Gary Glazner

Renaissance Pleasure Faire- Participatory Arts

panty hose vs leggings

Even wearing two pair of “L’eggs Pantyhose”- (Yes! From the iconic egg container,) you still saw my leg hair, tufted and poking out. I shopped for my Faire costume, at 7/11 and felt sexy knowing the clerk, knew they were for me.  

After wearing them for weeks, a faire veteran clued me in saying, “You know you are wearing panty hose and not leggings, right?” Thank you, kind sir! I did not know. I surely did not know there was a difference between leggings and panty hose.

The Renaissance Pleasure Faire was a learning lab. Both in its mission and for me as a young poet. Rolling golden grass hills, oak tree forest, leafy canopies shading winding paths, lined with wooden booths, a village to experiment with participatory arts, although, I would have not known to use that term back then. I still use the lessons I learned at the Faire, on a daily basis in my work with the Alzheimer’s Poetry Project.

Faire Jobs

The Faire was located a few miles from my family home, in the town of Novato, California in a rural section of town called Black Point. During the years from around 1978 to 1990, that I worked at the Faire, I held many jobs: car parker; olive hawker, dancer, kissing booth attendant and wandering pass-the-basket, mandolin strumming, singer of serenades and shouter of poems.

My first job was parking cars in the big open fields outside the Faire. It was hot dusty work and no one needed help parking their car. One day I walked past a van and saw two guys drinking beer from a keg and smoking a joint. They motioned me over. When they found out I was a car parker, they said, “Come work for us,” and told me their parents sold olives at the Faire. Gilroy Olives, they had a booth and could get me a job hawking olives.

Oliver Olive

Oliver Olive, was my name, pronounced “All of her,” Olive. We would shout in our best Elizabethan accented voices, our lusty motto “Olives, soaked the queen’s own juices.” Drawing out the O in olive and giving it a rising melodic twist, in the tradition of street seller cries.

 “Takes two to eat one,” was the genius line, we said after our opening cry and my first lesson in participatory arts. We would approach couples, hand them an olive on a toothpick, then say, “Place the olive in your mouths and gently eat it.” They would of course end up kissing. 

The kissing couple were the stars of the show. It was hugely popular. We sold a lot of olives. On occasion if a woman needed an olive eating partner, I would offer my services. A rather pleasant lesson in participatory arts.

Later, I sang in a madrigal group and danced English Country Dance. I was a bloke at the Soak-A-Bloke/ Drench-A-Wench booth where people used a giant slingshot to shoot sponges at us and if they hit us, they got to kiss us. More lessons in putting the pleasure in Renaissance Pleasure Faire. .

The job I did the longest was playing mandolin. I learned six English Country Dance tunes and the basic Faire accent, so I could sound somewhat Elizabethan. I memorized sonnets 33 and 71 by Shakespeare, in the accent as well. I kept the name Oliver Olive.

 I would find a shady spot and place my basket on the ground and play. If I made ten dollars- that was a good day. But I wanted to travel to LA and do the Southern Faire and I could only do it if I made enough money.

 This is when I began to combine what I had learn in hawking olives with the pass the hat mandolin. I went directly up to couples and offered to serenade them. I worked out a tremolo part, where I would encourage them to kiss. Again, they became the stars. People love kissing.

 Using participatory arts techniques and making the people the focus of my act, I could easily make a couple of hundred dollars in a few hours. I was able to afford to drive to LA get a cheap motel room, pay for gas, food and come home with a profit.

 The years of honing my participatory art talents, in the streets of the Renaissance Pleasure Faire with hundreds of people a day, helped me to develop the skills I need for the Alzheimer’s Poetry Project, where we perform and create poems with people living with memory loss.

 To perform poems, we use a call and response technique where the session leader says a line of poetry and the group repeats or echoes back the words. This is the highlight of my use of participatory art. Making it a group experience helps to reduce some measure of isolation, and taps into established long-term memories. It makes the people living with memory loss the stars.

One of my proudest moments of playing mandolin at the Faire, was the day I saw in the crowd, the concert promoter Bill Graham, walking with his family.

No one had really noticed him and I walked up and without saying anything began playing “Greensleeves,” the Renaissance standard. For years Graham had ended all his concerts at the playing the tune over the sound system as the audience filed out.

 I had been to hundreds of his shows at Winterland, Day on the Green and Filmore West. I walked up plucking the melody and he got a big smile on his face. It was lovey to serenade him and his family as we strolled the Faire.

I will end with a little ditty about wearing panty hose instead of leggings.

I would, I could upon my leg!
Crack them from the clever egg!
Could you? Would you just for fun?
I could, I would- in the hot, hot sun!
I wore them pantyhose all day long.
I wore them right. I wore them wrong.
I sing to you my sweet, sad song.
Won’t you help? And sing along?