Not far from where I live, there’s a Renaissance fair. In the advertisements for the event, “fair” is spelled “faire,” so you know you’re getting the real thing. Many of the vendors at the faire refer to their business as a “shoppe,” rather than a “shop,” so you can be really sure what you’re getting.
Anyway, should you decide to goe to the faire this nexte weekende, you will witness the “cleavage contest,” which contains no extra letters except those related to bra size.
Like the Home Run Derby or a hot dog eating contest, the cleavage contest is exactly what it sounds like. Some events are so simple that they can be described perfectly in a title containing a small number of small words.
During the conteste, various lassies who have come to the faire in periode costume display at least the upper part (and the valley between) of those attractions that have remained virtually unchanged in appeal since the Renaissance, an event which President Donald J. Trump can tell you occurred in Texas during the 1800s. Numerous Texas School Boards would agree.
The event, which lingers like the smell of a passing leper, enrages a great number of women, some of whome call themselves “feminists,” while some of them just say they’re angry. Damn women can’t make up their minds, as they said during the Renaissance, just before they burned the witches.
As a reporter, I’ve participated greedily in numberless offenses against women. I have, for instance, covered a bunch of beauty pageants. In Massachusetts, where I live, covering a beauty pageant has the excitement of doing something illicit, the way buying marijuana used to feel. For the record, I covered beauty pageants because the women reporters refused to do it, it was easy, and it was at night so I was paid an extra $1 an hour as a “differential” for working the night shift.
The contest draws no lack of period-costumed contestants, and an appreciative mob of fans, who howl like a crowd of meth-fueled bikers at a wet T-shirt contest in Idaho.
Still, it’s a Renaissance faire, and it’s at least partially historical in nature, so the contestants and the howling mob of fans don’t have to feel like they’re doing something sleazy on two-for-one tequila shot night in a bar called “Junior’s,” the kind of place that never has a paved parking lot.
They don’t have any lepers at the Renaissance faire, and no one gets the plague. If you’re Jewish, and you go to the faire, they will not torture you with a red-hot iron until you convert. They also don’t burn heretics. And if you have a heart attacke at the faire, a modern ambulance will take you to a modern hospital where you will be seen by a doctor with clean hands, and not a Renaissance-era barber who won’t wash his hands between his last patient and you. His last patient, by the way, was a cow.
It’s all in goode funne, of course, and it represents the unchanging nature of some things in the world.
In America, we’re pretty light on lepers, and there aren’t any more witch burnings, though you might want to keep an eye on that twitchy preacher down at the megachurch. That guy needs an audience, and, if the faith healing stops drawing ‘em in, he may think about burning a witch in the parking lot. Imagine the size of THAT Sunday’s collection!
Still, if we’ve abandoned most of the features of Renaissance life, the leering at the womene continueth. Women who object will be burned at the stake, as God intended. Amen.