July 28, 2023 • 47 mins
Ariel and Jonathan are back talking more about their work at the Georgia Renaissance Festival, and what it's like to talk funny and to dress up in upholstery fabric all day in the Georgia heat.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
Hey, everybody, welcome to the Large Ner Drunk Collider podcast,
the podcast that's all about the geeky things happening in
the world around us and how excited we are about them.
I'm Ariel Castin and with me, as always is the
ever patient Shonathan Strickland.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
Well we may and might never all meet here again again. Yes,
welcome back, Ariel.
Speaker 1 (00:32):
Thank you. It was a massive storm that took me
out for a whole flip and week.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Now.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
Yeah, it's it's good to be back and to continue
this story about working at the Renfest since obviously we
still can't talk about all of the geeky things that
normally we would talk about until those producers get some sense.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
Yeah, and until the actors and writers get them Dalla Dallas.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
Yes, dollars and cents. So yeah, so we're going to
keep talking about Renfest and thank you to the people
who have asked us more questions about it. And we
left off with me rambling on about getting an injury,
but you had something to share on that along those lines,
(01:19):
as well, right Jonathan.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
Yeah, so I also was injured at Renaissance Fair once.
I have been in combat scenario a few times. I
filled in for someone one year for a couple of weekends,
and I was the bad guy for a season, and
I was a hero for another season. So I had
(01:43):
a lot of combat, but I never actually got injured
doing combat. You know, no one accidentally stabbed me or anything.
There were some close calls. There were a couple of
times where I got like like tagged by the flat
of a sword or whatever, but that you know, they
might give you a little bit of a welp, but
that's the that's as bad as it gets. Uh No.
The one time I got injured was during courtly dancing,
(02:08):
which what how, I'll tell you how areal so so
courtly dancing? Obviously, it's it's some dancing that we would do. Really,
it's it's more like English folk dancing. We didn't do
really any courtly dances because those typically involve lots of
like little steps and jumps in the air and kicks
(02:30):
in the air and stuff like that. Stuff that's not
easy to do when you're outside on un level ground.
Uh So we did a lot of of like folk dances,
so they were more like like the kind that that
the commoners would dance, and some of them were much
more modern than Renaissance, if i'd most.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
Of it is Hole in the Wall of folk dance.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
Hole in the Wall I think is based kind of
off of dances during like the regency, so it's much
later period. But that's that's that's where my injury comes in.
So yeah, there's a dance we would do. I learned
it originally at the SCA actually, but there's a dance
that the Renaissance Festival would do the Court would do
most days called Hole in the Wall. And in Hole
(03:12):
in the Wall, you have you have a partner and
you make up a line with typically, you know, this
is very old fashioned, but you would have all the
lords on one side and all the ladies on the other,
although I think these days we would just mix them
up as much as we wanted to, and then we
would do a series of dances. But the neat thing
(03:33):
about Hole in the Wall is that it has sequences
in the dance where the dancers kind of twirl apart
from each other and then come back together. And so
there are opportunities for someone who is not currently dancing
to swoop in and steal someone else's partner, and we
called it poaching. So you could if you wanted to
try and poach someone else's partner. I always found the
(03:55):
secret to not getting poached was throwing in a lot
of flourishes in the dance because it intimidated everyone. Yeah.
But but there was a time where I did not
start the dance. So there were there was a line
of dancers already dancing, and I decided I was going
to steal her majesty, the Queen. So who was dancing
(04:16):
with his majesty the King his majesty being played by
a friend of ours name John, who it was playing
Henry the eighth. And John is a John's a big dude. Yeah,
I swept in to steal the queen, and so John
decided he would give me a little hip check. And
uh he didn't. He didn't hit me hard or very fast,
(04:37):
but he is a bigger dude than I am, and
it cleared me off my feet. I we were on
a hill, so I fell down the hill. I ended
up spraining my ankle and my wrist and was laying
there on the ground and I hear the King say,
(05:02):
are you all right, Lord Admiral, And I remember saying
I'm not really sure yet. So it turned out I
was mostly all right. I had like I had sprained
my ankle, I had sprained my wrist, and he felt
terrible about it, but I was like, you know, it
(05:22):
literally was because he hit me at just the right
time on just the right spot of the hill where
I was unable to regain my balance. So I was like,
you know, ninety nine times out of one hundred, I
just would have been like pushed out of the way
and it would have been funny. And that's it. This
was just a freak accident. It was not really your fault.
I'm not blaming you. It's fine, but it did mean
(05:44):
that the next day. Because we would perform Saturdays and Sundays,
and then on Memorial Day weekend, we would also do
Memorial Day, this was one of the earlier weekends, so
it was a Saturday. So the next day I actually
had a brace on my wrist and I had my
(06:04):
ankle wrapped, so I was walking around with a cane.
I had a gauntlet like a leather glove, not a
metal gauntlet, but a leather glove over the hand that
had the wrist brace on it, so I could hide
the wrist brace. And I was hobbling around and all
day John went back and forth between giggling and seeing
(06:26):
me because it was so pathetic to apologizing profusely because
of it. And yeah, there's a picture of me, and
I look like the character from Young Frankenstein, the guy
who has the wooden hand, because I'm sitting there with
my hand elevated and it it was. That was the
one time I got injured was courtly dancing at the
(06:48):
Renaissance Fare.
Speaker 1 (06:50):
Gotcha, I I have been injured courtly dancing. Usually it's
my costume that gets injured because when you're dancing in
a hoop skirt, which is what we normally wore h
as ladies, Uh, it gets stepped on and then you
try to move and your skirt gets pulled off. My
skirt pulled off.
Speaker 2 (07:10):
I've been guilty. I think of stepping on your skirt
once or twice.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
Yeah, But the one injury like the biggest time I've
been injured. And I honestly don't remember if this was
at a LARP or at run Fest, because I know
we did this dance at Runfest a couple of times,
and it's just maybe we tried it both places and
one of them I got injured. Was we would do
toss the duchess, which is a circle dancing. It's uh
traditionally guy girl girl, guy girl, right.
Speaker 2 (07:35):
And it's done to the tune ding dong merrily on high. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (07:38):
Yeah, Uh do do do do Do Do Do Do
Do Do Do Do do do do And at the
end you go down a long run. Uh do do
do do do Do Do do do do, And it
goes on and then the end, and then you toss
a duchess and the one partner, partner A, will take
partner B and like pick them up and put them
(07:58):
to the other side. So take from the right to
the left, yes and no, and now you have a
new partner yeah. And now partner B has a new
partner A, and so on and so forth. And there
was one time or a couple of times where we're like, Okay,
now we're gonna switch partner B toss partner A. And
(08:19):
the way it worked out is that all of the
partner bees had been much more accustomed to being tossed,
and all of the partner as had been much more
accustomed to tossing and switching.
Speaker 2 (08:28):
That means.
Speaker 1 (08:30):
Like me, who ended up tossing my partner got kicked
in the shins so flipping hard it bruised and skinned
my knee like my shin.
Speaker 2 (08:43):
That sounds terrible.
Speaker 1 (08:46):
I mean it's also hilarious in hindsight. It was uncomfortable.
It was funny then, but it was uncomfortable then.
Speaker 2 (08:51):
I think it had to be a larm. I mean,
maybe it was at the festival. But I can say
I can say I have danced that dance more than
a hundred times and we never reverse the roles.
Speaker 1 (09:02):
So I think I think we did try it at Fair,
but it was only like once.
Speaker 2 (09:06):
Well, I guess the one time is all you need
to find out what a disaster it is.
Speaker 1 (09:11):
Yeah, yeah, you really need people because also at Fair
we would bring guests in to learn these dances. A
lot of them were not most of them, a lot
of them were not super hard and so but to
do something like that, you really need people who are
kind of more familiar with it already.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
Yeah, yeah, it's uh. That was one where we would
typically grab people from around to make the circle as
big as possible and to make it a real spectacle.
There were certain dances that were so elaborate and complicated,
relatively complicated, that you couldn't easily teach it to someone
(09:45):
in just a minute or so, and so those were
the ones we would do as sort of a demonstration
or or an exhibition. And then there were others that
were much easier to teach, and those we would bring
in partners from elsewhere, like tangle brawl, obviously super easy,
which the whole purpose of tangle brawl is just for
(10:07):
whoever's leading the dance to tangle everyone up. It starts
as a circle dance, but then the leader drops hands
with one person and then it becomes a chain, and
the leader just goes back and forth through the chain,
tangling everybody up until you can't really move anymore, which,
by the way, sounds like it's fun until you're late
(10:28):
in the run of the Georgia Renaissance Festival and everyone's
wearing upholstery and it's ninety degrees.
Speaker 1 (10:35):
And you get a patron's armpit in your nose and
you can't move. Yeah. That I will say it takes
some skill to be the leader of that, because you
can be too timid and not tangle it up well enough,
or you can be far too aggressive like I tend
to be, like when I play Settlers of Katan.
Speaker 2 (10:55):
And get.
Speaker 1 (10:58):
Within five secs. Look, I'm the person who's like, oh,
I'm gonna move the thief and take your one sheep
and your one wheat on round one. I've been yelled
at for that on the Joco Cruise. Yeah, so I
don't do it anymore.
Speaker 2 (11:14):
But the person who typically would would run the dance
when we were doing it was the actress who played
the queen, and she had a really good balance. She
had a good feel for how intense to make the dance.
She's paced it really well so that, you know, she
didn't have us all tied up in a knot to
(11:34):
the point where we couldn't move, like, you know, one
round into the dance, we'd be going for a while.
And that was a lot of fun. And yeah, dancing
in particular, that was one thing I always looked forward
to it. In fact, at one point I became the
dance leader. I became the one who taught the dances
and called them out and that kind of thing, which
was that was a lot of fun for me. Even
(11:56):
we even tried a couple of new ones that were
very complicated. Two I will say mixed success.
Speaker 1 (12:06):
Yeah, yeah, I like I did sometime being dance mistressed
as well, I think when you weren't there occasionally and
then my band played it for a while, so I'd
do that as times did you did you? Was the
mirror dance one of the harder ones that you tried
to do?
Speaker 2 (12:20):
No, that one. I think that one was one of
the easier ones. Honestly. Again, that was when I learned
originally at the SCA Gotcha, so that one I had.
I had learned that one when I was a teenager,
so that one was not too difficult. There is there
is an actual peasant dance called Newcastle, and the village
at Georgia Renaissance Fair is called Newcastle, so I thought, well,
(12:42):
we should really dance Newcastle at least once. But it
is it's got a couple of moves that are hard
to explain to people, especially if you don't really have
the full vocabulary. And while I could teach know the
other dances, this one was one where it was hard
(13:02):
for me to wrap my brain around. There are a
couple of moves toward the very end where there's like
a change in partners and a change in the in
the shape of the dance that was difficult for me
to communicate. So We did eventually get it down, but
you could call, like maybe the first two weekends a
fair rehearsal for that dance, except it was rehearsal in
(13:23):
front of people.
Speaker 1 (13:25):
Yeah, that's fine, you know, we're allowed to make fools
of ourselves. I was always sad when dancing was canceled
due to inclement weather, because I'm like, it's muddy, it's rainy,
I can still dance. It's snowy, I can still dance. Yes,
it does occasionally snow at the Georgia Renaissance Festival once
(13:45):
in a blue moon.
Speaker 2 (13:47):
Yeah. Yeah. The festival typically starts mid April and runs
through early June. But even in mid April, we can
Georgia our coldest weather off and hits a little later.
That It's not like in December or January. It's February,
March and then sometimes into April, and that that was
(14:09):
one of those years. But yeah, I was always disappointed
if we called it too Like there were some times
where it was just so flippin' hot that we would
call it because if you're getting toward the end of
the run and it's that and you're thinking this is
the beginning of the day, too, we would typically do
it early before it would get too hot, But on
the days where it was super hot already, you might
(14:30):
call it just because you've got to You've got a
whole day ahead of you, so you don't want to
burn out, like thirty minutes after opening gate.
Speaker 1 (14:40):
That's true, because at least at our Renfest, actors would
drop long before the gates would close.
Speaker 2 (14:48):
Oh yeah, no, we had We had actors who had
a reputation for not not being upright by the end
of the day and it and often it was because
there was some sort of undie ignosed condition that was
complicating matters. But it also could just be that they
weren't hydrating enough because you you essentially needed to be
(15:09):
drinking water pretty much constantly all day long because you'd
be sweating it out so fast that you need to
have water, and you need salt, you need some form
of electrolyte in order to sow. Pickles and water were
like the go tos for a lot of people.
Speaker 1 (15:25):
Uh, sex, if you don't like pickles, yeah, just now,
I didn't.
Speaker 2 (15:29):
At the time I was I was known as the
anti pickle guy, not because I don't like pickles, but
because people would just reach in there with their hands
to get a pickle out of h yeah, and I'm like, no,
I'm not going to have any of those like, oh,
come on that that surely the vinegar would kill anything off.
I said, listen, if there's anything that could survive, it's
(15:50):
gonna be here at this festival. And I Am not
putting my hand in there.
Speaker 1 (15:54):
But you know, sometimes it was just matter like it wasn't.
It wasn't always because like, okay, so as a person
who has gotten heat, not stroke, but exhaustion a couple
of times. Yeah, which, by the way, you never like
fully come back from that, My heat tolerance is a
lot lower.
Speaker 2 (16:09):
Now same here. I had the same issue.
Speaker 1 (16:13):
Yeah, Like, you can just work so hard and you
think you're hydrating enough, but because you're you're there's this
thing that happens when you act that sometimes you're so
in it that you'll go back, you'll look back at
the end of the day and go, what did I
do because you're just so in it? Yeah, And you
can you can be that way at fair even if
you're like, who's my next group of people to interact with?
(16:34):
You're so focused on what you're doing or your character
that you don't always keep track of the time or
when your last class of water was. I mean, I
got sent home with hypothermia in beginning stages of frostbite
one year because it snowed and I put on a
cloak and I was trying to stay warm. But there's
only so much you can do when you're a scantily
clad peasant girl. Like so uh, but Fair is outdoors,
(16:58):
so we were always victims to the weather. And like
even if I think I've only heard of Fair closing
like twice due to hurricanes or tornadoes or something like that,
and usually we stay open if it's pouring rain and
you just do what you can.
Speaker 2 (17:11):
Yeah, heck, I remember the was it two thousand, It
might have been two thousand, It could have been two
thousand and one. So let's kind let's kind of break
down the different groups that are that make up the
staff of Renaissance Fair because that'll that'll help a little bit.
(17:33):
So you've got your your the actual fair employees, So
that includes people who are ticket takers, and they are
the people who work in the festival owned shops and
the festival owned food stalls, and so the festival owns
some of those outright, and so those are direct employees
(17:55):
of the festival. You also have the street characters. They
are festival employees, and you have the you know people
who oversee them, the Entertainment Department, their festival employees. You've
got the grounds crew. They are you know, contracted by
the festival or their festival employees. You've got the booths.
Those are run by independent merchants who have purchased a
location at the festival. They have their own staff. You've
(18:20):
got street acts. Those are typically contracted to come in
and perform not street acts, but stage acts. They're contracted
to come in and perform on the various stages. Occasionally
you might have a festival owned you know, stage show
like the Shakespeare Parody was done by members of the
street cast, so that was not contracted out to another
(18:44):
theater group or anything. And you've got the Joust. And
when I first started, the Joust was actually owned by
the festival or was you know, an actual festival production.
They didn't go anywhere else. It was a Georgia Renaissance
Festival group. Well, on my last day, I guess it
must have been two thousand and one. I remember the
last day was the last day for the joust like
(19:06):
that was that they were retiring and then the festival
was going to contract outside groups to come in and
put and perform a joust. And at the end of
the day, we got one of those massive pop up
thunderstorms that is common in the southeast, and it was
it was a whopper, like the lightning was very close by.
(19:29):
It was one of those where you'd see the flash
of lightning and you would hear the thunder almost immediately afterward.
But it was the last joust that they were going
to do, and they were determined to do it. So
I remember standing up on the reviewing stand where the
King and Queen would set and watch the joust, and
you know, we were under at least some cover, but
(19:50):
what looking down at that joust field and thinking, these
these guys are insane because we've got this massive storm going.
They're wearing armor, and they're carrying lances like they are
lightning rods that are fighting each other. But they were
determined to do it. And like under normal circumstances that
(20:12):
never would have happened. They would have called that joust
and said we're not going to do it, it's too dangerous.
But because it was their last one. They went ahead
and did it anyway, and fortunately it all went fine.
No one got hurt, there were no issues. It was
a curtailed joust. It wasn't as long as it typically
would be, but they felt like they put on a
(20:34):
good show for the two people who were in the
audience because it was pouring down rain.
Speaker 1 (20:41):
Yeah, when you do a venue like that, you do
it because you love it.
Speaker 2 (20:48):
Yeah, And actually, like occasionally like those downpours once in
a blue moon would lead to some of those highlights
we mentioned in our last episode. We talked about how
like pretty much every performer, if they if they've had
at least one good day, they've got and not everyone has,
but if they had, they've got stories that they'll tell
(21:09):
that were particularly special and stood out to them. And
some of mine took place on those days where we
had pouring down rain. Because the people who would stay there,
the patrons, the guests, the people who stayed were the
ones who truly loved it, and they would get into
a character interaction and would be happy to participate, and
(21:31):
so it was like you were dealing with the super fans,
and that could always be a lot of fun. I
remember performing a Shakespeare parody in the lanes like because
it started pouring down rain, so no one in the
stages didn't have any cover, so the audience scatters because
it's pouring down rain. The actress who was playing the
(21:52):
Queen of the festival made the call that we were
going to cancel the show and then said She turns
to me as we're bex which was this tiny little hallway,
and said do you want to go and perform the
show in the lanes in front of the stores. And
I looked at her and I thought, like, this is
the woman who I never would have associated with willingly
(22:13):
going out into the rain, and she's asking about doing
a half hour show in the rain and the mud
in front of these folks. And I said, yeah, let's
do it. And it was the best, one of the
best performances we had. We weren't able to use all
the props or anything, and we couldn't the entrances and
exits were totally different because we didn't have a stage anymore.
But it was great. It was one of those moments
(22:34):
that really stands out.
Speaker 1 (22:36):
I think that leads us because there's so much we
still want to talk about I'm hoping we can't even
get through it all in this part too. But that
kind of leads into a question we got on discord
about how much of what we did at Fair was
ad libbed.
Speaker 2 (22:48):
We mentioned in the last episode we talked about bits
and lotzis and we described it a little bit. You know,
We said that a lotzi is where you're trying to
get attention. So you're doing something interesting, or you might
be singing to yourself, or you might be trying to
compose a poem. You're doing something that people might pick
up on as they go by and think that's interesting,
and maybe they even come in for an interaction. Bits
(23:11):
were kind of this outlined interaction that you have in
your head where you've got a situation that you're going
to present to your audience. You're going to work with
your audience to resolve that situation in some way, and
the bits dependent upon what your character was right. So
if you are the rat catcher, it might be finding
(23:34):
the best way to catch a rat, you know, Or
if you were the Lord Mayor, it might be I'm
I'm going to have a statue built in my honor,
but I need to see some different poses to figure
out which one I like the most. It's a very
classic bit, by the way, the statue bit, to the
point where it's kind of looked down on it streamcast
at this point. But but that's the idea that you
(23:56):
have the and within that you would have total freedom
to to be able to navigate through it. It's not
like you would have because you never can predict what
anyone else is gonna say. You would just have kind
of an idea of where it was going to go.
But beyond bits and lazis, you could just have conversations,
you could tell jokes, you could end up asking people
(24:17):
things and having witty banter. And again that was largely
up to the cast member. So some people were more
comfortable ad libbing, and some people were more comfortable falling
back on the bits that they had developed. And neither
approach is better than the other. They're just different.
Speaker 1 (24:37):
Yeah, Jonathan is more of an ad liber and I'm
more of a bit person. And I like really challenging
bits too. I like the bits that people look at
and go You cannot get an audience member to do that.
Like when I was the Black Widow, I would test
potential husbands and so they'd have to like breathe on
a mirror and some other stuff, and then like the
(24:59):
last thing would be uh. They would have to hop
up and down on one foot, rub their stomach, could
pat their head and sing on the little teapot. And
everybody said, Ariel, you can't get people to do that.
It's too hot, it's gravelly. No one's going to agree
to do that. Everybody agreed, not everybody. Eighty five percent
of the people that I encountered agreed to do that
(25:20):
and had a lot of fun with it. Those are
like I would tie teenage boys together with a giant
pig ribbon back to back. People said it can't be done,
Ariel and I would do it and everybody would have
a great time.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
Yeah. As your fashion consultant, the you know who was
obsessed with pink, Ariel would would often like if there
was a dad or you know, some middle aged guy
in the group, she would end up tying a pink bow,
typically like a headband. They'd have this big, fluffy pink
(25:53):
bow in the front of their head. And often I
would walk around festival and say, well, Vogue's been with
that one, because I can see them still wearing the
ping Bo and then like, oh, yeah, I did that
like three hours ago. He's still wearing it.
Speaker 1 (26:06):
Yeah, And the people are like, if you do that,
they're going to take it right off. It's too hot. No,
people like and I think, I think it's really on
bringing Like this is the goal of all acting is
you're trying to affect the other person in the scene.
You're trying to affect the audience. And when you're in
interactive theater like Renfest, you're trying the other person in
(26:28):
the scene is the audience, right, So you want to
give them a good experience. And as long as you
do that, they're gonna they're gonna love it well.
Speaker 2 (26:37):
And also, like you start to learn very quickly to
spot traits in people that indicate they are more likely
to play along. Right. You'll see like people who who
try to avoid eye contact. You're you're thinking, I might
say hello to them. I might, I might say something
(26:58):
nice about them, but that's probably about it the extent
I'm going to go because they are clearly attempting to
avoid attention. Then there are others who'd be wearing like
a ridiculous T shirt or a hat or something, and
that was often an indicator that this is someone who
is more likely to engage in play, and you would
(27:18):
just look out for that, and occasionally people would would
start the interaction with you as opposed to you doing
it to them, and then you're like, well, all right,
I guess this is happening. Let's do it. And so yeah,
that was again you would learn that pretty quickly, and
like that was part of the rehearsal process too. You
(27:39):
would get at least some instruction on this, but until
that opening day, you haven't really experienced it. One of
the things that we used to do. I am assuming
they still do some version of this, but what we
used to do during rehearsal process. It was my least
favorite rehearsal. Can you guess which one it is?
Speaker 1 (28:00):
Was it the Love and Hate Letters? No?
Speaker 2 (28:02):
I love Love and Hate letters? Those were my favorites. No,
my least favorite. The one that I dreaded was good Bit,
Bad Bit.
Speaker 1 (28:10):
Oh yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (28:13):
So the concept behind good bit Bad Bit is you've
been working throughout the rehearsal process to develop these bits,
like this is something you've been workshopping, and the thing
is when you're work shopping it and you're working with
the rest of the cast. Everyone is encouraged to be
very positive and to reinforce the what's working and all
(28:35):
that kind of stuff. It's up to the director to
step in and say, maybe you need to workshop this
a bit more or change this or whatever. But it's
very positive overall, so good bit, bad bit. You would
do a bit an interaction in front of the rest
of the cast, and some of the cast would be
standing in as patrons, and the first time it goes great,
and then the next time, the people who are standing
(28:58):
in as patrons, I've been told to do something that's
going to throw you off, and that's.
Speaker 1 (29:04):
Might be guided by the directors, so they'll be like, Okay,
in this situation.
Speaker 2 (29:08):
Do this right. It might be in this situation you've
lost your child and so you're desperately trying to find them.
And then so this is stuff that happens when you're
on festival grounds. Ariel mentioned last week that part of
the job of the cast is also to be an
extension of the festival itself, which includes like if someone
(29:31):
gets hurt or if someone is lost, that you help
to get them to someone who can then take the
situation from there. And typically you're talking about getting them
somewhere where there's a walkie talkie where they can get
in touch with, you know, the security staff or the
medical staff that are on site, but you are the
liaison there frequently, and so that was one of the
(29:55):
bad bits, like, it's not that, not necessarily that people
are just crapping all over your efforts to entertain them,
although that was sometimes the thing. It was that, you know,
this is something that can happen at festival. You need
to be prepared for it. You need to know what
the right reaction is. The one that I always had
the hardest time with was someone who'd ask me where
(30:17):
a specific merchant was and I'm like, I don't know,
there's like seventy of them out here.
Speaker 1 (30:24):
Let me look at your broadside, and the one of
us who can find it first wins. Yeah. I would
just say you get to go to the shop.
Speaker 2 (30:31):
I would just say that, oh, it's back there. You'll
see a dragon swing somewhere back that way. And they
were like, Jonathan, do you know is the hair braiding
really back there? Like, I don't know. I don't have hair.
I haven't had hair since nineteen ninety nine.
Speaker 1 (30:43):
Let me teach you how to read a map. A
lot of people didn't have maps. I also cannot tell
you where half the.
Speaker 2 (30:49):
Shops were and the maps the maps, Like the very
first year I was there, we had the program. For
the first two years we had the program that included
a list of all the merch and like numbers on
the map, so you could actually see where things were.
But after that you had the map, but it wasn't
labeled like you didn't have specific labels for merchants. So
(31:11):
unless you just happened to know, oh, you're looking for
this one very iconic store or the Peacock t room,
everyone knows where the Peacock Tea room is because that
was the place that all the cast wanted to be
at all day.
Speaker 1 (31:25):
It was it was always easier if they were asking
for something generic. I'm looking for wooden swords, Well, there's
three places at the Georgia Renaissance Festival where you can
get them. Usually you can go here, here, or here,
depending on where you are. Yeah, but to go back
real quick to the ad lib I would say about
eighty five percent of fair is ad libbed, but on
(31:46):
and outline. The things that were usually more scenario usually
stuck to a script, and a lot of stage shows
stuck to the script. But even with that, like I
would say, even like eighty five percent of scenario or
a stage show is scripted and the other twenty five
percent is where you know you're going to get audience
reaction or response, so you can't adjust. But it's something
(32:09):
especially noticeable if you enjoy like a specific act, and
you go back and you watch them multiple times in
a year, multiple years in a row, you'll see the
same jokes pop up because they've encountered it so many
times that audience member a says you're a duck, and
they know how they're going to respond to that.
Speaker 2 (32:24):
Yeah, Ariel knows because she came to see one of
the Shakespeare parodies I was in multiple times before she
joined the cast. So there she was in the audience,
and I was sitting there thinking, who the heck would
sub subject themselves to seeing this show more than once Shakespeare?
Speaker 1 (32:44):
And I like improv and my friend was in it,
not you. I have another friend who is in it.
Her friend he was like a schedule keeper. I think, like,
you didn't like this person and I can't remember their name.
We we did theater together and.
Speaker 2 (32:59):
I know who you're talking about. It's not that I
didn't like him. I liked him fine. He was just
a little green and was but was good looking and
so got got pushed a little harder than he necessarily
needed to.
Speaker 1 (33:13):
He was good looking. He got cast at a lot
of community theater stuff too. He was also a good actor.
Speaker 2 (33:18):
But yeah, yeah, no, he was fine. I think it
took a little bit more to get him to to
embrace the absurd, because that's really what the Shakespeare parody
is all about. It's about, you know. We Ariel mentioned
last week again, like we're told to be muppets. We're
supposed to have these big, big reactions. You know. If
(33:38):
we're happy, we are beyond joy. If we are sad,
we are absolutely devastated. Well, the same is true for
the Shakespeare parody, Like if it's a dramatic scene, then
we have to be melo dramatic as we're delivering it.
And it took him a little bit to get into
that mindset. I'm guessing. Was that when we were doing
(34:01):
the Scottish play or was that when we were doing Okay, yeah,
that's what I thought. I think. So that one was
fun because we had some great props that a friend
of mine made, including we had a set of fake
bagpipes that looked kind of like real bagpipes if you
were just if you had just gotten a casual glance
of them. But there was all it was was a
(34:21):
plaid T shirt that had been stuffed with pillow stuffing
and some PVC pipes that made it look like, you know,
like the drone pipes for a bagpipe. And instead of
the mouthpiece we had a kazoo, so it was really
bagpipe shape kazoo and I got to I got to
play that and it was It was great because the
audience was always bracing themselves for the worst sound imaginable
(34:44):
and then you get a kazoo sound out.
Speaker 1 (34:45):
Of it, which is also the worst sound imaginable. So
I actually don't remember I think it. I think it
was the Scottish play, but it could have also have
been Hamletter, Romeo and Julietta.
Speaker 2 (34:55):
Those were the three that I did. So yeah, it
was that fun stuff. I mean, like like the other
thing you had mentioned about the the ad libbing even
in the scripted stuff, which brings me to one of
my biggest gripes because I wrote scenario for you know,
(35:16):
three or four seasons I wrote, I wrote the scenario,
and I remember distinctly getting so frustrated at John as
the King for changing the lines I had written at
every because I'm up there too, I'm like right next
to him, and I'm like, is he gonna say it
right today?
Speaker 1 (35:33):
No, he is not.
Speaker 2 (35:36):
And we would come backstage and he'd say, how was it, Johnny,
And I'm like, well, you said some of the words
that seemed rather familiar.
Speaker 1 (35:45):
But you know what, there's there's a certain joy, Jonathan,
in watching you squirm on whether or not your story
is going to be told the way you wrote it.
I know that's a very unprofessional outlook, but it was
a little fun.
Speaker 2 (35:58):
I mean, I get it, but like I was also
playing a very smarmy character, so it kind of played
into my character choices, so I could actually be aggravated
and frustrated, and it was in character, so that was fine.
And Jonathan underneath is genuinely frustrated because he worked very
hard on those lines and the line for this much thanks,
(36:22):
it's from Shakespeare, and he would never say it.
Speaker 1 (36:27):
Okay, okay. Being from Shakespeare and not saying that is
very frustrating. I will agree to that. You know, I
also liked school days, though that was usually more scripted
as well.
Speaker 2 (36:40):
Yeah, I didn't do as many of those because I
was my day job didn't allow me to. But our
festival would reserve at least one day sometimes too for
schools around the region to come in for a school
day where the cast would end up informing or teaching
kids about things like what life was like during the
(37:03):
Middle Ages and the Renaissance. And yeah, Eric would do
a lot more of that than I did. I only
did I think I did it twice.
Speaker 1 (37:11):
Yeah, I did. I was on court a couple of years,
so like dancing and nighting ceremonies and jousts and things
like that, And then I did the Shakespeare Show for
a few years, and that was also quite a bit
of fun. Like I would buy so we would bring
kids up to do death scenes from very shakespeare things,
myself and our good friend Lucas, and we'd bring them
(37:35):
up and we'd do monologues that they'd have to die.
And there have been various iterations of the Shakespeare Show,
but this is the one that I did the most frequently.
And then we'd give them scrolls. But I always went
out and bought like the little, like little paperbacks of
the of the Shakespeare shows that the kids were doing,
and I'd buy, like, there'd be three shows a day,
(37:55):
and there'd be two days, so I would buy like
twelve paperbacks, and just each kid who did the show
would get a paperback of the show that the scene
the show that the scene they had just done was from.
So very rewarding.
Speaker 2 (38:12):
Yeah, that was really cool of you. It also reminds
me a little bit, although at a much smaller scale,
something that we would often do through the festival. I mean,
I'm not sure if they still do, but we would
do a nighting and princess making ceremony and anyone could
be knighted or made into a princess, but it was
(38:33):
made for kids, and the kids would come up and
they would get to do these adorable little tasks and
at the end would be awarded with a certificate proclaiming
them a night or princess, and that was always fun
to participate in. I never really I was never one
of the instructors, but I always got to do the reactions.
And playing up to reactions for little kids is always
(38:57):
the best because they just buy into it so quickly,
like they still have that sense of play, and they
don't they don't have a sense of like this isn't
cool to do this in public, so they would just
embrace it, and it was always one of my favorite
parts of the day.
Speaker 1 (39:14):
Yeah, yeah, mine too. Speaking of favorites, we actually need
to start wrapping up because I'm in a show that
opens this weekend, and so my schedule is all off
this week and I'm gonna I'm gonna have to have
a hard stop on today's podcast, So we might actually
do a part three to our experience at the Renaissance
Festival because everything you're really like, Oh, if you loved
(39:35):
it so much, why don't you do it anymore? And
we'll get into that next week, but before we go,
speaking of favorites, what is your now that I've gone
down like twelve Bunny Bunny trails? What is your favorite
memory slash bit of all time? Jonathan?
Speaker 2 (39:49):
So, my favorite bit was one that I would do
occasionally with other actors where we would do the classic
improv game word at a time, where you get two
or more people together and you're telling a story to
a crowd, but each person only gets to submit one
(40:09):
word at a time, so it'd be like once upon
a time there was like that sort of thing. And
my favorite was when we did it once where the
person we were there are three of us and the
person who was in spot number three. At the end
of the sentence, we were talking about how this lover
proclaimed his love in the form of a and she
(40:29):
said sonnet. And I turned to her and I said,
son it because it's a very difficult, very difficult art
form to do word at a time. But then we
stumbled through perhaps the world's worst sonnet ever written, and
it was one of the most joyous experiences because the
audience loved seeing like the characters turn on each other
(40:53):
because one of them has sabotaged the other two, and
so the audience loved it. And it was it was
genuinely a very challenging bit to do, but it was
clearly so entertaining the group that was watching us that
it was one of the most rewarding. I've got lots
of other stories too, but those are the kind that
get me all choked up because it's mostly about kids
(41:14):
being super sweet. So I'm just gonna save those for me.
Speaker 1 (41:17):
Yeah, my favorite, because I know you're about to ask.
So I also like my favorite overall memory slash bit
was the tying bows on the family and make them
all fashionable, and then tying the big bow on the
dad and then tasking the children of the family to
be my fashion consultant assistance and make sure that he
kept it on all day. Maybe that's why they kept
(41:39):
it on all day. But then they would come back
and they'd visit me every year and they'd put on
pink or they'd bring their bows back, or they'd remember me,
and I would get messages, like on social media once
that was a bigger thing, saying hey, we love this
and we're coming out. And so it was always great
to be able to like have that continued effect on someone.
(42:00):
Oh man, I'm getting terry thinking about it, So I'm
going to switch to my overall best bit of all time.
I don't know how I pulled this off and how
it was so good, But when I was Ruby Tulips
my kissing Wench, I had this group of LGBTQ guys
come up to me. They wanted me to wench their
(42:21):
friend who was pretty shy, and I don't like a
lot of kissing wenches. Don't like kissing people who don't
want to be kissed, right, So I said, okay, well
I will do that if you will, if the rest
of you will participate. So we're going to play a
game called Spin the Wench, at which point all of
(42:45):
them had to go in a circle and they had
to count down from five and I would spin and
whoever I landed on would get the kiss, which would
always be the people who were instigating me to kiss
somebody else, and so these and they absolutely loved it,
and I got tipped like twenty dollars from that each
(43:05):
person in that like ten person group, and they all
left super happy, and it was just it was a gamble.
I took on a gut feeling and I'm I had
a way out if they didn't want to do it,
to make sure that they were super happy and comfortable
and all that. But it ended up being such a brilliant, wonderful,
fun experience that I'm like, I'm I'm really glad I
(43:27):
trusted my gut on that one. Also, it's good tips. Yeah, I.
Speaker 2 (43:36):
Was a kissing winch for one season, but no, that
was only at the end of the day. But that's
a different story. So yeah, when we do a part three,
and I yeah, I think we might as well, like
just go ahead and say, next week we'll do a
part three. We'll talk a little bit more, maybe about
a couple of other things that are really memorable at
the festival, maybe some standout moments, but we'll also talk
about some of the things that are, you know, maybe
(43:59):
a little more challenging. And as Ariel was alluding to
reasons why we no longer work at the festival and
why like it would take a lot of dramatic changes
for me to even consider coming back, even just as
a guest.
Speaker 1 (44:19):
Yeah, yeah, But we'll get to that next week, along
with any other questions that might have arisen throughout our conversation.
So if people want to reach out to us, Jonathan,
how can they do that?
Speaker 2 (44:32):
Well, what you're gonna do is you're gonna go out
and you're gonna find an old copy of the computer
role playing game Ultima five, and you're gonna take your
character over to the town of Scara Bray and you're
gonna track down there's this one weird looking character. You
will never have seen him before, even if you played
(44:53):
Ultima five before. I was dressed up in rags, and
he's saying Scratchy Scratch to himself over and over again.
But if you go and talk to him, he will
give you a quest. It's gonna take a while because
it's gonna involve all these shards, and you're gonna have
to end up fighting gargoyles and ultimately you're going to
(45:14):
have to take down a dragon, and at the end
of all that, you're going to have a dragon ZG.
You're going to take that back to Scratchy Scratch Scratch
and give it to him. When you do that, it
transforms into me and you can ask me.
Speaker 1 (45:26):
The question that, oh that blew my mind Jonathan. For
people who who maybe just can't quite grasp the fact
that Jonathan is part dragon and related to someone named
Scratchy scratch uh, you can reach it out to us
on social media on Facebook, Instagram, threads, and discord. We
(45:50):
are large ner drawn Collider on x I guess It's
called now Twitter where llenc Underscore podcast. We are not
on Blue Sky yet and as always you can check
out well we don't have show notes. We don't have
show notes right now because you aren't really talking about stuff,
(46:11):
but I will be posting the episodes on our website
www dot Large nurdrun Collider. If you want a discord
invite and you can't find it there, they should all
work now if you're looking at like the latest the
latest posts, but if not, you can email us, or
if you just want to say hi in an email,
you can email us at large Nerdron pod at gmail
dot com. Because we really do love hearing from you,
(46:32):
and if you ask pointed questions, I will also make
Jonathan get on social media to answer them.
Speaker 2 (46:38):
So yeah, yes, and until next time, I am Jonathan
and let the festival begin.
Speaker 1 (46:45):
Strickland and I am Ariel. Your fashion say no without
a pink bo Caston.
Speaker 2 (46:58):
The Large Nerdron Collider is created by Ariel Caston and
produced edited, published, deleted, undeleted, published again. Curse That by
Jonathan Strickland. Music by Kevin McLeod of incomptech dot com
Hey, everybody, welcome to the Large Ner Drunk Collider podcast,
the podcast that's all about the geeky things happening in
the world around us and how excited we are about them.
I'm Ariel Castin and with me, as always is the
ever patient Shonathan Strickland.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
Well we may and might never all meet here again again. Yes,
welcome back, Ariel.
Speaker 1 (00:32):
Thank you. It was a massive storm that took me
out for a whole flip and week.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Now.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
Yeah, it's it's good to be back and to continue
this story about working at the Renfest since obviously we
still can't talk about all of the geeky things that
normally we would talk about until those producers get some sense.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
Yeah, and until the actors and writers get them Dalla Dallas.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
Yes, dollars and cents. So yeah, so we're going to
keep talking about Renfest and thank you to the people
who have asked us more questions about it. And we
left off with me rambling on about getting an injury,
but you had something to share on that along those lines,
(01:19):
as well, right Jonathan.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
Yeah, so I also was injured at Renaissance Fair once.
I have been in combat scenario a few times. I
filled in for someone one year for a couple of weekends,
and I was the bad guy for a season, and
I was a hero for another season. So I had
(01:43):
a lot of combat, but I never actually got injured
doing combat. You know, no one accidentally stabbed me or anything.
There were some close calls. There were a couple of
times where I got like like tagged by the flat
of a sword or whatever, but that you know, they
might give you a little bit of a welp, but
that's the that's as bad as it gets. Uh No.
The one time I got injured was during courtly dancing,
(02:08):
which what how, I'll tell you how areal so so
courtly dancing? Obviously, it's it's some dancing that we would do. Really,
it's it's more like English folk dancing. We didn't do
really any courtly dances because those typically involve lots of
like little steps and jumps in the air and kicks
(02:30):
in the air and stuff like that. Stuff that's not
easy to do when you're outside on un level ground.
Uh So we did a lot of of like folk dances,
so they were more like like the kind that that
the commoners would dance, and some of them were much
more modern than Renaissance, if i'd most.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
Of it is Hole in the Wall of folk dance.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
Hole in the Wall I think is based kind of
off of dances during like the regency, so it's much
later period. But that's that's that's where my injury comes in.
So yeah, there's a dance we would do. I learned
it originally at the SCA actually, but there's a dance
that the Renaissance Festival would do the Court would do
most days called Hole in the Wall. And in Hole
(03:12):
in the Wall, you have you have a partner and
you make up a line with typically, you know, this
is very old fashioned, but you would have all the
lords on one side and all the ladies on the other,
although I think these days we would just mix them
up as much as we wanted to, and then we
would do a series of dances. But the neat thing
(03:33):
about Hole in the Wall is that it has sequences
in the dance where the dancers kind of twirl apart
from each other and then come back together. And so
there are opportunities for someone who is not currently dancing
to swoop in and steal someone else's partner, and we
called it poaching. So you could if you wanted to
try and poach someone else's partner. I always found the
(03:55):
secret to not getting poached was throwing in a lot
of flourishes in the dance because it intimidated everyone. Yeah.
But but there was a time where I did not
start the dance. So there were there was a line
of dancers already dancing, and I decided I was going
to steal her majesty, the Queen. So who was dancing
(04:16):
with his majesty the King his majesty being played by
a friend of ours name John, who it was playing
Henry the eighth. And John is a John's a big dude. Yeah,
I swept in to steal the queen, and so John
decided he would give me a little hip check. And
uh he didn't. He didn't hit me hard or very fast,
(04:37):
but he is a bigger dude than I am, and
it cleared me off my feet. I we were on
a hill, so I fell down the hill. I ended
up spraining my ankle and my wrist and was laying
there on the ground and I hear the King say,
(05:02):
are you all right, Lord Admiral, And I remember saying
I'm not really sure yet. So it turned out I
was mostly all right. I had like I had sprained
my ankle, I had sprained my wrist, and he felt
terrible about it, but I was like, you know, it
(05:22):
literally was because he hit me at just the right
time on just the right spot of the hill where
I was unable to regain my balance. So I was like,
you know, ninety nine times out of one hundred, I
just would have been like pushed out of the way
and it would have been funny. And that's it. This
was just a freak accident. It was not really your fault.
I'm not blaming you. It's fine, but it did mean
(05:44):
that the next day. Because we would perform Saturdays and Sundays,
and then on Memorial Day weekend, we would also do
Memorial Day, this was one of the earlier weekends, so
it was a Saturday. So the next day I actually
had a brace on my wrist and I had my
(06:04):
ankle wrapped, so I was walking around with a cane.
I had a gauntlet like a leather glove, not a
metal gauntlet, but a leather glove over the hand that
had the wrist brace on it, so I could hide
the wrist brace. And I was hobbling around and all
day John went back and forth between giggling and seeing
(06:26):
me because it was so pathetic to apologizing profusely because
of it. And yeah, there's a picture of me, and
I look like the character from Young Frankenstein, the guy
who has the wooden hand, because I'm sitting there with
my hand elevated and it it was. That was the
one time I got injured was courtly dancing at the
(06:48):
Renaissance Fare.
Speaker 1 (06:50):
Gotcha, I I have been injured courtly dancing. Usually it's
my costume that gets injured because when you're dancing in
a hoop skirt, which is what we normally wore h
as ladies, Uh, it gets stepped on and then you
try to move and your skirt gets pulled off. My
skirt pulled off.
Speaker 2 (07:10):
I've been guilty. I think of stepping on your skirt
once or twice.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
Yeah, But the one injury like the biggest time I've
been injured. And I honestly don't remember if this was
at a LARP or at run Fest, because I know
we did this dance at Runfest a couple of times,
and it's just maybe we tried it both places and
one of them I got injured. Was we would do
toss the duchess, which is a circle dancing. It's uh
traditionally guy girl girl, guy girl, right.
Speaker 2 (07:35):
And it's done to the tune ding dong merrily on high. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (07:38):
Yeah, Uh do do do do Do Do Do Do
Do Do Do Do do do do And at the
end you go down a long run. Uh do do
do do do Do Do do do do, And it
goes on and then the end, and then you toss
a duchess and the one partner, partner A, will take
partner B and like pick them up and put them
(07:58):
to the other side. So take from the right to
the left, yes and no, and now you have a
new partner yeah. And now partner B has a new
partner A, and so on and so forth. And there
was one time or a couple of times where we're like, Okay,
now we're gonna switch partner B toss partner A. And
(08:19):
the way it worked out is that all of the
partner bees had been much more accustomed to being tossed,
and all of the partner as had been much more
accustomed to tossing and switching.
Speaker 2 (08:28):
That means.
Speaker 1 (08:30):
Like me, who ended up tossing my partner got kicked
in the shins so flipping hard it bruised and skinned
my knee like my shin.
Speaker 2 (08:43):
That sounds terrible.
Speaker 1 (08:46):
I mean it's also hilarious in hindsight. It was uncomfortable.
It was funny then, but it was uncomfortable then.
Speaker 2 (08:51):
I think it had to be a larm. I mean,
maybe it was at the festival. But I can say
I can say I have danced that dance more than
a hundred times and we never reverse the roles.
Speaker 1 (09:02):
So I think I think we did try it at Fair,
but it was only like once.
Speaker 2 (09:06):
Well, I guess the one time is all you need
to find out what a disaster it is.
Speaker 1 (09:11):
Yeah, yeah, you really need people because also at Fair
we would bring guests in to learn these dances. A
lot of them were not most of them, a lot
of them were not super hard and so but to
do something like that, you really need people who are
kind of more familiar with it already.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
Yeah, yeah, it's uh. That was one where we would
typically grab people from around to make the circle as
big as possible and to make it a real spectacle.
There were certain dances that were so elaborate and complicated,
relatively complicated, that you couldn't easily teach it to someone
(09:45):
in just a minute or so, and so those were
the ones we would do as sort of a demonstration
or or an exhibition. And then there were others that
were much easier to teach, and those we would bring
in partners from elsewhere, like tangle brawl, obviously super easy,
which the whole purpose of tangle brawl is just for
(10:07):
whoever's leading the dance to tangle everyone up. It starts
as a circle dance, but then the leader drops hands
with one person and then it becomes a chain, and
the leader just goes back and forth through the chain,
tangling everybody up until you can't really move anymore, which,
by the way, sounds like it's fun until you're late
(10:28):
in the run of the Georgia Renaissance Festival and everyone's
wearing upholstery and it's ninety degrees.
Speaker 1 (10:35):
And you get a patron's armpit in your nose and
you can't move. Yeah. That I will say it takes
some skill to be the leader of that, because you
can be too timid and not tangle it up well enough,
or you can be far too aggressive like I tend
to be, like when I play Settlers of Katan.
Speaker 2 (10:55):
And get.
Speaker 1 (10:58):
Within five secs. Look, I'm the person who's like, oh,
I'm gonna move the thief and take your one sheep
and your one wheat on round one. I've been yelled
at for that on the Joco Cruise. Yeah, so I
don't do it anymore.
Speaker 2 (11:14):
But the person who typically would would run the dance
when we were doing it was the actress who played
the queen, and she had a really good balance. She
had a good feel for how intense to make the dance.
She's paced it really well so that, you know, she
didn't have us all tied up in a knot to
(11:34):
the point where we couldn't move, like, you know, one
round into the dance, we'd be going for a while.
And that was a lot of fun. And yeah, dancing
in particular, that was one thing I always looked forward
to it. In fact, at one point I became the
dance leader. I became the one who taught the dances
and called them out and that kind of thing, which
was that was a lot of fun for me. Even
(11:56):
we even tried a couple of new ones that were
very complicated. Two I will say mixed success.
Speaker 1 (12:06):
Yeah, yeah, I like I did sometime being dance mistressed
as well, I think when you weren't there occasionally and
then my band played it for a while, so I'd
do that as times did you did you? Was the
mirror dance one of the harder ones that you tried
to do?
Speaker 2 (12:20):
No, that one. I think that one was one of
the easier ones. Honestly. Again, that was when I learned
originally at the SCA Gotcha, so that one I had.
I had learned that one when I was a teenager,
so that one was not too difficult. There is there
is an actual peasant dance called Newcastle, and the village
at Georgia Renaissance Fair is called Newcastle, so I thought, well,
(12:42):
we should really dance Newcastle at least once. But it
is it's got a couple of moves that are hard
to explain to people, especially if you don't really have
the full vocabulary. And while I could teach know the
other dances, this one was one where it was hard
(13:02):
for me to wrap my brain around. There are a
couple of moves toward the very end where there's like
a change in partners and a change in the in
the shape of the dance that was difficult for me
to communicate. So We did eventually get it down, but
you could call, like maybe the first two weekends a
fair rehearsal for that dance, except it was rehearsal in
(13:23):
front of people.
Speaker 1 (13:25):
Yeah, that's fine, you know, we're allowed to make fools
of ourselves. I was always sad when dancing was canceled
due to inclement weather, because I'm like, it's muddy, it's rainy,
I can still dance. It's snowy, I can still dance. Yes,
it does occasionally snow at the Georgia Renaissance Festival once
(13:45):
in a blue moon.
Speaker 2 (13:47):
Yeah. Yeah. The festival typically starts mid April and runs
through early June. But even in mid April, we can
Georgia our coldest weather off and hits a little later.
That It's not like in December or January. It's February,
March and then sometimes into April, and that that was
(14:09):
one of those years. But yeah, I was always disappointed
if we called it too Like there were some times
where it was just so flippin' hot that we would
call it because if you're getting toward the end of
the run and it's that and you're thinking this is
the beginning of the day, too, we would typically do
it early before it would get too hot, But on
the days where it was super hot already, you might
(14:30):
call it just because you've got to You've got a
whole day ahead of you, so you don't want to
burn out, like thirty minutes after opening gate.
Speaker 1 (14:40):
That's true, because at least at our Renfest, actors would
drop long before the gates would close.
Speaker 2 (14:48):
Oh yeah, no, we had We had actors who had
a reputation for not not being upright by the end
of the day and it and often it was because
there was some sort of undie ignosed condition that was
complicating matters. But it also could just be that they
weren't hydrating enough because you you essentially needed to be
(15:09):
drinking water pretty much constantly all day long because you'd
be sweating it out so fast that you need to
have water, and you need salt, you need some form
of electrolyte in order to sow. Pickles and water were
like the go tos for a lot of people.
Speaker 1 (15:25):
Uh, sex, if you don't like pickles, yeah, just now,
I didn't.
Speaker 2 (15:29):
At the time I was I was known as the
anti pickle guy, not because I don't like pickles, but
because people would just reach in there with their hands
to get a pickle out of h yeah, and I'm like, no,
I'm not going to have any of those like, oh,
come on that that surely the vinegar would kill anything off.
I said, listen, if there's anything that could survive, it's
(15:50):
gonna be here at this festival. And I Am not
putting my hand in there.
Speaker 1 (15:54):
But you know, sometimes it was just matter like it wasn't.
It wasn't always because like, okay, so as a person
who has gotten heat, not stroke, but exhaustion a couple
of times. Yeah, which, by the way, you never like
fully come back from that, My heat tolerance is a
lot lower.
Speaker 2 (16:09):
Now same here. I had the same issue.
Speaker 1 (16:13):
Yeah, Like, you can just work so hard and you
think you're hydrating enough, but because you're you're there's this
thing that happens when you act that sometimes you're so
in it that you'll go back, you'll look back at
the end of the day and go, what did I
do because you're just so in it? Yeah, And you
can you can be that way at fair even if
you're like, who's my next group of people to interact with?
(16:34):
You're so focused on what you're doing or your character
that you don't always keep track of the time or
when your last class of water was. I mean, I
got sent home with hypothermia in beginning stages of frostbite
one year because it snowed and I put on a
cloak and I was trying to stay warm. But there's
only so much you can do when you're a scantily
clad peasant girl. Like so uh, but Fair is outdoors,
(16:58):
so we were always victims to the weather. And like
even if I think I've only heard of Fair closing
like twice due to hurricanes or tornadoes or something like that,
and usually we stay open if it's pouring rain and
you just do what you can.
Speaker 2 (17:11):
Yeah, heck, I remember the was it two thousand, It
might have been two thousand, It could have been two
thousand and one. So let's kind let's kind of break
down the different groups that are that make up the
staff of Renaissance Fair because that'll that'll help a little bit.
(17:33):
So you've got your your the actual fair employees, So
that includes people who are ticket takers, and they are
the people who work in the festival owned shops and
the festival owned food stalls, and so the festival owns
some of those outright, and so those are direct employees
(17:55):
of the festival. You also have the street characters. They
are festival employees, and you have the you know people
who oversee them, the Entertainment Department, their festival employees. You've
got the grounds crew. They are you know, contracted by
the festival or their festival employees. You've got the booths.
Those are run by independent merchants who have purchased a
location at the festival. They have their own staff. You've
(18:20):
got street acts. Those are typically contracted to come in
and perform not street acts, but stage acts. They're contracted
to come in and perform on the various stages. Occasionally
you might have a festival owned you know, stage show
like the Shakespeare Parody was done by members of the
street cast, so that was not contracted out to another
(18:44):
theater group or anything. And you've got the Joust. And
when I first started, the Joust was actually owned by
the festival or was you know, an actual festival production.
They didn't go anywhere else. It was a Georgia Renaissance
Festival group. Well, on my last day, I guess it
must have been two thousand and one. I remember the
last day was the last day for the joust like
(19:06):
that was that they were retiring and then the festival
was going to contract outside groups to come in and
put and perform a joust. And at the end of
the day, we got one of those massive pop up
thunderstorms that is common in the southeast, and it was
it was a whopper, like the lightning was very close by.
(19:29):
It was one of those where you'd see the flash
of lightning and you would hear the thunder almost immediately afterward.
But it was the last joust that they were going
to do, and they were determined to do it. So
I remember standing up on the reviewing stand where the
King and Queen would set and watch the joust, and
you know, we were under at least some cover, but
(19:50):
what looking down at that joust field and thinking, these
these guys are insane because we've got this massive storm going.
They're wearing armor, and they're carrying lances like they are
lightning rods that are fighting each other. But they were
determined to do it. And like under normal circumstances that
(20:12):
never would have happened. They would have called that joust
and said we're not going to do it, it's too dangerous.
But because it was their last one. They went ahead
and did it anyway, and fortunately it all went fine.
No one got hurt, there were no issues. It was
a curtailed joust. It wasn't as long as it typically
would be, but they felt like they put on a
(20:34):
good show for the two people who were in the
audience because it was pouring down rain.
Speaker 1 (20:41):
Yeah, when you do a venue like that, you do
it because you love it.
Speaker 2 (20:48):
Yeah, And actually, like occasionally like those downpours once in
a blue moon would lead to some of those highlights
we mentioned in our last episode. We talked about how
like pretty much every performer, if they if they've had
at least one good day, they've got and not everyone has,
but if they had, they've got stories that they'll tell
(21:09):
that were particularly special and stood out to them. And
some of mine took place on those days where we
had pouring down rain. Because the people who would stay there,
the patrons, the guests, the people who stayed were the
ones who truly loved it, and they would get into
a character interaction and would be happy to participate, and
(21:31):
so it was like you were dealing with the super fans,
and that could always be a lot of fun. I
remember performing a Shakespeare parody in the lanes like because
it started pouring down rain, so no one in the
stages didn't have any cover, so the audience scatters because
it's pouring down rain. The actress who was playing the
(21:52):
Queen of the festival made the call that we were
going to cancel the show and then said She turns
to me as we're bex which was this tiny little hallway,
and said do you want to go and perform the
show in the lanes in front of the stores. And
I looked at her and I thought, like, this is
the woman who I never would have associated with willingly
(22:13):
going out into the rain, and she's asking about doing
a half hour show in the rain and the mud
in front of these folks. And I said, yeah, let's
do it. And it was the best, one of the
best performances we had. We weren't able to use all
the props or anything, and we couldn't the entrances and
exits were totally different because we didn't have a stage anymore.
But it was great. It was one of those moments
(22:34):
that really stands out.
Speaker 1 (22:36):
I think that leads us because there's so much we
still want to talk about I'm hoping we can't even
get through it all in this part too. But that
kind of leads into a question we got on discord
about how much of what we did at Fair was
ad libbed.
Speaker 2 (22:48):
We mentioned in the last episode we talked about bits
and lotzis and we described it a little bit. You know,
We said that a lotzi is where you're trying to
get attention. So you're doing something interesting, or you might
be singing to yourself, or you might be trying to
compose a poem. You're doing something that people might pick
up on as they go by and think that's interesting,
and maybe they even come in for an interaction. Bits
(23:11):
were kind of this outlined interaction that you have in
your head where you've got a situation that you're going
to present to your audience. You're going to work with
your audience to resolve that situation in some way, and
the bits dependent upon what your character was right. So
if you are the rat catcher, it might be finding
(23:34):
the best way to catch a rat, you know, Or
if you were the Lord Mayor, it might be I'm
I'm going to have a statue built in my honor,
but I need to see some different poses to figure
out which one I like the most. It's a very
classic bit, by the way, the statue bit, to the
point where it's kind of looked down on it streamcast
at this point. But but that's the idea that you
(23:56):
have the and within that you would have total freedom
to to be able to navigate through it. It's not
like you would have because you never can predict what
anyone else is gonna say. You would just have kind
of an idea of where it was going to go.
But beyond bits and lazis, you could just have conversations,
you could tell jokes, you could end up asking people
(24:17):
things and having witty banter. And again that was largely
up to the cast member. So some people were more
comfortable ad libbing, and some people were more comfortable falling
back on the bits that they had developed. And neither
approach is better than the other. They're just different.
Speaker 1 (24:37):
Yeah, Jonathan is more of an ad liber and I'm
more of a bit person. And I like really challenging
bits too. I like the bits that people look at
and go You cannot get an audience member to do that.
Like when I was the Black Widow, I would test
potential husbands and so they'd have to like breathe on
a mirror and some other stuff, and then like the
(24:59):
last thing would be uh. They would have to hop
up and down on one foot, rub their stomach, could
pat their head and sing on the little teapot. And
everybody said, Ariel, you can't get people to do that.
It's too hot, it's gravelly. No one's going to agree
to do that. Everybody agreed, not everybody. Eighty five percent
of the people that I encountered agreed to do that
(25:20):
and had a lot of fun with it. Those are
like I would tie teenage boys together with a giant
pig ribbon back to back. People said it can't be done,
Ariel and I would do it and everybody would have
a great time.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
Yeah. As your fashion consultant, the you know who was
obsessed with pink, Ariel would would often like if there
was a dad or you know, some middle aged guy
in the group, she would end up tying a pink bow,
typically like a headband. They'd have this big, fluffy pink
(25:53):
bow in the front of their head. And often I
would walk around festival and say, well, Vogue's been with
that one, because I can see them still wearing the
ping Bo and then like, oh, yeah, I did that
like three hours ago. He's still wearing it.
Speaker 1 (26:06):
Yeah, And the people are like, if you do that,
they're going to take it right off. It's too hot. No,
people like and I think, I think it's really on
bringing Like this is the goal of all acting is
you're trying to affect the other person in the scene.
You're trying to affect the audience. And when you're in
interactive theater like Renfest, you're trying the other person in
(26:28):
the scene is the audience, right, So you want to
give them a good experience. And as long as you
do that, they're gonna they're gonna love it well.
Speaker 2 (26:37):
And also, like you start to learn very quickly to
spot traits in people that indicate they are more likely
to play along. Right. You'll see like people who who
try to avoid eye contact. You're you're thinking, I might
say hello to them. I might, I might say something
(26:58):
nice about them, but that's probably about it the extent
I'm going to go because they are clearly attempting to
avoid attention. Then there are others who'd be wearing like
a ridiculous T shirt or a hat or something, and
that was often an indicator that this is someone who
is more likely to engage in play, and you would
(27:18):
just look out for that, and occasionally people would would
start the interaction with you as opposed to you doing
it to them, and then you're like, well, all right,
I guess this is happening. Let's do it. And so yeah,
that was again you would learn that pretty quickly, and
like that was part of the rehearsal process too. You
(27:39):
would get at least some instruction on this, but until
that opening day, you haven't really experienced it. One of
the things that we used to do. I am assuming
they still do some version of this, but what we
used to do during rehearsal process. It was my least
favorite rehearsal. Can you guess which one it is?
Speaker 1 (28:00):
Was it the Love and Hate Letters? No?
Speaker 2 (28:02):
I love Love and Hate letters? Those were my favorites. No,
my least favorite. The one that I dreaded was good Bit,
Bad Bit.
Speaker 1 (28:10):
Oh yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (28:13):
So the concept behind good bit Bad Bit is you've
been working throughout the rehearsal process to develop these bits,
like this is something you've been workshopping, and the thing
is when you're work shopping it and you're working with
the rest of the cast. Everyone is encouraged to be
very positive and to reinforce the what's working and all
(28:35):
that kind of stuff. It's up to the director to
step in and say, maybe you need to workshop this
a bit more or change this or whatever. But it's
very positive overall, so good bit, bad bit. You would
do a bit an interaction in front of the rest
of the cast, and some of the cast would be
standing in as patrons, and the first time it goes great,
and then the next time, the people who are standing
(28:58):
in as patrons, I've been told to do something that's
going to throw you off, and that's.
Speaker 1 (29:04):
Might be guided by the directors, so they'll be like, Okay,
in this situation.
Speaker 2 (29:08):
Do this right. It might be in this situation you've
lost your child and so you're desperately trying to find them.
And then so this is stuff that happens when you're
on festival grounds. Ariel mentioned last week that part of
the job of the cast is also to be an
extension of the festival itself, which includes like if someone
(29:31):
gets hurt or if someone is lost, that you help
to get them to someone who can then take the
situation from there. And typically you're talking about getting them
somewhere where there's a walkie talkie where they can get
in touch with, you know, the security staff or the
medical staff that are on site, but you are the
liaison there frequently, and so that was one of the
(29:55):
bad bits, like, it's not that, not necessarily that people
are just crapping all over your efforts to entertain them,
although that was sometimes the thing. It was that, you know,
this is something that can happen at festival. You need
to be prepared for it. You need to know what
the right reaction is. The one that I always had
the hardest time with was someone who'd ask me where
(30:17):
a specific merchant was and I'm like, I don't know,
there's like seventy of them out here.
Speaker 1 (30:24):
Let me look at your broadside, and the one of
us who can find it first wins. Yeah. I would
just say you get to go to the shop.
Speaker 2 (30:31):
I would just say that, oh, it's back there. You'll
see a dragon swing somewhere back that way. And they
were like, Jonathan, do you know is the hair braiding
really back there? Like, I don't know. I don't have hair.
I haven't had hair since nineteen ninety nine.
Speaker 1 (30:43):
Let me teach you how to read a map. A
lot of people didn't have maps. I also cannot tell
you where half the.
Speaker 2 (30:49):
Shops were and the maps the maps, Like the very
first year I was there, we had the program. For
the first two years we had the program that included
a list of all the merch and like numbers on
the map, so you could actually see where things were.
But after that you had the map, but it wasn't
labeled like you didn't have specific labels for merchants. So
(31:11):
unless you just happened to know, oh, you're looking for
this one very iconic store or the Peacock t room,
everyone knows where the Peacock Tea room is because that
was the place that all the cast wanted to be
at all day.
Speaker 1 (31:25):
It was it was always easier if they were asking
for something generic. I'm looking for wooden swords, Well, there's
three places at the Georgia Renaissance Festival where you can
get them. Usually you can go here, here, or here,
depending on where you are. Yeah, but to go back
real quick to the ad lib I would say about
eighty five percent of fair is ad libbed, but on
(31:46):
and outline. The things that were usually more scenario usually
stuck to a script, and a lot of stage shows
stuck to the script. But even with that, like I
would say, even like eighty five percent of scenario or
a stage show is scripted and the other twenty five
percent is where you know you're going to get audience
reaction or response, so you can't adjust. But it's something
(32:09):
especially noticeable if you enjoy like a specific act, and
you go back and you watch them multiple times in
a year, multiple years in a row, you'll see the
same jokes pop up because they've encountered it so many
times that audience member a says you're a duck, and
they know how they're going to respond to that.
Speaker 2 (32:24):
Yeah, Ariel knows because she came to see one of
the Shakespeare parodies I was in multiple times before she
joined the cast. So there she was in the audience,
and I was sitting there thinking, who the heck would
sub subject themselves to seeing this show more than once Shakespeare?
Speaker 1 (32:44):
And I like improv and my friend was in it,
not you. I have another friend who is in it.
Her friend he was like a schedule keeper. I think, like,
you didn't like this person and I can't remember their name.
We we did theater together and.
Speaker 2 (32:59):
I know who you're talking about. It's not that I
didn't like him. I liked him fine. He was just
a little green and was but was good looking and
so got got pushed a little harder than he necessarily
needed to.
Speaker 1 (33:13):
He was good looking. He got cast at a lot
of community theater stuff too. He was also a good actor.
Speaker 2 (33:18):
But yeah, yeah, no, he was fine. I think it
took a little bit more to get him to to
embrace the absurd, because that's really what the Shakespeare parody
is all about. It's about, you know. We Ariel mentioned
last week again, like we're told to be muppets. We're
supposed to have these big, big reactions. You know. If
(33:38):
we're happy, we are beyond joy. If we are sad,
we are absolutely devastated. Well, the same is true for
the Shakespeare parody, Like if it's a dramatic scene, then
we have to be melo dramatic as we're delivering it.
And it took him a little bit to get into
that mindset. I'm guessing. Was that when we were doing
(34:01):
the Scottish play or was that when we were doing Okay, yeah,
that's what I thought. I think. So that one was
fun because we had some great props that a friend
of mine made, including we had a set of fake
bagpipes that looked kind of like real bagpipes if you
were just if you had just gotten a casual glance
of them. But there was all it was was a
(34:21):
plaid T shirt that had been stuffed with pillow stuffing
and some PVC pipes that made it look like, you know,
like the drone pipes for a bagpipe. And instead of
the mouthpiece we had a kazoo, so it was really
bagpipe shape kazoo and I got to I got to
play that and it was It was great because the
audience was always bracing themselves for the worst sound imaginable
(34:44):
and then you get a kazoo sound out.
Speaker 1 (34:45):
Of it, which is also the worst sound imaginable. So
I actually don't remember I think it. I think it
was the Scottish play, but it could have also have
been Hamletter, Romeo and Julietta.
Speaker 2 (34:55):
Those were the three that I did. So yeah, it
was that fun stuff. I mean, like like the other
thing you had mentioned about the the ad libbing even
in the scripted stuff, which brings me to one of
my biggest gripes because I wrote scenario for you know,
(35:16):
three or four seasons I wrote, I wrote the scenario,
and I remember distinctly getting so frustrated at John as
the King for changing the lines I had written at
every because I'm up there too, I'm like right next
to him, and I'm like, is he gonna say it
right today?
Speaker 1 (35:33):
No, he is not.
Speaker 2 (35:36):
And we would come backstage and he'd say, how was it, Johnny,
And I'm like, well, you said some of the words
that seemed rather familiar.
Speaker 1 (35:45):
But you know what, there's there's a certain joy, Jonathan,
in watching you squirm on whether or not your story
is going to be told the way you wrote it.
I know that's a very unprofessional outlook, but it was
a little fun.
Speaker 2 (35:58):
I mean, I get it, but like I was also
playing a very smarmy character, so it kind of played
into my character choices, so I could actually be aggravated
and frustrated, and it was in character, so that was fine.
And Jonathan underneath is genuinely frustrated because he worked very
hard on those lines and the line for this much thanks,
(36:22):
it's from Shakespeare, and he would never say it.
Speaker 1 (36:27):
Okay, okay. Being from Shakespeare and not saying that is
very frustrating. I will agree to that. You know, I
also liked school days, though that was usually more scripted
as well.
Speaker 2 (36:40):
Yeah, I didn't do as many of those because I
was my day job didn't allow me to. But our
festival would reserve at least one day sometimes too for
schools around the region to come in for a school
day where the cast would end up informing or teaching
kids about things like what life was like during the
(37:03):
Middle Ages and the Renaissance. And yeah, Eric would do
a lot more of that than I did. I only
did I think I did it twice.
Speaker 1 (37:11):
Yeah, I did. I was on court a couple of years,
so like dancing and nighting ceremonies and jousts and things
like that, And then I did the Shakespeare Show for
a few years, and that was also quite a bit
of fun. Like I would buy so we would bring
kids up to do death scenes from very shakespeare things,
myself and our good friend Lucas, and we'd bring them
(37:35):
up and we'd do monologues that they'd have to die.
And there have been various iterations of the Shakespeare Show,
but this is the one that I did the most frequently.
And then we'd give them scrolls. But I always went
out and bought like the little, like little paperbacks of
the of the Shakespeare shows that the kids were doing,
and I'd buy, like, there'd be three shows a day,
(37:55):
and there'd be two days, so I would buy like
twelve paperbacks, and just each kid who did the show
would get a paperback of the show that the scene
the show that the scene they had just done was from.
So very rewarding.
Speaker 2 (38:12):
Yeah, that was really cool of you. It also reminds
me a little bit, although at a much smaller scale,
something that we would often do through the festival. I mean,
I'm not sure if they still do, but we would
do a nighting and princess making ceremony and anyone could
be knighted or made into a princess, but it was
(38:33):
made for kids, and the kids would come up and
they would get to do these adorable little tasks and
at the end would be awarded with a certificate proclaiming
them a night or princess, and that was always fun
to participate in. I never really I was never one
of the instructors, but I always got to do the reactions.
And playing up to reactions for little kids is always
(38:57):
the best because they just buy into it so quickly,
like they still have that sense of play, and they
don't they don't have a sense of like this isn't
cool to do this in public, so they would just
embrace it, and it was always one of my favorite
parts of the day.
Speaker 1 (39:14):
Yeah, yeah, mine too. Speaking of favorites, we actually need
to start wrapping up because I'm in a show that
opens this weekend, and so my schedule is all off
this week and I'm gonna I'm gonna have to have
a hard stop on today's podcast, So we might actually
do a part three to our experience at the Renaissance
Festival because everything you're really like, Oh, if you loved
(39:35):
it so much, why don't you do it anymore? And
we'll get into that next week, but before we go,
speaking of favorites, what is your now that I've gone
down like twelve Bunny Bunny trails? What is your favorite
memory slash bit of all time? Jonathan?
Speaker 2 (39:49):
So, my favorite bit was one that I would do
occasionally with other actors where we would do the classic
improv game word at a time, where you get two
or more people together and you're telling a story to
a crowd, but each person only gets to submit one
(40:09):
word at a time, so it'd be like once upon
a time there was like that sort of thing. And
my favorite was when we did it once where the
person we were there are three of us and the
person who was in spot number three. At the end
of the sentence, we were talking about how this lover
proclaimed his love in the form of a and she
(40:29):
said sonnet. And I turned to her and I said,
son it because it's a very difficult, very difficult art
form to do word at a time. But then we
stumbled through perhaps the world's worst sonnet ever written, and
it was one of the most joyous experiences because the
audience loved seeing like the characters turn on each other
(40:53):
because one of them has sabotaged the other two, and
so the audience loved it. And it was it was
genuinely a very challenging bit to do, but it was
clearly so entertaining the group that was watching us that
it was one of the most rewarding. I've got lots
of other stories too, but those are the kind that
get me all choked up because it's mostly about kids
(41:14):
being super sweet. So I'm just gonna save those for me.
Speaker 1 (41:17):
Yeah, my favorite, because I know you're about to ask.
So I also like my favorite overall memory slash bit
was the tying bows on the family and make them
all fashionable, and then tying the big bow on the
dad and then tasking the children of the family to
be my fashion consultant assistance and make sure that he
kept it on all day. Maybe that's why they kept
(41:39):
it on all day. But then they would come back
and they'd visit me every year and they'd put on
pink or they'd bring their bows back, or they'd remember me,
and I would get messages, like on social media once
that was a bigger thing, saying hey, we love this
and we're coming out. And so it was always great
to be able to like have that continued effect on someone.
(42:00):
Oh man, I'm getting terry thinking about it, So I'm
going to switch to my overall best bit of all time.
I don't know how I pulled this off and how
it was so good, But when I was Ruby Tulips
my kissing Wench, I had this group of LGBTQ guys
come up to me. They wanted me to wench their
(42:21):
friend who was pretty shy, and I don't like a
lot of kissing wenches. Don't like kissing people who don't
want to be kissed, right, So I said, okay, well
I will do that if you will, if the rest
of you will participate. So we're going to play a
game called Spin the Wench, at which point all of
(42:45):
them had to go in a circle and they had
to count down from five and I would spin and
whoever I landed on would get the kiss, which would
always be the people who were instigating me to kiss
somebody else, and so these and they absolutely loved it,
and I got tipped like twenty dollars from that each
(43:05):
person in that like ten person group, and they all
left super happy, and it was just it was a gamble.
I took on a gut feeling and I'm I had
a way out if they didn't want to do it,
to make sure that they were super happy and comfortable
and all that. But it ended up being such a brilliant, wonderful,
fun experience that I'm like, I'm I'm really glad I
(43:27):
trusted my gut on that one. Also, it's good tips. Yeah, I.
Speaker 2 (43:36):
Was a kissing winch for one season, but no, that
was only at the end of the day. But that's
a different story. So yeah, when we do a part three,
and I yeah, I think we might as well, like
just go ahead and say, next week we'll do a
part three. We'll talk a little bit more, maybe about
a couple of other things that are really memorable at
the festival, maybe some standout moments, but we'll also talk
about some of the things that are, you know, maybe
(43:59):
a little more challenging. And as Ariel was alluding to
reasons why we no longer work at the festival and
why like it would take a lot of dramatic changes
for me to even consider coming back, even just as
a guest.
Speaker 1 (44:19):
Yeah, yeah, But we'll get to that next week, along
with any other questions that might have arisen throughout our conversation.
So if people want to reach out to us, Jonathan,
how can they do that?
Speaker 2 (44:32):
Well, what you're gonna do is you're gonna go out
and you're gonna find an old copy of the computer
role playing game Ultima five, and you're gonna take your
character over to the town of Scara Bray and you're
gonna track down there's this one weird looking character. You
will never have seen him before, even if you played
(44:53):
Ultima five before. I was dressed up in rags, and
he's saying Scratchy Scratch to himself over and over again.
But if you go and talk to him, he will
give you a quest. It's gonna take a while because
it's gonna involve all these shards, and you're gonna have
to end up fighting gargoyles and ultimately you're going to
(45:14):
have to take down a dragon, and at the end
of all that, you're going to have a dragon ZG.
You're going to take that back to Scratchy Scratch Scratch
and give it to him. When you do that, it
transforms into me and you can ask me.
Speaker 1 (45:26):
The question that, oh that blew my mind Jonathan. For
people who who maybe just can't quite grasp the fact
that Jonathan is part dragon and related to someone named
Scratchy scratch uh, you can reach it out to us
on social media on Facebook, Instagram, threads, and discord. We
(45:50):
are large ner drawn Collider on x I guess It's
called now Twitter where llenc Underscore podcast. We are not
on Blue Sky yet and as always you can check
out well we don't have show notes. We don't have
show notes right now because you aren't really talking about stuff,
(46:11):
but I will be posting the episodes on our website
www dot Large nurdrun Collider. If you want a discord
invite and you can't find it there, they should all
work now if you're looking at like the latest the
latest posts, but if not, you can email us, or
if you just want to say hi in an email,
you can email us at large Nerdron pod at gmail
dot com. Because we really do love hearing from you,
(46:32):
and if you ask pointed questions, I will also make
Jonathan get on social media to answer them.
Speaker 2 (46:38):
So yeah, yes, and until next time, I am Jonathan
and let the festival begin.
Speaker 1 (46:45):
Strickland and I am Ariel. Your fashion say no without
a pink bo Caston.
Speaker 2 (46:58):
The Large Nerdron Collider is created by Ariel Caston and
produced edited, published, deleted, undeleted, published again. Curse That by
Jonathan Strickland. Music by Kevin McLeod of incomptech dot com
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