The world's a stage at Waxahachie's Scarborough Renaissance Festival
WAXAHACHIE – How do you train a cat? More than that, how do you keep them from eating the rats they work with?
“Honestly, the cats are more afraid of the rats, than the rats are of the cats,” answered Melissa Arleth. She’s the top dog in her cat-and-rat show known as “Cirque du Sewer," one of many entertainment acts being performed on more than 20 stages each weekend this spring at Scarborough Renaissance Festival, now in its 42nd season.
The event in Waxahachie, about 31 miles south of downtown Dallas, continues through Memorial Day.
A cat and mouse game
“The thing with cats that's really difficult isn't training the behaviors, it's getting them comfortable on stage,” Arleth explained. “The most important thing is that all the training is fun. They don't think they're being trained, they think they're getting to play.”
As for the rats, when not onstage they enthusiastically mix freely with Arleth’s cats.
“We give the rats free-range time so they can get out of the cage, kind of run around,” she said. “The rats will run right up to the cats and try to be friends.”
From the cats’ perspectives, however, those feelings aren’t necessarily reciprocated.
“They're these little frenetic creatures running up, getting in the cat faces, trying to touch their noses, and cats aren't really into that,” she added, laughing. “So, when the rats are out, the cats just go to a high shelf, and look down.”
The way to Scarborough
The first Renaissance festival was organized in 1963 in Southern California, according to RenFaire.com, and shortly became known as the Renaissance Pleasure Faire.
Held in the hills north of Los Angeles near the community of Agoura, it mimicked an English springtime fair during the Elizabethan era and participants went to great lengths to maintain authenticity for the period using costumes, speech and selling crafted items.
Today, Renaissance festivals can be found in nearly 40 states, with most featuring more than one at varying times of year. RenFaire.com notes Texas has eight, with the two biggest festivals being Scarborough from early April to Memorial Day, and the Texas Renaissance Festival near Houston running from early October until Thanksgiving.
Each weekend at Scarborough is assigned a theme.
For example, May 6-7 is designated Celtic Weekend, followed by Celebrating Chivalry Weekend, then Legends of the Seas and the Last Huzzah for the three-day Memorial Day weekend.
Additionally, Celebrating Chivalry coincides with Mother’s Day, when up to three children 12 and under gain free entry with each paid adult.
While performers and staff wear period costume and (for the most part) duplicate the speech mannerisms of the era, visitors, or “patrons” as they are known, bring a wide diversity to the faire.
“What we see from the costuming from patrons really, is dictated in a large part by pop culture,” said Helaine Thompson, Scarborough’s director of marketing and communications. “For instance, when movies come out, we see an influx of those type of costumes.”
Stormtrooper knees?
And that’s not limited just to movies such as “The Lord of the Rings” or the streamed series “Game of Thrones.” In what might be the ultimate genre mash-up, Jason and Cheryl McKinney of Lubbock recalled the sight of “Star Wars” characters meandering among Scarborough’s stately trees.
“There’s a squadron of Stormtroopers that comes and they dress in kilts,” Jason said. “I've seen a “Star Trek” Away Team with their tricorders out, acting like they had just beamed down.”
The McKinneys have been devoted Scarborough fans, trekking from the Panhandle for two decades. In 2018, they married here.
For Easter weekend, they came with their friend Jenny McClish and her mother, Corky. All four were dressed as gnomes, their classic conical hats sporting bunny ears for the holiday.
Jason’s costume sported an additional accoutrement, one that proved handy for modern concerns two years ago.
“Back in '21 when they opened back up after COVID, we all had to wear masks, and trying to figure out a way to incorporate a mask into ren faire was not easy,” Cheryl said. It was her friend Jenny who solved the problem.
“She came up with this idea for making beards for the mask. We decided to be gnomes and it's stuck,” Cheryl said. “Now, everybody expects us to come as gnomes.”
Most patrons purchase the pieces of their costumes at Scarborough or other faires. The outfits can be as simple as a cloak and hat or as elaborate as a full suit of metal plate armor.
Moses?
For much of his 20 years coming to Scarborough, Bill Block said he would dress as a Viking.
He’d don chain mail and a helmet, growing his beard out three months ahead of time. Like many who come in costume, he would happily pose for pictures with other non-costumed patrons.
Then, about eight years ago, as the passage of time conspired against him, a coworker at the bookstore in which he worked suggested he switch his look to be less warrior, and more wizard.
“As a Viking I’d walk around get maybe two pictures the whole day,” he said. “But I walk around as Gandalf, it can be 50-100 pictures a day.”
Occasionally he’ll draw a “Moses” fan, too. But his pointed gray hat, long gray cloak and heavy beard make him a natural for the “Lord of the Rings” character.
“People just seem to identify with Gandalf better. The small children keep calling me Dumbledore, but Dumbledore never wore a hat like this,” he chuckled, referencing the Harry Potter wizard. “I get it all, but I enjoy it; I love talking to the kids.”
Fur-ious performers
Back at Cirque du Sewer, the felines were hitting their marks. All except for Schrodinger, of course.
The other two rescue cats already onstage with Arleth, Pad Kee Meow and Sputnik, were on their assigned perches. But Schrodinger had decided to make a break for the upper reaches of the set behind Arleth.
Running up a small flight of stairs, tail held high with the joy of one who knows good mischief when he commits it, the cat was soon retrieved by Arleth’s assistant, Vitaliy Volpert. Back on his perch, Schrodinger watched the crowd and Arleth wondered if he’d stay.
Trained in theater and ballet, she said uncertainty isn’t a flaw in her show, it’s a feature.
“If you know cats, we figure it just adds to the fun,” Arleth said, laughing. “I have no idea, day to day, what that cat's gonna do.”
While the cats avoid the rats, the same can’t be said for the occasional small critter wandering where it shouldn’t. During one show, when Pad Kee Meow missed his cue, to come onstage, Arleth knew something was up.
“I think you need to come here and help with this,” Volpert called from backstage.
Pad Kee Meow (“His mother was Siamese, and his father was good at jumping fences”) had found something far more interesting to occupy his time.
“He’d caught a mouse and over the microphone, the whole audience heard me saying, 'Alright, drop it, drop it; oh, drop it again,'” she said, laughing. “I got the mouse away, gave him chicken and I said, ‘You did a good job, and now we're gonna do a show!'”
And that worked. For about three minutes, anyway.
“He did his first couple of tricks and then it seemed like he suddenly realized I had tricked him and taken his mouse. He got, like, really angry, and then he wouldn't perform for the rest of the day.”
Apparently, even a pouting cat knows not everything tastes like chicken.
'Cheat to win!'
Just north of the jousting arena, the boys of summer gathered to play.
Except they weren’t all boys. At least half were women.
And it wasn’t baseball, rather something called “Stool Ball."
Billed as a precursor to cricket and baseball, about the only thing it had in common with those sports was a ball, a canoe oar for a bat, and at least one base, otherwise known as the tree at midfield.
The two teams, the International Incidents and the Robin Hood Robins, squared off using the namesake stool as homeplate.
In the game, the ball, a soft, leather sphere, is struck by the oar and the player, in skirts or in pants, sprints to the best of their ability around the tree and back to the stool. If they get struck by the ball before making it to the stool, or an opposing player tags the stool with the ball, they are out.
It should be noted that the Robins’ team slogan was “Cheat to Win!” and they tried their best to live up to it.
When a batter was going to beat the ball to the stool, one of the women would simply sit on the stool, covering the entire seat with her skirts.
Both teams shared the pitcher (“If there is cheating, I shall cheat for both sides!”) and as the game finished, observers were left wondering who exactly won. In that regard, it may have been the observers themselves.
Not simply an exhibition of an ancestral pastime, Stool Ball was a performance.
“We have a performing company that's called Scarborough Academy of Performing Arts, with over 90 members,” said Thompson. “Stool Ball is one of the shows that they put on.”
The seemingly spontaneous game (it actually happens every festival day at noon), gets to the heart of what Thompson described as a critical component of the faire.
“A big part of their role at the festival is improvisational theater, they do impromptu interaction with patrons and other people throughout the festival site,” she said. “It really brings the festival alive.”
Without the company, the festival is basically a fancy flea market. It’s the actors who provide the connective tissue with patrons through interaction. They are recognizable by the brassy, silver dollar-sized badge worn by each.
“You can have the stage entertainment, you can have the artisans, you can have all of that, but if you don't have that performing group out and about, you don't have the feel of walking into an English village,” Thompson said. “That is really what brings (the festival) to life.”
Twenty tons of bird legs
Shopping is a big draw for Scarborough, Thompson said there are more than 200 artisans and at least 95% of what is offered is handmade.
“We are a juried craft show, which means that anything that comes into the festival has to meet the approval of our internal jury group. We don't allow mass-manufactured products into the festival, we're an artisan marketplace,” she said.
Scarborough claims to have the largest food-on-a-stick selection in the state. Sausage, chicken, steak, fruit, pies.
“If we can put it on a stick, we will,” Thompson said.
Vandal Van Camp has managed Bertha’s Best Bakery at the Faire for 14 years. He promised that if you arrive early, you can smell the morning’s baked bread lingering in the air.
“The cinnamon rolls were my grandfather's recipe, as they were his father's before him, and he would definitely be proud that I'm making them,” Van Camp said. “Anytime we fall short of a recipe, I just go to my family cookbook, page through and multiply it up.”
Patrons can dine on Middle Eastern food, pasta, fish and chips, sandwiches, salads, giant pretzels, ice cream, bangers and mash, and a hundred other food items. But the one thing that outsells them all are turkey legs.
“We average 20 tons of turkey legs over the course of our eight-week season,” Thompson said.
There’s no shortage of children wandering the pathways gnawing on bird legs the size of their heads. It’s a time-honored tradition, helped by the occasional barker hollering, “Step right up, come eat like Henry the VIII!”
A life in the Renaissance
Henry, by the way, is played this season by Mick Moreau, a member of Scarborough’s performing company, with Jana Zepp portraying the king’s sixth wife, Catherine Parr.
They hold court throughout the day, appearing at various events such as dances, jousting, and the parade as it winds through the center of the festival.
Dancers, soldiers and performers of all kinds march in the parade. They waved as the crowd cheered their favorites.
At the procession’s end, Doug Kondziolka brought up the rear, strolling along in character as Miguel from the Don Juan and Miguel show. A staple of the festival, he and Jose Granados have appeared at Scarborough for 39 of their 45 years performing together.
It’s hard to tell what cracks loudest, their whips or their jokes. Wearing a metal conquistador helmet, when the two-foot red feather sticking out the top falls to the stage, Kondziolka cries out, “Oh! I’ve gotta fix my WiFi!”
It’s a family show, in more ways than one. Granados’ adult daughter Dakota Winrich, now performs onstage with her father as Esmeralda.
“She’s been helping out probably since she was three or four years-old,” Granados said.
“At the beginning, while we were passing our hat, she would clear the swords off the stage. Then I taught her how to crack a whip and to cut targets and she's been doing that for probably the last 30 years.”
Granados and Kondziolka met in the late 1970s working the King Richard’s Faire between Chicago and Milwaukee as part of a larger company called Ring of Steel.
“Basically, I was already a character named Don Juan in the company and then Doug was brought on to be like my man servant, which you know, to this day, he still is,” Granados said, laughing.
They took their act on the road starting in the mid-80s, working ren fests from Arizona to Florida. The outline is pretty simple, there’s a bit of a Don Quixote – Pancho Sanza vibe, with Kondziolka and Granados dueling with zingers, swords and one-liners, along with whip stunts like shaving the ends from the dried pasta held gingerly in Kondziolka’s teeth.
Forty-five years is a long time to do anything. The pair keep their act fresh by riffing on the given weekend’s theme at the festival, refining older jokes or finding new ones in the moment.
“A lot of this stuff is based on improv or extemporaneous speaking and that's the way to discover new material,” Kondziolka said. “We'll do something once that's funny and then we'll often do it again, and it won't be funny. Then we'll do it again, until we find what really made it funny.”
Audience participation can be a large part of any ren fest show, and its often where the real magic happens. Before the pandemic, the pair would invite someone to test the blindfold onstage, often a woman.
“I would take the blindfold off, and her fiancé would be kneeling in front of her, proposing,” Granados recalled. “Those moments are really special.”
Such encounters have kept them going this long, and could serve to propel them into the future.
“I like making people laugh, I like making people feel good or feel some emotions,” Kondziolka said. “You know, theater is a good thing.”
Granados echoed his co-star’s sentiment, adding that getting to help people forget their problems is what keeps him going.
“We fell into this more or less by accident, I wasn't looking to do a career in Renaissance festivals, there's no college course where you say, 'You know, I want to work at Renaissance festivals all my life,’” he said, then laughed.
“I guess my drug of choice is entertainment.”
If You Go
What: Scarborough Renaissance Festival
Where: 2511 FM 66 Waxahachie, Texas or about 30 miles south of Dallas and 2 miles west of Interstate 35E on FM 66 just south of Waxahachie.
Admission: Age 13 and older, $32 online or $37 at the gate; 5-12 $14 online or $17 at the gate. Children 4 and under are free.
Special note: Children 12 and under are admited free Mother’s Day – May 14. No child ticket required and up to 3 children free with each paid adult. Waxahachie has several chain hotels within the city, though no 24-hour retailers outside of convenience stores. While traffic can be heavy getting into the festival from I-35E, it tends to move quickly though some may want to try looping around and entering the grounds by driving east on FM66.
Website: https://www.srfestival.com
This article originally appeared on Abilene Reporter-News: Waxahachie's Scarborough Renaissance Festival
