suddenly, not in my state of gushy intoxication, not with how he smelled, not with his youth. 

There I sat, sighing, honey still on my tongue, when who should amble up to the party but Tiny Cup and his girlfriend? They targeted me, and I knew why. My mead-dazzled brain won’t let me remember exactly how it happened, but what I do remember is being invited to join them both, that night. I remember I looked up at him, down at her, shrugged, and said,”why not?” And so I did.

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I think we finally stopped our athletic nocturnal activities somewhere around 4am. Of course, the warmups for the last day of fights were at 8am, as usual. In costume, raggedly and wryly happy with myself, I weaved my probably-still-tipsy way to the field of battle. We in the Band all got in places for rehearsing the first fight.

There was some banter, as always, regarding the lothario behaviors of the night before, when attention landed on me. “How about you, Zuko? Did you finally get laid?” When I answered that I had, the whole Band responded with a flurry of surprised shouts, questions, and back-slapping, before we all boisterously got back into places. I don’t think they expected me to pull off the putting out. “So which one was it?” the alpha asked. “Princeling, or Tiny Cup?”

“Well,” I answered. “I wouldn’t call him Tiny…”

I could muse in a sociological manner about how my taking of a big dick was an equal gesture to a bragging of my own big dick in this scenario, but I’ll leave it. The real kicker came when both Not-Very-Tiny-At-All-Cup and his girlfriend appeared at the edge of the fighting field. They both had the large grins of those who’ve engaged in exhilarating sex not hours before, and she held a latte in her hand, offering it to me.

I’ve mentioned before how badly the same-sex thing would have gone down in this group. Had it come out that I had bedded them both, not only would I have been mocked mercilessly, but my achievement wouldn’t have been accepted as such. It would have been a cheapening—that I was so desperate for Tiny Cup that I f*cked his girlfriend, too. That I wasn’t ‘man’ enough to seduce him himself. The Band needed to know about Tiny Cup. They absolutely needed to stay ignorant about his girlfriend’s presence during my conquest.

I, part sheepishly, ambled over to the couple, the whispering Band clustered behind me, watching. I accepted the coffee with thanks. “How’d you sleep?” she asked with a sultry wink. 

“Not much,” I answered, and the costumed couple chuckled knowingly before leaving me to the rest of my warmup.

“Whoa!” the alpha exclaimed, regarding the girlfriend’s behavior. “She’s acting like she knows!”

“She has to know,” I muttered, hopefully cryptically.

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That summer was one of growing up, of coming of age. The whole Band went through these rites of passage that are in place to turn boys into men, and as I wasn’t treated differently—I, too, came of age as a man. I didn’t identify as one, gender-wise, necessarily, but I did socially function as one, was treated as one to a large extent, and acted like one. I have no regrets: the mid-‘90s was not a welcoming time for gender or sexual orientation exploration and non-binary options weren’t, at least not as an identity beyond fashion taste. This summer-long adventure was a deeply fun experience, educational in quite a few ways. 

After the Faire was over, I had two dates set up with two different RenFaire performers. One was with Tiny Cup, who dressed like Neo from The Matrix in his non-theatrical life. The other? The other was that meh redhead from the improv troupe: Ninjaboy.

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Ninjaboy had joined in the big final fight of the final day, where the Band would traditionally break out the fake blood and rubber entrails, as well as include more non-fighters to join and do simple moves along with us. We’d do all the crazy shit we wouldn’t have tried to pull during the regular run of the Faire: firearms and squibs, acrobatics, an arm burn, a squirt knife; all these things were on deck for that last seven minutes of that last day. Ninjaboy was slated to perform a handspring and then a dagger throw trick, knife straight into my throat. 

That year, we had more than twenty performers joining us for the final-final fight. It was cold and clammy, raining steadily through most of the afternoon. In the center of the playing field (usually dry woodchips, now slippery chips embedded into deep mud), there was a white plastic hardware store bucket. No, it wasn’t period-correct. But all the regular patrons knew what it meant, to see that bucket placed there, and were eager in their anticipation to see what the final fight would be like this year. The other performers that weren’t fighting with us, including Tiny Cup and his girlfriend, formed a perimeter of protection around the sopping field, and the fighters in their places, ready. The bucket was filled with, in order of their appearance in the sequence of fight moves: fake blood-filled rubber tubing, packs of fake blood of various poppable sizes, and spaghetti with red sauce. All of this was meant to approximate gore of all kinds.

The rain spoiled everything—the non-fighters dangerously slipped on the mud; the squib got too wet and wouldn’t go off, nor would the theatrical firearm make a sound for the same reason. The arm burn didn’t catch on fire—too wet. The squirt knife had somehow been drained of all its bloody filler in the rain, and Ninjaboy had injured his knee and so couldn’t do his handspring.

We were disappointed, but also elated. Covered in mud, spaghetti sauce in all orifices, and sticky with fake blood, we all decided to go to the sushi restaurant where Ninjaboy worked, to celebrate the end of another successful Colorado Renaissance Festival. I discovered my packed civilian clothing had gotten almost as sodden as my costume, so I didn’t have clean & dry clothes to change into. Miss Piggy gave me a horrid pink fuzzy sweatshirt with an insipid-eyed kitten on its front. I hated it but it felt so warm and soft and dry, and I was so grateful for it that I didn’t care how decidedly un-sexy I looked as I sat with the gang at the sushi place and shoveled unagi into my starving face. 

Tiny Cup wasn’t there, but Ninjaboy made a point to stay near me, and make conversation about stage combat, the Band, and the final fight. We chatted about his time with the Band, last summer. This summer, I had heard my fellow Band members chide Ninjaboy behind his back for being not quite up to the snuff of their high level of performance ability. They had nicknamed him Ninjaboy in a mockery of his martial arts training. I had seen him perform the previous summer and was impressed by his Japanese flavored costume and acrobatic abilities—I wasn’t sure where they'd gotten their derision from, unless it was just that he trained at different places than their school. He had strawberry hair tied back in a Celtic-knot-fastened plait, and a red beard, piratelike. He bought me cold sake, which I had never had before, and recommended an advanced level of salmon sushi I had never tasted. He told me how impressed he was with my ability to keep up with (and in his opinion, surpass) the Band of Young Men. The cold sake was warming, and the beautiful food healed me from inside, from my crazy weekend, and freezing, exhausted, messy body. I sighed with smooth intoxication and relief. I looked around to toast my Band of brothers, but they were already gone, no doubt home to Denver. I hadn’t noticed their goodbye. Ninjaboy kept talking: he reminded me of the mid-summer parade, when he had walked the whole length of the Faire with me, asking me about my writing. I hadn’t remembered. He reminded me: he wanted to read some of my writing sometime. I gave him my phone number.

caption...

Re: this picture: The bro on the left was an understudy for the bro in the blue shirt and was taking his place when he had another gig the last couple weeks of the Faire. So he was sort of more Band-adjacent than one of the Thrilling Three. Really nice guy, much sweeter than the Band members themselves. Our nickname for him was Tom Bag o’Donuts, after the Dom Irerra bit that was viral among us at that time. And, before you ask: the alpha was the one who requested I pose like that with my hand on him, for this picture. The fucker. I hear both bros are happily married now in their middle age, and I wish them health and good life. 

1. May he and Johnny Fox rest in peace. Oh gosh, and Puke & Snot too. Jeez…

2. You might be wondering: What?! Theatre people, homophobic? Men in theatre, especially in such a nerdy subgenre as reenacting, engaged in hypermasculinity? Sounds like an oxymoron, doesn’t it? Well there are two reasons for this, as I see it: 1) in a field where one is already more than usual assumed to have the stigma of femininity/homosexuality, the defending and performance of masculinity becomes an overcompensation; 2) swords. Swordsmanship is a man’s art, no matter how many women now and through history have been excellent duellists, etc., that big silver phallus is just that. A swordsman swings his big shiny metal dick around, and the skill to do so has been and still is very male-centric. A woman swinging her big shiny metal dick around? She’s a sexy rarity. Or she’s one of the guys.

3. Name the Shakespeare play.