And so, with the aid of a green screen, CamTwist software, and a youtube video, I sat down and performed for this video with me inside the ship...

I recently put together a keynote (powerpoint) presentation to help make sure I made my key points. Because I embedded youtube videos in it, It's too large to upload here, but I can post a link to it in drop box.

This past week I experienced the privilege of working with the Texarkana Renaissance Faire. While many smaller faires struggle to survive the rigors of a world that has multiple entertainment opportunities, I feel that this faire has a great shot at the long haul. It seems large enough to sustain momentum, but now past its fourth year, it will need to keep growing, bit by bit.  Spirit are high, and the main struggle that I foresee will be getting the word out to their local community.


I was very glad to see many of the staples of the faire experience represented, from sca boffing to horse rides and acrobatic juggling performers as well as two royal courts. With all of this were added the fae contingent of fairies, a Minotaur, several mermaids, a magical fox and even a unicorn. Plus pirates, like bacon, they enhance. I was part of the musical contingent. Welcome to Neverland.

At first nonplussed by Saturday's gate opening when the patrons slowly trickled in, I noticed that they kept coming in at a similar rate all day long. Huzzah! And best of all, most stayed for the long haul. The traffic remained steady up until the end. That is great for the merchants, who we must concede are the real backbone of a faire. A steady stream means never being overwhelmed. I hope their sales coincide.

As I often do, I spent much of my time seeking those spots with less faire performance life in order to add some background entertainment. Blessed by passersby who stop to listen or chat, I got a bit of a feel for the diversity of the audience. Of note were a couple who were off to meet with a dragon, the young child who wanted to play my kobza, and who's grandparent snapped us together in a picture with her pretending to play, and a quiet gentleman who had no favorite type of song but just wanted to sit and listen to whatever I might play. The fantasy is in you all, we are just here to help elicit it. We watch you as much as you watch us.


Characteristically, I left home the morning of the faire. Texarkana hit my radar through a listing on Meistersrealm, and I had noticed that it is on the very outskirts of my travel range. But, that meant that I had to leave at about 4am, so I was already a bit travel worn when I arrived in time for the 9am meeting. The talk was to the point, mostly logistics with a little pep, and mercifully, uncharacteristically for some faires, brief. Please keep that up. There was no similar meeting on Sunday, so thank you also for trusting your performers to figure it out. There was always room to move along and perform wherever we wished.


Backstage is where one often hears the best and worst. What I heard was playful. We even exchanged a riddle or two. That says volumes. In a fantasy world, the spirits must remain high. Take it from a former Disney cast member, that is not always so. Plus, thank you Texarkana Faire for the great piles of water bottles. I downed about eight or ten of them when the weather did get a bit warm.


Now, I did pack street clothes, but truthfully, I did not change into them for the whole weekend. Much of the cast went out en mass on Saturday night, but while it was a mass exodus, it was in small groups, so as a solo I was a bit lost sitting alone at the bar. Thank you to the few who came over from their tables to say a quick hello; you made me feel welcome. I did get to talking with some of the locals there about all of the strangely clothed patrons, and found out that none of them knew about the faire. One of the restaurant staff even asked if there was a LARP event going on, and some wanted to know if there was jousting. Sadly, no and no, but I did manage to pique their interests, and tell them that I fully expected to see them on Sunday. I then retired to the hotel for the evening before I managed to turn into a pumpkin. Thank you Texarkana Faire for the nice room and board.


I met more interested folk at breakfast.  Dressing the part first thing in the morning attracts some interesting looks, often followed by questions. All in all, I probably talked with a dozen locals who did not know about the faire and told them to come look me up there. Oh, the difficulty of marketing in a modern world. Word of mouth only works within social circles, and in a crazy world where one can choose their own data stream it becomes difficult to be seen by a public that is used to skipping commercial content. What can one do? The spectacle will sell it, so keep the faith Texarkana. You have arrived, keep the ball in play, and your base will keep growing. I can only hope that my small efforts send some your way.

I just got back from the 4th Annual Texarkana Renaissance Festival last weekend and I’m sore in all the right places. (Yes, that means it was a good faire.) Each faire brings with it lots of experiences, both new and old, and this one proved no different in that respect. A couple of these encounters, however stand out, so I thought I might expand.

A well meaning fellow performer commented to me that my “material was going over the heads of my audience.” He meant it sincerely, and I love him for that, still I have to admit that that is right where I want to be. I can joke about it, mostly because I’m not making a living at it. A couple of years ago another performer commented that they liked the way I paired themes to enhance meaning, like singing about Machiavelli to the melody of the Turtle’s Happy Together. I actually hadn’t entirely made that connection myself, but like the artist I trained as, I take full credit for my unintended little mistakes of genius. Evidently, I want the music to go over my head as well. Like a scene from a Pixar movie, I want people to enjoy it all on their own level. And parents, if your kids get the higher level jokes, it’s not my fault.

These are just a few of my musical influences.

Another interesting new experience was being interviewed for the Renaissance Festival Music podcast. I did it cold, and so did the seemingly genuinely interested interviewer Danny Faught, so I hope I came off as moderately intelligent. I’m sure that he did. Though I fear the worst about my own end of the conversation, I trust the audience to figure something out from my ramblings. See I, like my music, am all over the map.


I was raised in a theater family on a diet of Shakespeare, and Greek and Norse mythology, with a smattering of Monty Python and classic Star Trek thrown in for good measure. I spent my summers with my grandparents in their rather huge music store, surrounded by musical instruments, and classic sci-fi television. I even lived for two years in Lothlorien of Middle Earth where we put together some great haunted houses. (I used to get big question marks on my mail, but it was always delivered.) Eventually,  I found Karen, the best part of my life, and she brought me the gift of the church. (Well, Jesus is the greatest gift, and the church is a mixed blessing that goes along with the package.)

The church is a large part of my chosen family, where I accept certain expectations, but I also realize there needs to be some grace, because I can't meet everyone's different expectations.

I now teach art with a sort of historical mash up approach, and entertain people at Renaissance faires for my own enjoyment with a similar methodology.

So, you see, I don’t do this stuff so much for the patrons. I tell my students the same thing: I cannot please everyone, and when I try to do so, I end up pleasing no one. So, I do what I like, and I invite others along for the ride. At a faire, it’s all theater, so I have stuff that I have written along with material from other sources, some typical material, some classical, and some things that others have written that amuse me. I try to put my stamp on all of it with melody or style. Of my own material, there is a distinction between the stuff I do for faire, and  the stuff I do not, but sometimes that dividing line is thin.

Here is what mashing up ancient Egypt with modern figures might look like.

My non-faire songs are generally christian in nature, and they probably cover more of my musical writings than not. Still, the two are not mutually exclusive, like the Christmas Cantata that I wrote with a general Celtic theme, one discipline informs the other. Pick up my Antiephemeral CD if you want to hear how Celtic music, rock, and christianity can get along. Playing in the Water is our Church CD that I produced and wrote the majority of songs for as well. I do faires to relax.

I do the same sort of stuff in the classroom, dragging students through the process in the process. Yes, they suffer through my history presentations and ramblings, and they do the odd project using all too traditional materials with my invitation to bring the modern into the picture through their own experiences and willy nilly metaphors. Some actually do. I introduce them to the limitation of the media in the hope of driving their creativity. That’s just another process. Yet all along the way, what I do for them I do for me, and I invite them to participate in the experience... much like this rambling that you have just read through.

So here is what I do... music. Specifically, I sing songs. During the renaissance, the easiest and quickest way to make a profit from a printing press was to print unbound pages. Today we might call them flyers or informational pamphlets. A printer would set up side by side pages like they would bind in a book, and print them on one side of a piece of paper. This is a broadside, a double-wide page.

Among the most popular of these were song lyric sheets. They sold for around a penny. Without recording devices, your tunes came from your own voice. And, if you did not know the melody, never fear, many of these broadside ballads started out with a note of what melody to use. Most of these melodies were widely known or even traditional melodies from aural/oral music traditions. If you were lucky, a balladeer might even sing part of it for you so that you could learn.

I'm the person that sells the song lyrics, using melodies familiar to the people.

So when recording and producing an album, I don't yet see where most of the projected monitory overhead comes in. I'm not hiring musicians, and neither would a band trying to do the same. With a computer there is really no more need for studio time., and most discs don't need much in the way of a cover design anyway. That seems to leave buying your own product for resale and maybe gas for a road trip to promote the music.